How Vigo Council migrated to Linux

Software developer Eloy Coto just wrote this article on the transition to [GNU!/]Linux from the Town Council of the city of Vigo, in Galicia.

How Vigo Council migrate to Linux
http://acalustra.com/how-vigo-council-migrate-to-linux.html

I did my small part to push this process, too. On december 2009 I was working there and noticed that the standard office software was mostly on Spanish. This was unsatisfying, being Galicia a bilingual region, so I started my work on testing programs and systems which could provide a better bilingual support - and of course I didn't limit myself to Windows NT. I already had a portable computer with GNU/Linux Ubuntu. So, I tested both Windows NT [5.1, 6.0] and GNU/Linux systems [Ubuntu, Trisquel]. After finishing my report, of course I made myself sure of handing the first copy of it to Ricardo, the then-chief of the IT Departament. It was february the first, 2010.

Then I tried to publish my report written in galician language, but nobody in Galicia wanted to publish my 28-page report on paper or even make available the 12-Megabytes PDF document in the world wide web. I already had hired an Internet hosting at the moment, but it was too small - only 1 Gigabyte of bandwith per month, which meant that 80 readers would suffice to bring it down. So I had to resort to convert the report to HTML, divide it in 20 pages, show the images in a reduced size, and trust statistics - they shown that the average visitor would read only three pages, so the use of bandwith would be greatly reduced, and so it was.

Nó en galego de Nacho Agulló: Sistemas informáticos multilingües con galego e español, Presentación
http://www.grafotema.com/agullo/sistemas/index.gl.html

This story has an ironic ending. The director from Spain's oldest computer magazine called me. He wanted to know about the report, he asked me to e-mail it to him, he read it in spite of being in a language he wasn't familiar with and he said he wanted to publish a shorter version of it in Spanish. So I updated the report to add the then-new Windows NT 6.1 and GNU/Linux openSUSE too, shortened it, and translated it into Spanish afterwards. And so it was how the report nobody wanted to publish in Galicia was published in Spain's oldest and most prestigious computer magazine. Poetess Rosalía de Castro, now I truly understand you!

sumario Nº 206, julio-agosto 2010, año XXXVI - PDF
http://docplayer.es/13249964-Sumario-no-206-julio-agosto-2010-ano-xxxvi.html

And this was my small part on helping the IT Departament to become aware of the alternatives. Fair enough, they were already using Fedora at the time in a small number of desktop computers, and of course had servers. And they had already migrated from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice in 2006 - I was a part of that process too.