The Vienna city council this week decided to reconfigure 720 PCs running GNU/Linux and used in child day care centres in the city to also boot Vista, Microsoft's latest operating system.

The city council wants these PCs to also run Windows Vista this year in order to run an application for mandatory tests on language skills, report Austrian and German IT news sites. This applications will at the moment only work with Microsoft's web browser.

Reconfiguration of the day care centres PCs will cost the city some 105,000 Euro, writes the Austrian IT news site Futurezone. It quotes Marie Ringler of the Vienna Green party: "Part of that would have been enough to make the company developing the language software speed-up the adaptation to Firefox."

Ringler is worried that Vienna is turning back on its Open Source IT policies. The German IT news site Heise quotes her as saying it is the death-knell, following the city's decision in February to spend 7.6 million euro on new Microsoft licences. Other city council members deny that Vienna is abolishing its Open Source plans. SPÖ (Social Democratic Party) representative Siegfried Lindenmayr: "Vienna has been using Open Source software for the last twenty years and will continue to do so", he told Futurezone.

Wienux

The day care centres were among the first in city to work with PCs using the GNU/Linux distribution Wienux, developed by Vienna since 2005 and based on the Debian distribution. "We started with Linux and many of us have gotten used to it", Christine Spieß, head of the city's department responsible for the child care centres, told Futurezone. The language testing application was custom built for Vienna years ago. That the day care centres would be using GNU/Linux, the company could not have foreseen, said Spieß.

The city's IT department offers users in the public administration the choice between a GNU/Linux desktop or a Microsoft dekstop. Of the city's total 32,000 PCs a thousand now run Wienux, the majority being those at the day care centres. Some 15,000 PCs in the city use OpenOffice.

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Further information:

• Futurezone news item (in German)
• Futurezone news item (in German)
• Heise news item (in German)
• Pro-Linux news item (in German)