openAdmin
11-05-2009, 05:16 PM
Munich, Tuscany, Paris, Austria what do they all have in common? Apart from being must-see destinations in Europe, they have all recently been in the news for being open source champs. No, I’m not just talking about Europe’s resistance to the Oracle acquisition of SunMicrosystems.
The Limux (http://www.osor.eu/case_studies/limux-2013-the-it-evolution)project team at the municipal administration of Munich met with Dan Mosedale, Chief Technical Officer at Mozilla Thunderbird (http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/features.html), and David Ascher, CEO of Mozilla Messaging (http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/), in Munich in October to discuss the implementation of open source software in the municipality. They were pleasantly surprised to know that their email application Thunderbird was already used as a basic component of LiMux's open source clients since the project began and works on about 15 000 municipal PCs. The migration to the GNU/Linux distribution Debian is currently in progress and is expected to be completed by 2010.
LiMux project leader Peter Hofmann was quoted in egovmonitor.com as saying that he wants the coming third version of Thunderbird to be integrated into the city council's workstations.
"Our goal is not limited to rolling out Linux desktops. At the moment we are busy installing OpenOffice, with which some 14 000 workstations have now been equipped. And along side, we also have finished some two thousand Linux PCs."
Meanwhile the government body in Tuscany, Italy published a new version of Sagadb, an open source Geographic Information System (GIS) application this month.The software that is used by museums, libraries, courts of law and by health care organisations allows users to view a map to access public available information. The code can be used to access Tuscany's system using Javascript and a web browser and publish customized geo-referenced databases and maps.
According to Viviana Cossi, one of the developers, based in the city of Firenze, the region started the project by initially working on an application based on Grass GIS (http://grass.itc.it/), one of the oldest open source GIS applications available .Over the years the Tuscany developers added support for other data formats, which made their application more and more independent of Grass.( egovmonitor.com)
Cossi says the Tuscany regional administration decided to publish Sagabd as open source for two reasons. "Making it available as open source makes it easy to incorporate existing code into a project". Secondly, the region as a matter of principle has a policy to select open source software wherever possible.
Not to be left behind, 471 schools in the region surrounding Paris will participate in a portal project using Eliot, a web-based workflow software that was originally developed for three schools of the region. The government of Īle-de-France has signed a €19.6 million six-year contract with several IT services providers for the design, implementation and management of the workflow portal. The portal will be accessed by about one million users, including 400 000 schoolchildren making it one of Europe's biggest open source projects.
Eliot is developed by about seventy developers and is built on top of open source components such as the relation database management system PostgreSQL, the Apache web server and the Tomcat Java application server. It can be accessed with just a web browser. It allows the system to be up to date, in technology as well as in applications, explained Olivier Vigneau , a project manager at one of the IT services providers, in the statement published by the company. According to (http://www.osor.eu/news/fr-existing-open-source-portal-to-be-used-by-paris-region-schools)Vigneau, Eliot is also being used by schools in Strasbourg and some schools in Switzerland and Germany. "The majority of applications used five years from now, are yet to be imagined."Ooh la la!
Open source data management company Ingres Corporation (http://www.opensourcegroups.com/www.ingres.com)is trying to stake a piece of the European pie by partnering up with PROGRAMMIERFABRIK (http://www.programmierfabrik.at/) in Austria. PROGRAMMIERFABRIK develops software for financial service companies, software companies and government institutions.
“For far too long there was no real alternative to the overpriced database solutions of proprietary software providers. Ingres Database is the first solution to offer the same reliability and performance at a fraction of the cost of proprietary solutions, as well as market leading open source standards.” said Wilfried Seyruck, managing director, PROGRAMMIERFABRIK GmbH. The fact that Ingres provides partners with 24x7 support made the deal irresistible for the Austrian firm. As a former certified Oracle partner, PROGRAMMIERFABRIK now feels that the time is right for venturing into a more open source model.
Our European tour comes to an end but I’m sure the journey for Open source is just beginning.:)
The Limux (http://www.osor.eu/case_studies/limux-2013-the-it-evolution)project team at the municipal administration of Munich met with Dan Mosedale, Chief Technical Officer at Mozilla Thunderbird (http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/features.html), and David Ascher, CEO of Mozilla Messaging (http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/), in Munich in October to discuss the implementation of open source software in the municipality. They were pleasantly surprised to know that their email application Thunderbird was already used as a basic component of LiMux's open source clients since the project began and works on about 15 000 municipal PCs. The migration to the GNU/Linux distribution Debian is currently in progress and is expected to be completed by 2010.
LiMux project leader Peter Hofmann was quoted in egovmonitor.com as saying that he wants the coming third version of Thunderbird to be integrated into the city council's workstations.
"Our goal is not limited to rolling out Linux desktops. At the moment we are busy installing OpenOffice, with which some 14 000 workstations have now been equipped. And along side, we also have finished some two thousand Linux PCs."
Meanwhile the government body in Tuscany, Italy published a new version of Sagadb, an open source Geographic Information System (GIS) application this month.The software that is used by museums, libraries, courts of law and by health care organisations allows users to view a map to access public available information. The code can be used to access Tuscany's system using Javascript and a web browser and publish customized geo-referenced databases and maps.
According to Viviana Cossi, one of the developers, based in the city of Firenze, the region started the project by initially working on an application based on Grass GIS (http://grass.itc.it/), one of the oldest open source GIS applications available .Over the years the Tuscany developers added support for other data formats, which made their application more and more independent of Grass.( egovmonitor.com)
Cossi says the Tuscany regional administration decided to publish Sagabd as open source for two reasons. "Making it available as open source makes it easy to incorporate existing code into a project". Secondly, the region as a matter of principle has a policy to select open source software wherever possible.
Not to be left behind, 471 schools in the region surrounding Paris will participate in a portal project using Eliot, a web-based workflow software that was originally developed for three schools of the region. The government of Īle-de-France has signed a €19.6 million six-year contract with several IT services providers for the design, implementation and management of the workflow portal. The portal will be accessed by about one million users, including 400 000 schoolchildren making it one of Europe's biggest open source projects.
Eliot is developed by about seventy developers and is built on top of open source components such as the relation database management system PostgreSQL, the Apache web server and the Tomcat Java application server. It can be accessed with just a web browser. It allows the system to be up to date, in technology as well as in applications, explained Olivier Vigneau , a project manager at one of the IT services providers, in the statement published by the company. According to (http://www.osor.eu/news/fr-existing-open-source-portal-to-be-used-by-paris-region-schools)Vigneau, Eliot is also being used by schools in Strasbourg and some schools in Switzerland and Germany. "The majority of applications used five years from now, are yet to be imagined."Ooh la la!
Open source data management company Ingres Corporation (http://www.opensourcegroups.com/www.ingres.com)is trying to stake a piece of the European pie by partnering up with PROGRAMMIERFABRIK (http://www.programmierfabrik.at/) in Austria. PROGRAMMIERFABRIK develops software for financial service companies, software companies and government institutions.
“For far too long there was no real alternative to the overpriced database solutions of proprietary software providers. Ingres Database is the first solution to offer the same reliability and performance at a fraction of the cost of proprietary solutions, as well as market leading open source standards.” said Wilfried Seyruck, managing director, PROGRAMMIERFABRIK GmbH. The fact that Ingres provides partners with 24x7 support made the deal irresistible for the Austrian firm. As a former certified Oracle partner, PROGRAMMIERFABRIK now feels that the time is right for venturing into a more open source model.
Our European tour comes to an end but I’m sure the journey for Open source is just beginning.:)