* Dan Kegel dank@kegel.com [2004-02-22 00:16:21 -0800]:
Hi,
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.
hmm, I'm pro this. Since I'm working as developer and system integrator, such topics are really interesting for me. But they of course dont really belong to the wine-users list.
Perhaps we could also set up a general wine-advocacy list, where we discuss general things, i.e. vmware vs. wine, etc.
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.
ACK.
BTW: this way we perhaps could make clearer to the goverments, that they dont just use another operating system (-kernel), but instead go completely opensource - meaning all govermental processes have to be transparent (of course this takesj political processes, but perhaps we could help here a little bit)
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!)
Yeah, wine-users too wide for this. Most talk there's about quite specific questions. For govermental users, we have more general questions, i.e. is some package running, what problems may occour when running package XYZ under wine, etc.
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.
ACK.
BTW: if for some reason (I cant image any good one) the winehq folks dont want such an list @winehq, i'd offer to host it at my site.
<snip>
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.
hmm, shouldn't we better split off into several languages, at least german and english ?
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cu