Dev.SN

Indian State Has Solution to End of Win XP Support

posted by janrinok on Monday March 24 2014, @02:11PM   
from the linux-is-the-boss dept.

prospectacle writes about another possible shift from Win XP to Linux:

"With Microsoft ceasing to support Windows XP, the Tamil Nadu state government has advised its departments to switch to Bharat Operating System Solutions, also known as BOSS Linux.

BOSS Linux is developed by India's "National Resource Centre for Free/Open Source Software", which is financed by their Ministry of Communication and Information Technology. BOSS supports national languages including Bengali, Telugu, and Tamil.

Why would you develop your own entire operating system when you can just buy the newest version from Microsoft?"

• Re:You don't have to. Re:You don't have to. (Score: 4, Insightful) by Sir Garlon on Monday March 24 2014, @03:00PM

  by Sir Garlon (1264) on Monday March 24 2014, @03:00PM (#20440)

  All you said is true. I think you forgot to account for the labor costs to actually re-image the machines, the cost of data migration and training. Those are real costs, but they are costs you would incur to some extent to upgrade to a new Windows version anyway. TFA is not very long or in depth, but it does address those migration costs.

  it's likely that the government will find itself faced with a substantial hit to their productivity when the new tech goes out as thousands of employees will struggle to pick up the new operating system. In the long run, however, the positive effects of the switch could outweigh the short term harms...

  It's hard to tell if that is just the reporter veering off into speculation, or if the state of Tamil Nadu has done the math. I do think it's smart to consider the alternative of cutting that dependency on Windows licenses. How that works out, balancing short-term costs vs. long-term savings, is a tricky question. An Indian state government may very well come up with a different answer to that question than an American state government would.

  Another thought that just occurred to me -- if the government has a lot of older machines, they might not be able to just upgrade to Windows 7 or 8.

  --
  [Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight who is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.

  Parent

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• Re:You don't have to. (Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Monday March 24 2014, @05:09PM

  by Nerdfest (80) on Monday March 24 2014, @05:09PM (#20555)

  You need to re-image, and even re-train to a degree when switching from XP to Win7, and especially Win8.

  Parent