Birmingham City Council mulls Linux rollout
Link: Birmingham City Council mulls Linux rollout
Birmingham City Council is considering an extension to the open source software deployment it started in autumn 2006.
The council installed just 200 Linux desktops in 2006 in a pilot scheme, at a cost of over £500,000 of open source public funding, leading to criticisms that the project fell short of expectations.
This lead to the project being mothballed, and some machines in the city’s library cluster were migrated to Windows XP instead.
The council has now said that open source is still an important part of its strategy and it is considering further deployments, although they will not all take place this year.
The council is currently rolling out a revised model, and will continue rollout as appropriate.
Birmingham City Council is one of the founding partners of the National Open Centre, an organisation that was launched in 2006 to help set national policy on use of open source software.
The other founding partners are the National Computing Centre and the council-led Digital Birmingham initiative. Open source project partners include OpenAdvantage, which works with the University of Central England, and Midland Open Source Technologies.
