What has happened to the intentions of approaching the state code free?

The electoral program of Brazilian President Lula da Silva stunned the world by making reference to free software as one of the main priorities of its national educational project. A few years later, infighting in her party and the pressures of lobbies computer, have to tear up the project. Microsoft created a special version of its small XP operating system, which allowed him to take a major cut in public in several Brazilian states.

The case of Munich has been the most resounding of recent times in Europe. The council of this city in 2003 announced its intention to migrate 14,000 desktops, located in the municipal offices, from Windows NT to Suse, a division of German-based free software GNU / Linux. The news was so explosive that the Steve Ballmer, executive vice president of Microsoft, gave up his ski vacation in Switzerland to visit those responsible for that decision, to offer a discount of 90% on new licenses purchased. To date, the project remains under study. According to Peter Hoffman, head of the plan, the implementation may not be realized until mid-2006 following the corresponding pilot program.

Another curious example of the difficult road that has yet to walk free software in public administrations, is provided by the German town of Schwäbisch, where the City Council responsible for technology, Horst Braun, had the happy idea of consulting with municipal employees on their doubts and opinions before carrying out a possible migration in the four work stations to handle.

Basically, the three main fears of civil servants were as follows:

    a) "Linux to be part of a plan to monitor their emails"
    b) "to cease to function with Linux CDs that give the journals of computer enthusiasts"
    c) "that did not work in Linux games that were installed on their computers" (¡!).

The distributions "autonomous" of GNU / Linux

Extremadura (the pioneer in the state) is called Linex, GuadaLinex in Andalusia, Molinux in Castilla-La Mancha, LliureX in Valencia, Melinux in Melilla, Max in Madrid, Catix in Catalonia, Augustux in Zaragoza. In the Basque Country have just released their EusLinux, these are distributions of GNU / Linux is mostly based on Debian and customized to fit personalities, monuments, languages and local cultural events. In general, these projects have been welcomed as an effort to equip public schools effective tool to avoid squandering public funds in draconian licensing of software.

However, not all congratulations to. According to Alberto Abella, coordinator of the second white paper on free software, "Unfortunately, what began as a coordinated initiative has been broken down and basically every autonomous region, municipality, university ... is going to free." Many criticize the lack of a serious plan of implementation, training and monitoring of these distributions.

Still, the fact is that until a few years ago nobody was talking about free software in local and autonomous, whereas at present, the autonomous distros will gradually gaining ground, both in labs and in private homes teachers and students. Institutions such as the Castilian-La Mancha Ínsula Barataria Foundation is giving training courses for teachers on Molinux 2.0 Sancho, who, as they say,

remains committed to the philosophy of bringing people and businesses of Castilla-La Mancha a comprehensive software package for free with the objective of democratizing the use of new technologies.

www.guadalinex.org
www.linex.org
www.lliurex.net
www.educa.madrid.org / web / madrid_linux
www.catix.org
www.molinux.info
www.zaralinux.org / pro / augustux
www.melilla.es / soliman
www.ibarataria.org

Original publication in September 2006

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