Vienna becomes a little less of an Open Source City

In the same month that folly and Soundnetwork's micro-festival of open source technology, art and culture is launched in Liverpool, Vienna, a city much more advanced than almost any city in the UK, has undergone a regrettable back-slide to using (and paying through the nose for) proprietaryi systems, in this case, Windows Vista.

Shockingly, the nub of the informative report on ZDNet is that the city council has essentially squandered 3 years of investment in Open Sourcei technology in the city's infrastructure for the sake of a single program for nursery children - perhaps ironically called "Sly Mouse" - that will *only* runi on Internet Explorer.

For the sake of this programme, apparently, the city council approved a €8 MILLION upgrade across the board to Windows Vista, where city employees and departments had been just getting used to practically free, open-source software.

Apparently, the Schlaumäuse software requires several Internet "Exploder" plug-ins and caused frequent crashes in Wine, the Linuxi software used to run Windows applications on Linux.

"This is a major setback to the city's Linux migration," said Marie Ringler, a member of the district council and representative of the Vienna Green Party.

It seems likely though that the city's huge expenditure will prove to have been pointless anyway: the software maker behind the Schlaumäuse software is planning a Firefox version for 2009 according to councillor Ringler, who pointed out that the city could have subsidised a Firefox version of the software for a fraction of the cost of the Windows Vista migration.

Hardly thinking out of the box. The only thing the city council seem to want "out of the box" is their software, and they're complacent enough to pay extortionate and unnecessary prices for their 1-dimensional thinking.