Wines maker makes good with open source

For some reason Australian wine maker De Bortoli Wines has been getting good media coverage for the last few months on its use of open source software. Maybe they have a good PR firm behind them or perhaps its just a good open source story, which it is.

The Australian Financial Review covered them this week ( 19 Apr 2005, p.36) but you can read about them in ComputerWorld (7 Dec 2004) and also the Australian (22 Mar 2005). Going against the Citrix thin-client trend, De Bortoli are using bootable linux DVD's and USB drives so that PC's can keep working despite communication and networking problems. They are also using Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice on Windows machines. Its not all smooth sailing of course and they haven't completely dumped Windows, however its still a good example of how an SME can take advantage of open source software.