Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by zizban on Tuesday July 22 2014, @11:09PM   Printer-friendly
from the one-small-step-for-Tux dept.

It appears that, like the German city of Munich, the Swiss Canton of Geneva has been very measured in its migration to FOSS.

In 2003, the tax office of the canton passed out CDs which contained the Mozilla online suite, OpenOffice.org, and a tax application, GE Tax 2002.

In 2008, they made the commitment that all their public schools' 9000 computers would have Windows (dual-boot) removed, leaving Ubuntu Linux.

While they have reached a significant milestone, it appears they did not complete the system-wide conversion before the XP end of life and they will still be running that obsolete OS on a number of computers.

All primary and secondary public schools in the Swiss Canton of Geneva are switching to using Ubuntu GNU/Linux for the PCs used by teachers and students. The switch has been completed by all of the 170 primary public schools, and the migration of the canton's 20 secondary schools is planned for the next school year. Ubuntu GNU/Linux offers powerful services to the teachers, is easier to maintain, faster, safer and more stable than the decade-old proprietary operating system it is replacing, the canton's school IT department concludes, based on several four-year long pilots.

Making it easier to service the canton's schools' PC needs was one the main reasons for 'Service ecoles-medias' (SEM), part of Geneva's IT department, to switch the schools to Ubuntu, as the proprietary system is no longer being maintained.

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 3) by meisterister on Tuesday July 22 2014, @11:55PM

    by meisterister (949) on Tuesday July 22 2014, @11:55PM (#72545) Journal

    Now if only a certain other government of a certain country in North America between Canada and Mexico could learn something from this.

    --
    (May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
    • (Score: 3) by Nerdfest on Wednesday July 23 2014, @12:11AM

      by Nerdfest (80) on Wednesday July 23 2014, @12:11AM (#72550)

      Canada needs to learn it as well. As I keep saying though, open source doesn't buy golf vacations and expensive lunches.

    • (Score: 1) by Freeman on Wednesday July 23 2014, @07:51PM

      by Freeman (732) on Wednesday July 23 2014, @07:51PM (#72943) Journal

      They have, they just don't know the best way to pressure their Government into buying Micro$haft. Which is why they just created a focus group to decide what their next move should be.

      --
      Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
  • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Wednesday July 23 2014, @01:15AM

    by aristarchus (2645) on Wednesday July 23 2014, @01:15AM (#72567) Journal

    But now these poor Heidi types will be disadvantaged because they are not familiar with the "industry standard"! (Read: illegal business software monopoly) Someone has to go first, I guess, and point out that the emperor has no bill.

    • (Score: 2) by zsau on Wednesday July 23 2014, @03:47AM

      by zsau (2642) on Wednesday July 23 2014, @03:47AM (#72616)

      Does Microsoft still have a monopoly? I lived in Germany for a few years, only a minority of the people I knew used Windows, and I think I only once used a Windows computer in that time. But that was an academic situation. Back home in Australia (i.e. the English speaking country, not the German one), most normal people I know who have laptops have Macs. But that's in a social situation. My only recent business experience is working in a software/web shop so I don't think the variety here is a good indication of the real world, but only a handful of people (e.g. most of the helpdesk team, a few of the managers) use Windows; the rest use Macs (except the developers, who are split between Windows and Macs).

      • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Wednesday July 23 2014, @04:48AM

        by aristarchus (2645) on Wednesday July 23 2014, @04:48AM (#72634) Journal

        Only referring to the conviction, back around 1999? And the fact that this argument about "industry standards" is still used to call classes on how to use Word and Excel "computer science" classes, and forcing student to pay (albeit at a discount) for said proprietary software. The English speaking Australalia? Oh, you southerners, of what ever continent or sub-continent!

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 23 2014, @01:29AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 23 2014, @01:29AM (#72570)

    It has been nice to have the English language spoken around the world without having to pay someone royalties to speak it.

    I believe it is way past high time for our computational infrastructure to do likewise.

    The use of ASCII was a good start, when the bit patterns in the byte meant the same thing to any processor regardless of architecture.

    This is definitely going to be a good thing when many many many people know exactly how the system works, anyone being free to observe it if one wishes, and free to use it anytime he wants... like making a fire if you want one. I really look forward to the day that the structures and mechanisms running the OS are wide open public. Hopefully broken pieces of code will become as obvious as cracks in the sidewalk.

    I believe we can have computers we can trust, but not before we can bring the whole kit and kaboodle out in the open for public scrutiny with no behind-the-scenes trickery/secrecy involved. We need to have it standardized, so everyone's stuff will play together. And we need the OS, like the English language, to be able to evolve to meet the needs of the day. It looks like the Linux community has nailed that one as well.

    I really look forward to the day when I can again fire up a system, load what I want in it, then run it without having to get dad's permission. Its as if I once had my own car ( DOS ), then someone stole it ( time, obsolescence ), now I have to borrow Microsoft's car ( via EULA/Licensing ) every time I want to use it, then I can't trust the car because its all tricked out with tracking crap and may or may not go where I am trying to steer it, or ratting me out to every Tom, Dick, and Harry ( TLA's / marketers ) who has shaken the Microsoft hand.

    I am so tired of getting prodded by all these "business method" cattle prods where people are gaming the system by having Congress pass law to privatize their gain and socialize the losses to do so. There was once a day that when you saw someone working doing something, and the reward for doing it was high because there was a shortage of it, if you decided to pitch in and do it too, it was once called "competition". The new word for this behaviour is "violation of a business model", and we have Congressmen to pass law to make it so.

    Then we wonder why so many people are on entitlement programs.

    Only thing supporting this paradigm is Congress's ability to borrow money - cuz its pretty obvious that very few people are actually paying their bills anymore.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 23 2014, @02:32AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 23 2014, @02:32AM (#72591)

      computers we can trust[...]with no behind-the-scenes trickery/secrecy

      Can't there from here.
      ...at least not without being down-modded by someone who thinks it's normal to run anti-virus software on a system.

      -- gewg_

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by Magic Oddball on Wednesday July 23 2014, @08:46AM

        by Magic Oddball (3847) on Wednesday July 23 2014, @08:46AM (#72671) Journal

        Normal refers to how common something is, not whether it's desirable or negative. As far as I'm aware, Windows users are still the majority, and the norm for them is to run anti-malware software -- which does make it normal.

        It's not normal for those of us in Linux to use AV utilities, but it's increasingly being recommended, thanks to platform-agnostic nasties in Web content and/or the potential risk of infected files at sites like OpenDesktop.org.

        • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 23 2014, @06:58PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 23 2014, @06:58PM (#72910)

          The only reason to run anti-virus on a non-M$ box is because that box interacts with an M$ box that you care about.
          If you run a for-profit server, you have an obligation to do that for your clients.

          Anyone else logically has no such obligation; let those folks running M$'s easily-infected OS use THEIR OWN watts and CPU cycles to "protect" themselves.

          People who have a clue abandoned the easily-infected stuff years ago.

          .
          platform-agnostic nasties in Web content

          - Keep Java turned off in your browser and if you MUST use Java, have a separate profile for that.
          - Keep backups of your browser profiles.

          Here's the big one:
          - If you suspect that your OS has been compromised, WIPE IT AND REINSTALL; don't try to "fix" it.

          .
          infected files

          Get your apps from vetted sources.

          Don't run untrusted code on production boxes.

          Anti-virus apps are looking for infections in WINDOZE apps; they are NOT looking for infected Linux executables.
          Linux handles vulnerabilities in a completely different way:
          Flaws are patched QUICKLY and the patches are made available QUICKLY.

          Again: If you suspect that your OS has been compromised, WIPE IT AND REINSTALL; don't try to "fix" it.
          Pasting band-aids all over an OS and thinking that that is "protection" or a "cure" is naive.

          Get yourself a proper OS that has a proper design, proper permissions, and proper support then dump the stuff that allows a file to be executable as soon as it hits your box.

          -- gewg_

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 23 2014, @03:06AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 23 2014, @03:06AM (#72600)

      "There was once a day that when you saw someone working doing something, and the reward for doing it was high because there was a shortage of it"

      Call me complacent or arrogant in my privileged country, but there's not really a shortage of anything except quality.