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The future of Wienux?

In February of 2008, I posted about the City of Vienna, and its open source project called Wienux.

Based on Debian, this Linux distribution was developed by the municipality department 14, and intended to be deployed to several thousand workstations in the Viennese magistrate offices.

Several studies had been conducted to assess the viability of the project, and initial results looked promising. An extensive study was still pending publication.

In the meantime, 7.600.000 euros had been reserved for a possible migration to Windows Vista. At the time this move was heavily criticized since study findings had not been published, and initial reports showed Wienux to be a viable option for the City of Vienna.

Now, according to an article in Der Standard, Wienux is no longer available for download on the MA14 website, due to "upgrades and development".

MA14 has refused to comment to the Austrian Der Standard newspaper about the removal of the download link.

As it stands so far, a decision in the summer, to migrate 750 workstations to Windows Vista will most likely go ahead, according to statements by a member of the municipal council from the Green party .

At this point, in my opinion, it would appear that several key decision makers have been bought off to vote in favor of Windows Vista. With silence from MA14, and the removal of Wienux from their site, it seems this project is being killed off.