Servicio Autonomo de Propiedad Intelectual, MILCO, Venezuela
Using exclusively Debian from 2004 in all services, migrating desktops in 2006, collaborating with the Free Software Community in Venezuela.
The Autonomous Service of Intellectual Property (SAPI) is a government office in Venezuela which registers trademarks and invention patents in the country (SAPI doesn't accept patents on software, nor hardware-embedded software, nor human beings) and generally works to improve the peoples' quality of life through free knowledge diffusion.
In 2004, before the presidential decree on Free Software use was approved in Venezuela, SAPI started migrating their servers to GNU/Linux. We decided to use Debian over several other options including Gentoo, Red Hat/Fedora and Ubuntu because of the robustness, scalability and general ease-of-use for the daily administration.
Servers migrated included HP ProLiant ML 110/350/570 servers, a Compaq Alphaserver DS20 and several IBM ThinkCentre. Services provided include external mail (supporting secure mail transactions and webmail), transparent proxy, firewalls, IDS, web-apps pool, DNS, webserver, databases server, SAN and several other applications. Currently SAPI is starting the migration of 150 desktops (mostly IBM Thinkcentres and Compaq Evo's) after a one-year term of Free Software use over proprietary platforms (namely, OpenOffice.org and Mozilla solutions) and one HP 9000 server running a 4GL-written program in Informix and a Compaq 3000 holding a directory.
SAPI is trying to pay back at the Free Software Community by hosting the servers for SOLVE (Software Libre Venezuela) several community events (like the Caracas Trollparty 2006) and a mirror of Free Software applications. Plans include a CD with Free Software for free selling in the streets and the release of all systems in a Subversion server.
