DE: Foreign ministry: 'Cost of Open Source desktop maintenance is by far the lowest' — Open Source Observatory

The Foreign Ministry in 2001 began migrating its back-end IT systems to Open Source in order to provide all embassies and consulates with Internet access and email. 'Our strategy was to use as far as possible Open Standards and Open Source. Reduction of costs was the main reason for this decision.' Upon completion of this project, the ministry decided in 2004 to also migrate the desktops.

The biggest hurdle proved to be to convince the two hundred IT workers a the ministry. 'Their issues were not technical. They just did not know anything about Linux and Open Source and we had to change their views. We took all of them on a crash course of using Linux servers and configuring Apache. There they discovered that it works.'