Zaragoza City Council case

In the free software master we have been studying how to make the deployment of free software in different environments, since the deployment subject that started two weeks ago. So for this subject we have been studying different aspects that one have to take care when migrating and deploying free software and I am going to talk about them after every session.

So the first case we studied was the successful migration to open source software that took place on the Zaragoza City Council. The first thing they did was to make an inventory from which they got the number of 3000 PCs and 60 Servers approximately. Then you have to realise that doing this migration is not something that is going to be finished from one day to another or even a month, but instead is going to be a process that is going to take some time.

The people in charge of this migration also had a plan which consisted on before doing the total migration, first they would migrate some apps they considered as ‘lightweight apps’ (like mozilla firefox, vlc, 7zip) then the standard office apps and finally the whole operating system, so doing this we make feel the change to be not so abrupt for the average users.

We also learnt that usually business leaders or in these case politicians when they hear about free software they think that all the money they are going to save is going directly to something else, when the reality is that in the beginning they are going to have to spend money on migration resources and in a long term future they will get to see the results. So it is important to always bear in mind that the main reason will not always be only the money, even though in a long term you will save some money. For instance, in this case the main resources that the Zaragoza city council had to spend on was on technical training, hardware, 6 new IT employees and consulting.

And finally about average users they also told us that many times they resist to this changes because of the anxiety that the use of this new OS brings. So in order to solve this one should talk to the users and explain what this change is about. For example this is a good video that explains it in a not technical way.