On Sat, 2011-11-19 at 21:37 +0000, alan c wrote: > On 19/11/11 20:40, Juan J. MartÃnez wrote: > > I don't know the details about UK gov, but in Spain the government pays > > an absurd amount of money just for the licenses, and then pays for > > support... frequently from a third party (probably the vendor providing > > the hardware, with a partnership with the software vendor). > > Linkat A distribution promoted by the government of Catalonia, Spain? > gnuLinEx A distribution promoted by the government of Extremadura, Spain? > Guadalinex Ubuntu-based distribution promoted by the local government > of Andalucia, Spain, for home users and schools?
Spain has autonomous regions with a local government that is in charge of the national health system, public education, employment policies, etc; Those Linux distributions are solutions of different regional governments for the education system. It makes sense, because in that way the can teach software that the students can use at home without paying licenses. Extremadura and Andalucia where the first regions to use Linux distributions in education, basically because they are the poorest regions in Spain. Again, it makes sense: instead paying licenses and having 1 computer per 5 kids, we can have 1 computer for each 2 kids. It's been a good strategy for a lot of time, even with the aggressive lobbying of Microsoft. The problem is that free software it's part of the local government political agenda and when the party in power changes... they like to change everything including the good decisions like promoting open source :) I remember that back in 2004 almost all autonomous regions in Spain had a Linux distribution (based in Debian or Ubuntu). Open source has great success in Spain, but just in education and in some infrastructures, but our government system has too many layers and in most of them Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, etc; are kings. Regards, Juan -- jjm's home: http://www.usebox.net/jjm/ blackshell: http://blackshell.usebox.net/ en_GB@blog: http://engbblog.wordpress.com/ -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
