Andalusia renews funding for key open source projects

 The government of the Spanish autonomous region of Andalusia will continue to fund the development of GECOS and Guadalinux, two of the region’s key free software projects. On 28 April, the region awarded a one-year EUR 70,000 contract to Solutia, a Spanish ICT service provider. The government is planning new features and improvement, and all updates will be shared publicly.

“This investment will benefit not only our own public organisation, it is a contribution to all that use or build on these solutions”, comments Juan Conde, head of the free software promotion project of the Ministry of Finance and Public Administration in Andalusia.

On 2 June, Conde gave an impromptu presentation at the OpenExpo 2016 conference in Madrid. GECOS (Guadalinex Escritorio COrporativo eStandar) is a suite of management tools for Andalucia’s standard corporate desktop, and the number of IT departments in the region that uses GECOS is growing gradually. “The GECOS team is focusing on delivering technological advice to newcomers, assisting them with their deployments and tests”, he said.

Keeping hardware up to date

The software suite makes light work of workstation desktop management. GECOS offers:

• tools for inventory and monitoring of PC hardware;
• centralised management;
• desktop standardisation; and
• scalability.

 

GECOS reduces IT maintenance costs, lowers the cost for software licences, and increases the lifespan of PC workstations. “From experience, we know that IT management support is critical”, said the head of Andalusia’s free software team. “GECOS is easy to deploy and easy to use.”

Andalusia is making GECOS available under the EUPL licence. Since early this year, the code development is hosted on GitHub.

 

More information:

Presentation on GECOS
OpenExpo 2016 conference website
GECOS on GitHub
OSOR news item