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Munich Spurns Steve Ballmer's Software Rebates
Kurt Pfeifle writes "Steve Ballmer's recent trip to Munich to offer up to
90% rebates for the Microsoft Software Assurance and
Licenses was in vain. The ruling party of Germans biggest city and self-proclaimed 'technology capital' now decided
to migrate 14.000 workstations to Linux and an OSS
office suite. A study comparing the alternatives had
assigned 6218 (out of 10.000) points to Linux/OSS,
while the MS Windows platform only scored 5293. Babelfish translation of the latest newsticker story."
... Berlin is. Berlin has got a population of approximately 4 million, compared to Munich's approximate 1.5.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
as the article says, may 28th's the day.
(though it looks likely)
I had the same story submitted, along with a cleaned up translation, but it was rejected.
Anyways, here's the corrected translation, hope it helps.
Alex
Munich City Hall's SPD decides in favour of Linux
In today's meeting, the SPD faction of the Munich City Hall spoke out in
favour of using Linux on the PCs of the city's administration. Thus a
preliminary decision has been made, spokesman Jürgen Bühl said. The Munich
city administration migrates from Windows NT to Linux as the client
operation system and to an office suite from the Open Source domain.
The transition to Linux guarantees greater independence of suppliers and
greater "flexibility in the design of the future IT landscape of the city
administration". Additionally considerably lower cost are created.
Considering the tense budget situation in the states [Bavaria] capital, this
is an aspect that "supplements the strategic-qualitative advantages," says
the note from Munich.
Town councillor Christine Strobl, deputy leaders of the parliamentary group
and SPD spokeswoman in the personal and administrative committee, states:
"At the same time we provide for the further shaping of the technology
location Munich. For development and support the city will purchase
services. Thus we promote high-quality jobs in the region. In this context,
the Technical University of Munich's support during the migration underlines
the outstanding position of the science location Munich."
The migration of the 14,000 PC systems and Notebooks with over 16.000 users
is to take place "gently". In particular departments with extensive
specialized applications are to be able to plan on a long-term basis. The
final decision will be made by the city council in the plenary assembly on
May, 28th. For over one year SPD has held 35 of the 80 seats , the CSU 30,
the Greens 8 and the FDP 3. The other parties account for the remaining four
seats.
"We are fully conscious that our decision has a signal effect", says Strobl.
"That's why we have investigated the matter intensively." The consulting
firm Unilog initially rated the impoved offer from Microsoft as advantagous.
But open questions had remained and finally a new offer of IBM was present.
The new total evaluation of capital value and qualitative-strategic criteria
led to a draw between both solutions, continues the town councillor. As the
combination of Linux and an Open Source office suite
"qualitative-strategically clearly comes out in front, the SPD parliamentary
group decided for this option as the long-term direction".
Heisenberg may have been here
Munich will be the first city with over 1 Million inhabitants that is run by Linux
Heise has the story (Babelfish may help you)
Short facts are: The actual vote will occur on wednesday, but the SPD and Green party hold 43 out of 80 seats and have both committed to vote in favour of Linux to be used in the government of Munich, a city of about 2 million inhabitants.
The main reason for the migration was "strategic-quality reasons" and to support competition in software, not cost, which was said to be about the same for Linux and Windows.
About 14000 client computers are involved.
The used distribution will be SuSE, but IBM is also involved. OpenOffice will be used as office suite.
The earlier happenings are also quite exciting:
what Bavarian beer is really made of
The same thing as all German beer: barley, hops, water, yeast.
The actual law.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Under the Munich government's scoring system, one would generally expect scores around 6000, based on the extremely popular Novell system they had running for many years before they decided to "upgrade" to Windows after being given the hard-sell by MS. To score 6218 shows that Linux is well ahead of the curve; I believe that when they looked at a Solaris installation a couple of years ago, that managed slightly lower at about 6100 (I forget the exact number, but it was somewhere around that).
The most interesting figure is Windows at 5293. AFAIK, that is the lowest score they've ever given out. Certainly the lowest one I've seen that they published.
Go Linux!
Well these are 90% rebates. So basicly Germany will have to fork over to Microsoft the Full Price of the product. Then Microsoft hold on to the cash for a couple months and invests it and makes more money. Then after some time they give them 90% they gave them back. So say in this period of time they make 10% interest on the cash. Then they are still making a profit. You are assuming that Microsoft will just hold the cash and not do anything with it, which is furthest from the truth.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
when you click a few links, you get to the story about the actual study, which says:
Microsoft-Kunden müssen jetzt jährlich für Software-Lizenzen bezahlen. Bei den 10.000 städtischen PCs käme eine Summe von zirka 4,5 Millionen Euro zusammen.
in english:
Microsoft clients now have to pay a yearly software licence. with the 10000 PCs that would be around 4.5 million euro.
exactly why this article talks about 10000 computers, and the other one about 14000, i don't know
In the Heise article, the rebate offered by Ballmer is not specified. In fact, the details of the offer seem to be secret. The 90% number seems to originate from earlier discussions (not linked to Munich) about an internal Microsoft order not to lose to Linux at any cost.
I know most of you know this already, but for those who don't the USA is one of just a few countries that use a point only to seperate whole numbers from decimal numbers, in many countries, including Germany if memory serves, you use the point as an American would a comma in a number, and a comma to seperate whole and decimal parts of a number.
Little Brother, watching the watchers
The format for Open Office files are OPEN you dimwit. There's no "lock in" here. Read about at http://xml.openoffice.org/ before before posting nonesence.
Likewise. from the article:
Sounds to me like you'd be better off saving it as an RTF then as a MSXML file. Save yourself 100kb.
I'm very interested in the non-speed problems your folks have been encountering. OpenOffice 1.1 beta 2 is out; it would be good to know what issues still remain. Perhaps a few of them can be addressed before 1.1 final is out. See my page on the subject. If you have any documents that can't be opened in OO1.1beta2, please send me a copy, I'll light a fire under the developers. Or file your own issues if you're motivated.
I would have thought Mexico City has a stronger claim to this title.
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
No, that's not true. A couple of other cities running Linux:
By the way, a lot is happening in developing countries. On May 22nd, I had the opportunity to attend the publication seminar of the interesting Free as in Education research report by Niranjan Rajani, sponsored by the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs. Other writers published in the study are Cesar Brod (Brazil), Frederick Noronha (India) and Nico Coetzee (South Africa). Also attending the seminar, among many others, was Edgar Villanueva (Congressman, Peru), who sent the famous response letter to Microsoft, giving a talk on "Legal and Other Experiences in Promoting FLOSS in Peru".
But cities are not the only ones interested in Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS), of course. For example, what do you like the government of South Africa open source software web site at http://www.oss.gov.za/? Their Government OSS Strategy Document (in PDF format) could be interesting reading.
Trusted Computing FAQ | Free Dawit Isaak!
You mean the Unix-style copy-paste that often doesn't allow you to copy & paste information between various Linux applications, unlike Windows?
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." - Oscar Wilde
You're so obviously a n00b who's excited about using something different.
Linux is getting there, but it's not as good as Windows on the client side. Not yet anyway.
Multiple desktops, UNIX cut and paste, yeah they're neat, but after the newness wears off then you'll see.
Use Linux for a year or two then go back and try Windows. You'll be surprised at some of the crap you put up with in Linux. And don't get me started on the slowness of KDE... ugh.
Linux will get there, and things like this Germany deal help but it ain't there yet.