We have been speaking of Linux on the desktop in the past few articles. The home desktop presents many challenges, and we have seen how Linux and Open Source is rising to meet these. In this article, however, we will look at Linux implementations in the Business and the Government sector.

Novell is one company that is helping to push Linux into the business arena. It recently announced a new version of its Linux Desktop that has been specially crafted for small businesses. Due to ship on March 31, 2005, the new version will be called the Linux Small Business Suite 9, and is intended for businesses with about a hundred users and three servers. It will include Novell's Groupwise Collaboration Software, SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9, and the Novell Linux Desktop. At a competitive price of $475 for a five-client license, it ought to shake up the market.

The German city of Munich is in the process of migrating to Linux across 14,000 desktops. It did this despite many efforts from commercial software vendors to stop the shift. It is doing this in a planned manner, and is due to be completed by 2007.

Venezuela’s science and technology ministry has recently ratified a decree ordering, in a first phase, central government entities to draft plan for migration to open source software platforms within three months. The Venezuelan president has also announced that the country’s public administration will migrate to open source software within the next two years.

The 14 ministries concerned by this decree are supposed to operate a complete migration on open source system in the two coming years, except in those cases where it can be proved that the migration would be impossible. During the three months needed to elaborate a plan, the ministries have to inform themselves on the use of free software, and how their systems can migrate towards free software.

The local government of Vienna is due to start migrating its desktop PCs to open-source software in the second quarter of this year.

Users will be free to switch from Microsoft Office 2000 to OpenOffice.org and from Microsoft Windows 2000 to Linux, without the need of changing their operating system. The Municipality of Vienna has identified 7,500 desktops (of 16,000) that could be migrated to OpenOffice, of which 4,800 could migrate to Linux.

According to Erwin Gillich, the head of operational information technology at the Austrian capital’s municipal authority, only a few hundred users might migrate to open source software in the first year, but this number might increase afterwards.

The French Gendarmerie is going to adopt an open source solution for its operating system. The migration was announced in the ADAE Conference, 2nd February, in Paris.

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