A very interesting article on washingtonpost.com outlines how the Extremadura region of Spain is converting from Windows to Linux.. It’s a government sponsored campaign with the goal of converting more than 100,000 desktops in the next year.
In Extremadura, the regional government paid a local company $180,000 to cobble together a set of freely available software. The resulting disk contains a suite of programs that includes an operating system, word processor, spreadsheet and other applications. The government also invested in a development center that is creating customized software for accounting, tracking hospital patients and crop-yield management that the agency will distribute free to citizens.
So far, the government has produced 150,000 discs with the software, and it is distributing them in schools, electronics stores, community centers and as inserts in newspapers. It has even taken out TV commercials about the benefits of free software.
The article notes briefly that the conversion represents a “low-cost way to bring technology to the masses in the impoverished region.” Forget all the Microsoft-funded studies on TCO – this is Linux changing lives by reducing costs in a very real way.
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