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Open Source GNU is Not Unix IT Linux

How a Turkish Municipal District Switched to GNU/Linux (fsf.org) 76

Posted by EditorDavid from the GNU-hope dept.
Today I learned Turkey's Scientific and Technological Research Council has a subsidiary developing a GNU/Linux distro called Pardus, "redesigned to be used in accordance with the practices and habits of users in Turkey."

And this week the Free Software Foundation published a post from the proud project leader of Pardus, explaining exactly why open source was chosen in the district of Eyüpsultan (on the European side of Istanbul) and how they got it implemented: After the municipal elections held in 2014, the new administration realized (through internal financial analysis reports) that a large amount of money was being spent on licensing proprietary software. Looking to cut costs, management asked for a study to be carried out for solutions. As the Eyüpsultan municipality's IT department, we recommended to replace Microsoft Windows with Pardus GNU/Linux instead. We described our preference to transition to free software as "the desire to be independent from a company as well as the savings to be gained from cutting hefty license fees."

Additionally, we spoke about how the four freedoms would improve things outside of the budget. For example, we told the administration that users, when using free software, can fully benefit from the rights they have over the programs running on their computers. We also informed everyone that, when the software they run is proprietary, it means that a company claims rights over the user, and that such a claim of ownership can place restrictions on users in how they may or may not use the software. We told them that this is unacceptable. Arguments such as these were among the deciding factors that influenced our transition to free software.

The plan was presented to the municipal administration and widely accepted.

The municipal administration approved the project, and in January, 2015, the Eyüpsultan municipality started using free software applications such as LibreOffice (e.g. Writer, Calc, Impress, etc.). Prior to the implementations, basic user training on LibreOffice software was provided to the personnel of the institution. Over time, users were gradually and steadily directed to free systems, and, notably, without receiving backlash from users.... Training was an important item in the transition to Pardus GNU/Linux.
Besides an online support forum, they've also set up a live call center to answer questions. "I think we may be the only distribution that helps with issues via a call center."

So how do they feel now about that transition, eight years later? Free software has many advantages, including flexibility, high performance, major cost savings from licensing fees, independence from any particular company, and compliance with interoperability standards. Therefore, the transition of Eyüpsultan municipality to free software has resulted in benefits that were both strategic and practical. We believe, in the near future, more organizations will need to understand the philosophy of free software and the opportunities that free software provides.

The municipal budget has freed up money as a result of the moving from proprietary software to free software. The savings from the "proprietary software licenses" line of the budget was applied to the district in the form of new projects. The money goes now to, among other things, increasing the number of new parks and gardens, bicycle paths, and security cameras in the parks. Additionally, by increasing the number of classes we provide technical training, we started to provide classes in robotics and computation to young people. The Eyüpsultan municipality is now increasing the opportunities for students to further develop their personalities, abilities, goals, and self-discovery. It introduces young people to technology and encourages them to produce new technologies.
One final effect of using free software? It encourages others to do the same: As a result of this brave decision, many of the Istanbul district municipalities have started working to switch or have already made the switch to the Pardus GNU/Linux operating system. Institutions in other cities of the country have also expressed growing interest by asking questions about the Pardus operating system and free software.
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How a Turkish Municipal District Switched to GNU/Linux More

How a Turkish Municipal District Switched to GNU/Linux

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  • Debian + Xfce (Score:5, Interesting)

    by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Monday June 27, 2022 @07:52AM (#62653808)
    It's Debian + Xfce. Turkey doing this is a big deal - It's a big country, large population, & big govt institutions. Other govts seem to be sitting up to watch what happens with great interest. Since govts are by far Microsoft's biggest customers, it'll be interesting to see how they respond to this. On the other hand, this also means we have yet another distro of Linux.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by splutty ( 43475 )

      The same way they've always responded to this. With a lot of ~~bribes~~ special offers for the municipality in question.

    • Re:Debian + Xfce (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Ol Olsoc ( 1175323 ) on Monday June 27, 2022 @09:01AM (#62653974)

      It's Debian + Xfce. Turkey doing this is a big deal - It's a big country, large population, & big govt institutions. Other govts seem to be sitting up to watch what happens with great interest. Since govts are by far Microsoft's biggest customers, it'll be interesting to see how they respond to this. On the other hand, this also means we have yet another distro of Linux.

      Yeah. But as a person who spent a fair amount of time with installing and trying out different distros, they aren't all that different unless you get a special purpose version.

      So when we consider that Windows has several different versions of several different OS', with several different administration methods, I don't see much difference.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kenh ( 9056 )

        Windows has just a handful of versions:
        Win 11 (pro, enterprise, home, education)
        Win 10 (pro, enterprise, home, education)
        Windows Server 2019 (regular and data center)
        Windows Server 2016 (regular and data center)

        Linux has more distributions that start with the letter X than MS does of Windows, and the differences between most versions are licensing, not technical/code base differences. Not sure what "administration methods" has to do with anything.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by exa ( 27197 )

      Microsoft already responded to it. They had the original Pardus project shelved because it was too dangerous by making a deal with the government to give them free windows+offices licenses and suspend this project somehow. I calculated our project cost like dozens of millions of dollars to Microsoft. They were terrified!

      The project originally was based on native system tools and not debian. The switch to debian is a poor decision, they didn't have competent staff so they decided to do it on the cheap it see

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by exa ( 27197 )

        I keep a fork of the last windows killer version of the distro here, it is not developed presently but something might happen there, who knows?

        https://github.com/pars-linux

        This was the ARM capable version.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      What will be interesting is to see how Erdogan screws it up to serve him and his band of kleptocrats.

      • What will be interesting is to see how Erdogan screws it up to serve him and his band of kleptocrats.

        True dat!

    • Is this just MX Linux with localization and a new haircut?

    • It's a big country, large population, & big govt institutions.

      Turkey isn't doing anything. A small municipal district is, one with a population the size of a medium European city (around 700k people). This is an insignificant move that few are watching.

      Sidenote: Why are the pro Linux governments also the most corrupt dirtbags in the world? For once I wish we could get some positive news from a government in a country that isn't run by a wannabe (or borderline already is) dictator.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kenh ( 9056 )

      open source was chosen in the district of Eyüpsultan (on the European side of Istanbul)

      It's a Municipal District, on one side of a major city, not the nation of Turkey

      Kinda like a borough in NYC. It's interesting, but hardly changing the world - they are 8 years in, and so far they've only made a few other municipal districts to either switch or consider switching to Linux...

      This is not a revolution that Microsoft needs to be worried about in any meaningful way, not yet anyway.

      • Currently using or transitioning to Pardus: Turkish armed forces, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of National Defence, police, social security, & schools. Are those just a borough of Istanbul?

  • How likely is this decision because of their Favorite tech support office going out of business on the closed source side? Yes, I talking about Russia.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tora ( 65882 )

      you realize this started 8 years ago. RTFA

      • As did Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Particularly, Crimea. Back in WWII, Russia expelled most of the Crimean Tatars from the area, claiming them to be Nazi collaborators. Most ended up in Uzbekistan but a lot ended up in Turkey.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by kenh ( 9056 )

          FFS it's a small municipal district within one city in Turkey, who cares?

  • Good thing they didn't contribute their changes to another distribution, and created one instead. We needed more distributions.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      There website seems to indicate that this distro exists since 2005 and is Debian-derived.

      • I don't think it matters so much when they did it as the general principle involved. It's goofy that orgs keep creating new distributions instead of just literally tacking on a repo. Why do they want to create work for themselves?

        • If they throw enough talent at it there is plenty of Debian plumbing to fix, especially around init.

          There are many open bugs (e.g
            at one point there was one about using GPG keys to decrypt at boot) and the short answer is that fixing the bug touches too many silos and nobody has the energy, plus systemd has to want to cooperate.

          Those kinds of problems can be solved by a small full-time team but hobbyists empirically don't have the time.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      Calling something a "new" distribution doesn't mean much, especially if it's meant mainly for internal use. It probably makes sense to take an existing distro, throw out the stuff you don't want to support, and set up your own distribution archives.

  • I know what comes hext. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Monday June 27, 2022 @08:47AM (#62653946)

    Just wait, Microsoft is going to swoop in and put a stop to this, probably with bribes of some sort and "free" software/support just like Munich. Microsoft fears a foothold situation but in this case, they may just be too late... unless they go all in on stopping it which is a possibility. The real question is how much is Turkey worth to Microsoft.

    • Just wait, Microsoft is going to swoop in and put a stop to this, probably with bribes of some sort and "free" software/support just like Munich.

      Microsoft doesn't give a shit about a district of Turkey with a population smaller than a medium sized European city. They barely even give a shit about Munich which has double the population of what we're talking about here, and only piped up when Berlin was entertaining a switch too.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kenh ( 9056 )

        It's a municipal district in one city in Turkey - imagine if The Bronx in NYC converted to Linux, it's that kind of issue, nothing "revolutionary" going on after 8 years...

      • I think you are missing the point of it being a foothold situation but yes, they don't care about one city... they care that it could become every city.

  • Is there something truly noteworthy about this versus any of the other similar stories we see here periodically?

    • > Is there something truly noteworthy

      That the government responded strongly to the software freedom arguments and that they are focused on the user. Several other efforts were just about the money.

      Given Turkey's current efforts regarding Ukrainian wheat silos and mined ports failing, the desire to be free of US corporate interests is quite understandable.

       

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kenh ( 9056 )

        No,one district in one city found a way to avoid paying license fees for Microsoft products, that's it. This isn't a political stand against closed-source software.

  • This is it! The year of Linux on the desktop is finally upon us!

    • Only because their prez is fed up with being mistaken for poultry.

      • Poultry that is named after their country, as they were heavily involved in the trade of turkey fowl to the extent that it got named after their country rather than the colonies.

        What's really bizarre is that we all come up with English names for countries instead of just calling them by their own real names. How hard is it to say Italia? Korea is actually the name of a very old dynasty from hundreds of years ago (Koryo). Its real name is Hanguk (apparently short for Daehan Minguk). The truth is, though,

        • I think it's perfectly okay for all languages to come up with their own word for a country.

          But something called the "United Nations" is different, and there it definitely makes more sense to use their name for themselves.

          It is a bit ridiculous, for example, to call Deutschland the old Roman provincial name of Germany.

        • Can you please tell me how you'd pronounce "Österreich"? Or how about "Magyarország"? And you really think you could properly pronounce Az(e)rbaycan if most English speakers already fail at properly pronouncing the English version Azerbaijan?

          That (e), by the way, is a schwa [wikipedia.org]. Something /. can't even display.

          • Transliterating is different from renaming. See, for example, how I didn't use Hangul to write the name of Korea.

            • Ok, then. Transliterate that Ö in Österreich.

              • In surnames, I've seen it transliterated as Oestreich. It doesn't actually have to pronounce the same. Maybe Italia was a bad example since it's much closer to a direct transliteration but Germany vs. Deutschland are not at all the same.

  • Shouldn't that rather be named GOAT/Linux?

  • https://www.pisilinux.org/

    I'm the author of pisi, its original package manager. This is an offshoot of that original distro from sratch using an entirely new package format. This is the most popular pisi based distro.

    Hopefully, they'll use the much improved major revision of pisi next. You can follow the pisi releases here:
    https://github.com/examachine/pisi

    PISI was top notch when it was released. Today, only ports system compares to it IMHO. The packages were based on emerge scripts anyway, so the original

  • So they're using free software to power a local district that answers to a deeply oppressive national government. Great. I bet they use LibreOffice Calc to keep a list of suspected homosexuals, dissidents, and free-thinkers to jail on Erdogan's request, along with their families. Fuck them. Let them suffer with Windows 2000.

  • "redesigned to be used in accordance with the practices and habits of users in Turkey."

    Translation: don't be gay in Turkey.

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