This was an interesting read (London stock exchange moving to SuSE Linux) albeit this has been in the works for some time from what I understand from various readings:
London Stock Exchange in historic Linux go-live - ComputerworldUK.com
For such a functionality, very high reliability is essential.
This should be interesting to watch of any subsequent good or bad stories.
Especially as the previous .NET based effort was a debacle.
And then the funny counterstory is this
No more desktop Linux systems in the German Foreign Office - The H Open Source: News and Features
I wonder how high the bribe was, because it has no logic in it.
My guess is it boils down to this para :
… although open source has demonstrated its worth, particularly on servers, the cost of adapting and extending it, for example in writing printer and scanner drivers, and of training, have proved greater than anticipated. The extent to which the potential savings trumpeted in 2007 have proved realisable has, according to the government, been limited – though it declines to give any actual figures. Users have, it claims, also complained of missing functionality, a lack of usability and poor interoperability.
Any new person to the Office likely has already been trained in the products of the proprietary operating system, but not in Linux. They need to be retrained. The new persons are likely discontent having to learn this, and they likely stir up discontentment in the other users who were not happy with the forced move to Linux. These users likely bring with them stories of applications they used in their previous jobs that don’t have similar Linux counterparts. I know a weakness in Linux apps that I think would cause the biggest annoyance in our office if there was a move to Linux is that there is no Linux app that can compete with the functionality of Adobe Acrobat Pro, nor an app that has the user friendly combination of Microsoft-Access. Yes there are Linux apps that can do some functionality in pdf files, but they pale in comparison to Acrobat Pro. The same is true wrt user friendly use of Access. I suspect there are other office specific applications where the proprietary operating system has a lead over Linux as well.
Reference interoperability - it is true wrt office documents produced by Word, Excel, Access, and PowerPoint. In all cases I can point to cases where documents produced by those apps do NOT convert/display well in Linux Open Office / Office Libre. I confess thou, I struggle to understand just who they need to be interoperable with ? My experience with governments is they tell us the citizens the formats we must use/submit, and it is up to us to be interoperable with them. That point was a bit of a surprise.
Maybe they mean interoperable with their home PCs and their hopefully not pirated versions of MS-Office ?
What they state about drivers is likely true in that one just can’t buy any piece of hardware and use it on Linux. This restricts managers with discretionary budgets and that likely annoys them. There are a lot of neat technical items on the market, which do serve some limited purpose related to the office, where there may be no to limited Linux drivers (but no problems obtaining drivers for the proprietary operating system). The same is true for many printers, where there are some printers with drivers for the proprietary operating system, but not for Linux.
wrt proprietary drivers, its common knowledge that ATI and nVidia Linux video graphic drivers are NOT as capable as the MS-Windows proprietary video drivers. Although typically that is only important in playing back movies or playing video games which presumably are not functions for a government office.
Its a bit disappointing to read of this planned change back.
Apparently all was not perfectly smooth on the first couple of days use SuSE Linux as the operating system for the stock exchange , but nothing ‘blocking’ yet on the continued use. Story here :
London Stock Exchange tackles closing auction system problem - ComputerworldUK.com
I’ve heard South Africa is looking to do the same thing, moving its exchange to Linux. Not sure who they are looking to use yet.
Novell needs this (good) publicity, and build up confident in other companies considering moving to SLES with the pending acquisition.
I recently installed Windows again just for some games. Honestly i can not see any special benefit why i need to run Windows. Maybe, just maybe for Office, but even then i don’t think.
Updating under Windows is already a pain and then the crashes that some programs have. Mm… ok, i use Xp right now. Not the newest version but still Windows.
What i do like though, is the font technology that Windows uses. Fonts do look nice.
Die Woche: Kein Linux im Auswärtigen Amt | heise open
Its in german, so try to translate it with google.
It appears that user resistant was one of the reasons the AA switched back to Windows. Yeah, Windows rocks. Gee, people are really brainwashed. But on the other hand, people tend to be unwilling to adjust to new things anyway. Sad story indeed.
I think it’s pretty natural. For example I wouldn’t want to switch to BSD or OS X now that I know my way around linux 
Best regards,
Greg