Slashdot mentiones the move of desktop systems to opensource software in the german foreign ministry. After the cause of munich, it’s one further migration in a major public institution.
It’s not surprising that the move probably saves some licensing costs, while support services might remain a major cost factor. But me wonders how they get specialized closed source applications running on the Linux systems. They could use virtualisation, but then they still had to pay for MS Windows licenses.
The Answer is easy, nowadays specialized closed source applications tend to get written in Java :)
As far as the Foreign Ministry is concerned, I know of a software house here in Karlsruhe (surpise) working for them as a developer of such specialized Software written in Java.
Sven
I wonder why such specialized, individually written software was not ordered and delivered including the source code. While closed source software is a valid business model for the mass market, making complex software available for almost everyone at an affordable price tag, things look completely different for the class of software we are talking about here.