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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."
When any manufacturer offers incredibly deep discounts like this, it's only so they can get their hooks into you. "Give them the razors, sell them the blades."
Trolling is a art,
Is there anyone out there who mantains a list of countries, cities, companies, &c who have made the move to Linux? If not...well, it would be useful for making Open Source pitches to prospective switch-ers in government, business, and the like. To be sure, Munich isn't alone, but how much company does the city have? I imagine something like one of those push-pin maps, sorted by distro, perhaps, and by the size of the switch (citywide, countrywide, corporate). Would be neat. Does it exist?
Note that it is still a preliminary decision. But as you can read from the article if it comes to the final decision there probably will be 43 (SPD and Gruene party) to 33 (CDU and FDP) votes for Linux. :-)
With OSS they can see the source and verify that it's frre of any backdoor. So they can protect their precious secrets about the Oktoberfest and what Bavarian beer is really made of.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
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
"How many shares shall I sell today?"
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:
Anti-Americanism is *everywhere*. I'm posting from your number one ally, the UK, and people here grimace when you mention the US.
Went to Germany got owned came back and started selling his MS shares....
You will have to pry my proprietary software $$$ from my cold dead hands!
I am surprised that this was offered. Microsoft is not out of the legal woods in Europe and a discount of this magnitude can almost only be construed as an attempt to leverage a monopoly situation. There can be no other rational business reason for this discount.
On an aside this is a huge blow for MS. The knowledge of the offered discount is probably worse than not getting the biz.
Help fight continental drift.
I think that, rather than anti-americanism, it is a pro-germany stance. How many OS companies are in Germany? How many MS programming jobs are in Germany? How much economic runoff is there going to be in Germany in both scenarios?
If the Germans go with Suse, they have programmers in the country, administrators in the company, technical support in the country. Conversely, should Germany go with Microsoft, they only have administrators.
It just makes sense to go with Suse in this case. The technical barriers can be overcome, and interoperability only comes into play based on install base. You replace the whole load, compatibility problems go the way of the Moose.
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
You're not right. Various parts of the German government, especially the federal government, are considering Linux since quite a while. Munich's recent decision is just another step.
The major argument have probably been the high costs of MS systems, which in this case have also been accompanied by a general matching of the open source ideals with the ideals of the current government of Munich (liberal and social).
Oh, and by the way: The decision clearly wasn't driven by anti-Americanism. You can see that because IBM got the assignment, which is, as you know, also an American company.
And just about your opinion that Anti-Americanism was quite big in Germany now: According to a recent poll 70% of all Germans still consider Americans to be their friends (the number didn't change due to the latest events). The Germans just have a different opinion about world policy, that's all.
Kind regards,
Chris
Comment from one sysadmin when MS offered us free software...
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!
The reason was that under no circumstances Microsoft wants any publicly visible large migration to happen. They would have paid Munich to run Windows if it wouldn't look too stupid!
Hell, they DID pay a lot for the Bundestag to stay on Windows at least on clients. They invested over 5 million $ for a PR-campaign, which translates to 1000$ for each of the Bundestag's computers.
Money is not the issue here.
The issue is a big organization showing the world that Linux is viable on the client.
The issue is that now a lot of applications are going to get ported to Linux and Linux will be an even better deal for other cities.
The issue is that now millions of people are going to communicate with OpenOffice file formats with their government.
...Microsoft is removing Munich from its next version of Flight Simulator.
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.
Before the war, there was an article on how the US was spying on countries to see how they would vote on the war resolution in the UN.
5 936,00.html
http://www.observer.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12239,90
Because of this Germany may also be moving away from software that may have potential secret backdoors written in for the NSA. No matter how much you get in rebates, it will never give a government the peace of mind of having compiled and inspected the code yourself.