Germany: ‘Cost of Open Source Desktop Maintenance is by far the Lowest’

“The Foreign Ministry in 2001 began migrating its back-end IT
systems to Open Source in order to provide all embassies and
consulates with Internet access and email. “Our strategy was to use
as far as possible Open Standards and Open Source. Reduction of
costs was the main reason for this decision.” Upon completion of
this project, the ministry decided in 2004 to also migrate the
desktops.

“The biggest hurdle proved to be to convince the two hundred IT
workers a the ministry. “Their issues were not technical. They just
did not know anything about Linux and Open Source and we had to
change their views. We took all of them on a crash course of using
Linux servers and configuring Apache. There they discovered that it
works.”

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