Europe's Microsoft Alternative Region in Spain Abandons Windows, Embraces Linux By Ariana Eunjung Cha Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, November 3, 2002; Page A01 MERIDA, Spain -- Luis Millan Vazquez de Miguel, a college professor turned politician, is succeeding where multibillion-dollar, multinational corporations have failed. He is managing to unseat Microsoft Corp. as the dominant player in the software industry, at least in his little part of the world. Vazquez de Miguel is the minister of education, science and technology in a western region of Spain called Extremadura, a mostly rural expanse of olive trees and tiny towns with 1.1 million inhabitants. In April, the government launched an unorthodox campaign to convert all the area's computer systems, in government offices, businesses and homes, from the Windows operating system to Linux, a free alternative. Already, Vazquez de Miguel said, more than 10,000 desktop machines have been switched, with 100,000 more scheduled for conversion in the next year. Organizers regard the drive as a low-cost way to bring technology to the masses in the impoverished region. "We are the future," he said. "If Microsoft doesn't become more open and generous with its code, people will stop using it and it will disappear." Extremadura is being closely watched by Linux enthusiasts and Microsoft for how it manages the transition. Such efforts are likely to become the next front in the battle to steal market share from Microsoft, now that a federal judge has approved a settlement in its antitrust case in the United States. For now, many denizens of Extremadura find themselves having to use both operating systems, if for no other reason than to deal with an outside world that still relies heavily on Microsoft. But the campaign suggests that nationalism could play a powerful role in blunting the software company's expansion, as nation-states grow wary of becoming too dependent on the know-how of a single American corporation. Linux is one of several operating systems available free on the Internet. Programmers from around the world teamed up to develop the original program, and then private companies and others adapted the work to create their own unique flavors of the open-source software. Linux distributions these days go by a variety of names, including Red Hat, Suse and Mandrake. In Extremadura, the regional government paid a local company $180,000 to cobble together a set of freely available software. The resulting disk contains a suite of programs that includes an operating system, word processor, spreadsheet and other applications. The government also invested in a development center that is creating customized software for accounting, tracking hospital patients and crop-yield management that the agency will distribute free to citizens. So far, the government has produced 150,000 discs with the software, and it is distributing them in schools, electronics stores, community centers and as inserts in newspapers. It has even taken out TV commercials about the benefits of free software. Others are taking notice. A Spanish computer magazine began distributing the Linux disk that Extremadura created and a publisher is in the process of printing a book about the effort that will double as an instruction manual. Several of the region's major distributors of computers have agreed to pre-install the Extremadura Linux instead of Windows. For many, the Extremadura project symbolizes the seriousness of assaults on Microsoft by governments around the world. The European Economic Commission is promoting it as a model for the rest of the world, and officials from governments as far away as New Zealand and Peru have inquired about duplicating the region's efforts. There are now nearly 70 laws or policy proposals pending in two dozen countries that would force or at least encourage governments to use open-source software. This year Germany said it signed a contract to use Linux in many of its government systems; other significant economic powers such as the United Kingdom, China, Italy and Brazil are studying the matter. Microsoft has argued for years that free software is inferior to commercially made products because it requires a high level of technical expertise to make it work. But such arguments have grown less persuasive as corporations and governments have taken on the responsibility of creating stable versions of the free software. International Business Machines Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co. and others are developing Linux-based services, focusing primarily on the corporate market. "Linux has gone from a graduate student's project to a major force," Giga Information Group analysts Stacey Quandt and Bob Zimmerman wrote in a recent report. Juantomas Garcia, a programmer who has been lobbying the Spanish government to expand its use of free software, said such software is leaving the province free of "hackers and geeks and is migrating to a real tool for everyone." To Keep People Home Extremadura is best known as the birthplace of many of the conquistadors -- Francisco Pizarro, Hernan Cortés and Hernando de Soto among them -- who made their mark after leaving the place. Vazquez de Miguel, too, fled in his early years. He went to the United States to get his doctorate and worked as an organic chemist doing AIDS and cancer research before a friend convinced him that he could do more good for his people by returning and taking a job as a professor at the local university. Vazquez de Miguel, 52, says that by empowering people to use computers through Linux, he will be able to stop the outward migration and create new industries in Extremadura. Like many Linux advocates, he speaks about the software in emotional terms. "Connectivity and literacy" equals "equality and liberty," he said. Microsoft regards such talk as too dramatic and distracting. It is software, after all, not war, company officials said. It is far more productive in their view to talk about the technical aspects of Windows vs. Linux. "There's been too much theology and not enough economic analysis in the debate so far," said Bradford L. Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, who oversees the company's global lobbying team. "Consider that there's a lot more to the total cost and value of a product than the initial offering somebody might give you," Smith said. For instance, it is often expensive to find support services for free software, whereas such help comes bundled with the purchase of Windows. And companies like Microsoft have a vested interest in updating their products; that's not necessarily so with free software. "Somebody might give you a free puppy this afternoon," Smith said, "but you're going to have to go buy dog food in the morning." To eliminate some of the headaches, the Extremadura government paid Andago, a Spanish company, to take one of the free versions of Linux on the Web and make it suitable for public distribution. Organizers called their version "Linex," combining the names of Linux and Extremadura. The software has become so popular that it has been downloaded more than 55,000 times from www.linex.org by people outside Extremadura.