MUNICH AGAINST THE MICROSOFT MAFIA !!
MUENCHEN GEGEN DER MICROSOFT MAFIA !!
An article on Saturday in the main South Germany Newspaper "Sueddeutsche Zeitung" has outlined the city of Munich's disatisafaction with Microsoft's new licencing policy being brought in with XP. The article, in German, can be read at:
http://www.sueddeutsche.de/aktuell/sz/artikel140754.php
With the end of support for Windows NT on aproximately 10,000 workstations run by the Munich city council at the end of July, the city is faced with an addition annual bill of around 4,5 MILLION Euro (a euro is just less than AUS$2 or US$1) to "upgrade" and annual licencing fee's following years. With the tight hardware checks built into XP, hardware changes can cause the OS to need to be re-registered and activated with Microsoft, incuring further increased costs for the council and hence the rate payers.
Munich Council is actively looking into switching away from Microsoft products for what it sees as unfair business practices and is investigating a switch to Linux.
Er-Hum .... Perhaps someone from IBM Germany, should be paying the burgermeister a call ??? OS/2 can ceratinly fullfil the city's requirements.
While the loss of this revenue will not worry Microsoft unduly, a switch to OS/2 could breath a new lease of life into OS/2 Warp. Since Munich, the capital of Bavaria is one of the richest cities in Germany and considers itself the centre of Information Technology in Germany, wher Munich leads others could follow.
Even if IBM can't win back this valuable customer, it good to see the tide turning against the suspect business practices that continue to be executed by Bill Gates Gang of sch***ters.
The comments above are my opinion (although shared by many), the data in the newspaper article is factual as far as I know.
Cheers/2
Ed Durrant.
Source: OS2VOICE