Op Fri, 21 Jul 2006 12:05:18 +0100, schreef Roy Schestowitz:
> Dutch municipality Groningen migrates to OpenOffice
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | The Dutch municipality of Groningen (180.000 inhabitants) recently |
> announced to migrate to OpenOffice.org. The municipality expects to save
> | 330 thousand Euros, of which 160 thousand will be used for the |
> migration. Groningen isn't ready to switch to Linux yet, but it is |
> currently busy to make the applications it uses OS-independent. `----
>
> (Original in Dutch, I couldn't quickly a translation service that
> handles a Dutch->English route)
>
> http://tweakers.net/nieuws/43575/Gemeente-Groningen-stapt-over-op-OpenOffice.html
Here's my attempt at an adequate translation - comments are welcome, of
course:
Groningen district council migrates to OpenOffice.org By Martin Sturm -
Thursday, July 20th 2006 21:38 - Source: Groenlinks
The Groningen district council will not renew its MS Office license
subscription with Microsoft; instead, the decision was made to migrate to
the Open Source office suite OpenOffice.org. With this move, Groningen
says it's the biggest district council in the Netherlands to seriously
deploy Open Source Software.
The Groenlinks (Green Party) web site shows that on July 12th, the
council has approved a motion by councillor Karin Dekker to terminate the
licensing agreement with Microsoft. Yesterday, this decision was ratified
by the council meeting, so as a consequence, Groningen will no longer
receive upgrade versions of Microsoft's office suite, with expected
annual savings of 330,000 euros. Half this amount, i.e. 160,000 euros,
will be used to finance the migration to OpenOffice.org; for the time
being, the other half will be reserved for license expenses, should new
versions of Microsoft Office be necessary after all. The council,
however, noted that the latter is not the preferred scenario, and that
the reserved sum can be put to good use otherwise in the end.
For quite some time, Groningen has been working on introducing Open
Standards and Open Source Software (OSOSS), striving to reduce its
dependency on just one single software vendor. Recent research, however,
shows that migrating to a fully Open Source desktop environment, based on
the Linux operating system, is not yet a viable option. This means that
for the time being, the license subscription with Microsoft for the use
of Windows will be prolonged, at an annual cost of 135,000 euros.
Nevertheless, Groningen strives to make its workplace desktop environment
"operating system neutral", creating possibilities for a full migration
to Linux at some future time.
Richard Rasker
--
Linetec Translation and Technology Services
http://www.linetec.nl/
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