South Korean gov. leaving Windows 7 for Linux, saving $655 million

[littleman]

MS is dropping Windows 7 support in seven months forcing organizations to upgrade or search for new solutions.  South Korea decided to go open source and save $655 million.

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/south-korean-government-planning-linux-migration-as-windows-7-support-ends/

[ergophobe]

The Herald quotes the Interior Ministry as indicating that the transition to Linux, and the purchase of new PCs, would cost about 780 billion won ($655 million), but also anticipates long-term cost reductions with the adoption of Linux.

[ergophobe]

Also this in that article

This is not the first time that a major government has announced a migration to Linux. The city government of Munich, Germany, announced in 2003 a migration to Linux, though the deployment—which relied on a custom Linux distribution built by a consultancy for the government—became a boondoggle, prompting the city to migrate to Windows 10 at a cost of 50 million euro.

Why would a municipal government, even a large one like Munich, think that they were better off creating and maintaining their own distro? I know it's not like they were creating their own OS, but still, it seems like that was doomed to fail.

[littleman]

>cost

That's quite a reading blunder.  Of course, they do not need to buy new PCs, I thought that would be the point.  Linux would run quite well on PCs specked out for W7.

>Munich

I guess these governments have to find a way of making low cost options expensive.

[Brad]

If they stick with a proven, off the shelf Linux distro and reuse as many PC's as they can, this ought to work well for them.  Although it's more secure, there really is nothing special about Win 10 and it is a resource hog.

It might be cheaper to upgrade hardware at the same time if you factor in the labor costs of installing Linux on existing machines.