Hi there again ;),

AFAICS the German Foreign Office GNU/Linux disaster hasn't been a subject on this mailing list so far. As I do think this issue might be of interest to the non German speaking FSFE/free software community as well, I would like to share two links with you about the incident:

The German Foreign Office will migrate its desktop computers from Linux back to Windows. However, no truly compelling reasons for the decision appear to exist.

Various German Foreign Office documents leaked, for instance, to netzpolitik.org and then in part published, demonstrate that the German Foreign Office has no compelling reasons for its recent decision to migrate its desktop and notebook computers from Linux back to Windows. On two previous occasions, the German Foreign Office had asked management consulting firm McKinsey for an appraisal of its IT strategy, and both times the market researchers' studies concluded that Linux and open source software constitute a perfectly viable solution on desktop computers.

Link source: http://h-online.com/-1194263

FSFE press release: http://fsfe.org/news/2011/news-20110202-02.en.html An older article: http://www.osor.eu/news/de-ministry-of-foreign-affairs-to-ditch-open-source-desktop

Now coming back to my favorite subject of the last weeks ;) --- Elopocalypse and the conspiracy theories around it:

Facing the fact that Microsoft paid one billion dollar to Nokia http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-03-07/microsoft-is-said-to-pay-nokia-more-than-1-billion-in-deal.html for choosing Windows Phone 7, I think it is legitimate to at least ask whether Microsoft has also paid the German Foreign Office (or the somebody from the German liberal party, which runs the German Foreign Office...) for switching back to Windows XP (!).

What do you think?

Kind regards micu