Hire local company (SuSE) for government computer services, and reclaim part of that money from taxes while stimulating local economy. Sounds like a good idea for anywhere outside of Washington?
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/05/26/1855225&mode=thread&tid=109&tid=187 Munich Spurns Steve Ballmer's Software Rebates "Steve Ballmer's recent trip to Munich to offer up to 90% rebates for the Microsoft Software Assurance and Licenses was in vain. The ruling party of Germans biggest city and self-proclaimed 'technology capital' now decided to migrate 14.000 workstations to Linux and an OSS office suite. A study comparing the alternatives had assigned 6218 (out of 10.000) points to Linux/OSS, while the MS Windows platform only scored 5293." http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,1110809,00.asp Why Munich Dumped Microsoft for Linux http://www.suse.com/us/company/press/press_releases/archive03/munich.html City of Munich Replaces Windows with Linux "This initiative will see Germany's third largest city migrate 14,000 desktop and notebook computers to Linux. Their objective is to deploy information technology that stimulates more commercial and technological flexibility at a lower cost to the public sector." in other news... http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/result.xhtml?url=/english/newsticker/data/jk-24.10.02-007/default.shtml&words=Munich Head of German Branch of Microsoft Quits Warren
