Posted on Sun, Nov. 10, 2002 story:PUB_DESC
Spanish official launches drive to switch to Linux
REGION OF COUNTRY MOVES AWAY FROM MICROSOFT
By Ariana Eunjung Cha
Washington Post
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www.bayarea.com]
MERIDA, Spain - Luis Millan Vazquez de Miguel, a college professor turned politician, is succeeding where multinational corporations have failed. He's unseating Microsoft as the dominant player in the software industry, at least in his little part of the world.
Vazquez de Miguel is the minister of education, science and technology in a western region of Spain called Extremadura, a mostly rural expanse of olive trees with 1.1 million inhabitants. In April, the government launched an unorthodox campaign to convert all the area's computer systems, in government offices, businesses and homes, from the Windows operating system to Linux.
Already, Vazquez de Miguel said, more than 10,000 desktop machines have been switched, with 100,000 more scheduled for conversion in the next year. Organizers regard the drive as a low-cost way to bring technology to the masses in the impoverished region.
``We are the future,'' he said. ``If Microsoft doesn't become more open and generous with its code, people will stop using it and it will disappear.''
Extremadura's efforts are likely to become the next front in the battle to get market share from Microsoft, now that a federal judge has approved a settlement in its antitrust case.
For now, many denizens of Extremadura find themselves having to use both operating systems, if for no other reason than to deal with an outside world that still relies heavily on Microsoft. But the campaign suggests that nationalism could play a powerful role in blunting the software company's expansion, as nation-states grow wary of becoming too dependent on a single American corporation.
Linux is one of several operating systems available free on the Internet. Programmers from around the world teamed up to develop it, and private companies and others adapted the work to create their own unique flavors of the open-source software. Linux distributions these days go by names such as Red Hat, Suse and Mandrake.
In Extremadura, the government paid a local company $180,000 to cobble together 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's creating customized software for accounting, tracking hospital patients and crop-yield management.
So far, the government has produced 150,000 discs with the software, and it's distributing them in schools, electronics stores, community centers and as inserts in newspapers.
For many, the Extremadura project symbolizes the seriousness of assaults on Microsoft by governments around the world. The European Economic Commission is promoting it as a model, and officials from governments as far away as New Zealand and Peru have inquired about the region's efforts.
Microsoft has argued for years that free software is inferior because it requires a high level of technical expertise.
Such arguments have grown less persuasive as corporations and governments have taken on the responsibility of creating stable versions of the free software. International Business Machines, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and others are developing Linux-based services, focusing on the corporate market.