City governments (especially in Germany and France) have recently begun seriously consider migrating to Linux, and feasibility studies are being done and to some extent are publically available. The study done for Munich, for instance, recognizes that cities need sometimes hundreds of specialized software packages that are not yet available for Linux, and so the cities will have to continue running the Windows versions of those apps for the time being. Yet it suggests using Terminal Services and/or VmWare to run those apps! Clearly, the Wine community needs to make an effort to address the needs of city governments and to get the word out that Wine is a viable option.
One important part of this effort should be a mailing list akin to wine-users but dedicated to governmental users of Wine. (wine-users is full of all sorts of topics that might not mix well with staid government workers; some of the games discussed there might even be banned in Germany!) Dedicating a mailing list to this special category of user would greatly increase the signal-to-noise ratio, and should increase the likelihood that government users would feel comfortable about Wine.
IMHO the list should allow posts in any language; if nobody can handle the language a post is in, we'll ask the poster to try again in English. The goal here is to avoid intimidating these possibly skittish users; asking them to *always* post in English might scare some of them away.
Comments?
Thanks, Dan