German tax-men favour Linux

The Lower Saxony tax authority has migrated 12,000 desktops to SuSE Linux and the open source KDE desktop.

The outfit has been taxing the good people of Hanover using Solaris x86 version 8 since 2002.

The roll-out is well under way with more than 200 desktops being converted daily. It has taken two years of planning and the taxmen were told to keep very quiet about it until now.

Although Solaris has been fairly entrenched in the authority, the tax-men say they like the idea of having freely-accessible sources, no licence costs, as well as optimum support of current hardware.

It might even be tax deductible. µ