Re: News: Spanish's Extermadura abandoning LinEx, but maybe adopting Debian
On Sun, Jan 01, 2012 at 12:09:33PM +0000, Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo wrote:
> Hi,
>
> (I post it in debian-project because I think that it has a broad impact.
> Please move it to other list or ignore if not appropriate.)
>
> Just read this morning these news from a Spanish newspaper (spanish only,
> sorry). Maybe other people know about english versions, or some insider
> from the LinEx project also in Debian can share more news with us about
> that.
>
> http://www.publico.es/ciencias/414698/extremadura-abandona-linex
>
> Confirmed in: http://www.linex.org/joomlaex/
>
> Some highlights (possibly inexact or that will change in the future -- use
> with care ;) ):
>
> - Extremadura's regional government is the owner of the centre Cesje (Centro
> de Excelencia de Software José de Espronceda), in charge of developing LinEx
> (a Debian derivative created in 2002 especifically for the use and needs of
> this government/region). Due to wanting to streamline spending, they are
> going to transfer the centre to Spain's government. This, in principle,
> will end the development of LinEx, the contracts of programmers and the
> comissioning stopped since yesterday.
>
> - More than 70,000 computers with LinEx are used in schools/education, and
> more than 15,000 in health-care (roughly, equivalent of the National Health
> System). Only about 1% of the rest of the administration (40,000 in total)
> use LinEx, though.
>
> - Apparently, Extremadura's government plans to keep using free software,
> and they plan to migrate all of the computers with Windows OS to "another
> free distribution". In other part of the article they say that they're
> going to migrate from LinEx "to an open distribution, in particular,
> Debian". They cite in some places of the article Ubuntu as a possibility,
> as well, so maybe there are no firm decisions yet.
Hi,
Not answering Manuel directly but I want to add some comments since he brought
up this news.
This news is about the government closing the main development center of Linex
and 'transferring' it to somewhere else where it is not clear if they can also do,
want to do or plan to do this job.
Linex was already very close to Debian and we even have someone packaging in
Debian some of the stuff they use, and sometimes develop [1], mostly in one
of the 'flavours' of Linex: linex-edu. My understanding is they also have
sponsored people to improve some tools they needed in Debian / free software.
My reading of the article (and with data from another blog post in Spanish
[2]), is that don't want to pay the people who were working in the
development and adaptation of Linex (between 4-14 people), and they are just
announcing they will use Debian or Ubuntu directly, expecting those
distributions will include all they need in terms of support, documentation,
custom software, etc..
I see all of this as a first step to kill Linux in Extremadura without
announcing it directly but rather as letting it to die slowly.
Ana
[1] http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=jredrejo@debian.org
See aptlinex, fonts-linex or controlaula as stuff they are upstream for.
[2] http://alasombradeltomate.es/2011/12/16/extremenos-el-linex-ha-muerto/
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