The tax authority from lower Saxony in Germany is migrating 12.000 desktops to SuSE Linux. This project is known to be the most important event in history of IT in that institution.

Most of the computers were running Solaris 8 for x86. The process of migration is in advanced stage since about 300 computers are ported every day, according to Eva Brucherseifer, president of the KDE community in Germany, and managing director of basysKom, the consultancy firm which configured the new desktop environment.

The process of migration was planned two years ago, while the actual porting was started in April and the operation will be completed in September.

The project was kept in secrecy until now. If you wonder why the authorities decided to drop Solaris, you need to know that it's because Linux sources are freely available, offers enhanced hardware compatibility and scalability, features low costs for support and training and provides increased flexibility and usability. "The decision made by the Regional Tax Office in Lower Saxony represents an important step towards increased flexibility, enhanced usability and - last but not least - reduced training and support costs", said Brucherseifer.

Also under way is a parallel process of customization of KDE, meaning that it was translated in German and many of the advanced options were hidden because the employees are using it only for basic tasks. basysKom and the tax authority's IT department were the artisans of the KDE customization.

It's well known that many Germany public authorities embraced open source software enthusiastically. Nine out of every 10 German local authorities are using open source software and OpenOffice.org is being run on more than 50,000 PCs in the German public sector, according to Erwin Tenhumberg, a product marketing manager at Sun.