[seul-edu] Great News!!!

[astroboy@linuxfreemail.com]

On March, Monday 12 (just yesterday), the mexican national newspaper "Reforma" published a full featured article, titled "The government adopts free system". It announces that the government of the biggest city of the world, the Distrito Federal (D.F., or Mexico city) has announced its support for Linux.

It's a very long article, but I'll try to put the essential facts in English. (please excuse some errors, I'm not very good speaking or writing in English language)

"The government of Mexico city has initiated an informatic revolution that will let cut millions of pesos in expenses for software licences, using a free and open operating system named Linux.

This is the first government -that we know- that will switch all its
informatic systems to an operating system that have no licenses.

The goal, as explained by Jose Barberán, who is the Technical Coordinator of Systems Administration in Mexico city, is to have all the systems of the city government in Linux in about 1 to 2 years (....)

The informatic revolution which seed was planted by a young finland
programmer, Linus Torvalds, is now in the government of Mexico city.

The main goal is to cut expenses of dozens of millions of dollars in the payment of services due the use of commercial programs -such as Windows- and to use those saved resources in programs against poverty.

The design of the program for the free replacement began in September 2000, and after some reunions of the Technical Comiteee, it has already arrived to the phase of licitation of the computer goods. In some of the tax offices already begun the switching from the commercial to the free operating system, where Linux is already installed."

It includes an interview with Jose Barberan. The main issues declared there are:

"¿Do you plan to use and develop the Linux environment for goverment use?
No, we don't plan to develop, there is a lot of people in the world doing that, but we want to have it in all the systems of Mexico city government (...)


¿Do you plan to replace the Windows environment that is used in the offices?
Yes (...)

¿Isn't a risk to switch the systems?
It is a problem of training of the people, we need to create a
transition program to replace the things we use today to the new systems, but we must do it orderly.


¿Are there some resistance of the commercial companies to avoid that you enter open systems? I believe that means losses for them ¿do you have problems for it?
There was resistance, but each time is less, and I should notice that there are commercial companies supporting open systems, such as IBM and Sun Microsystems. They're not the only ones, of course, there are a lot of them."

The graphics in the interview suggest that the government chose SuSE Linux.

I hope that "Reforma" newspaper publish this article soon on its web page. When we notice its appearance we will let know the url to the list.

Regards,

Alejandro Díaz Infante
Escuela Normal "Manuel Ávila Camacho" (ENMAC)


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