Details of Linux-in-Munich Deal Revealed

An anonymous reader writes "USA Today is running a piece about the lengths which Microsoft went to in order not to lose the government of Munich's account to a Linux-based proposal from SuSE. Interesting to see how these types of contracts are structured, and just what Microsoft is willing to give up to prevent losing to Linux."

Comments

Re:quality and value

[NecroPuppy]

Actually, if you read the article (What? on Slashdot?!?) you'll see that Microsoft's final offer didn't come in soon enough to be reviewed by the Munich Council's tech/contract experts, and that they didn't take the offer seriously.

Some background information

[fxj]

The decision was based on a study made by a consulting firm in which the upgrade solution to winxp was cheaper than a pure linux solution on the time base of 5 years ! In the longer run the study claims that linux is cheaper than m$. also a solution with vmware was compared which was the cheapest of all ! The study claimed that for the pure linux solution they would have to buy a lot of new peripherials (card readers, printer etc) which makes the linux solution more expensive. a big problem for the winxp solution was that they would have to buy a lot of new hardware (new processors, more ram) which they wouldnt have to using linux. a short version of the study is available online:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/anw-2 7.06.03-0 03/
(sorry in german, use the fish)
the study is here:
http://www.muenchen.de/aktuell/clientstudie _kurz.p df

Re:$39 .5 million for Linux package. Linux is fre

[cranos]

Umm they are probably paying for the cost of support and rolling over all their machines (14,000 I think).

Major IT purchasers like to have someone they can rely on for support so they pay for it. The other cost would be the storage and distribution costs allowed under the GPL.

Re:Linux used in political campaign

[Holger Blasum]

IIRC political discourse (be it on slashdot or in an election) was meant to be about things that matter?
This comprises technology and its economic/social
implications.

Moreover, Lochner-Fischer (the candidate who had
printed the poster) actually has been a C application
programmer, so she understands the issue and her
stance in this is credible (I also saw her personally).

For bipartisan balance:
Former Fortran programmer posing with Jon Maddog Hall, also a good thing.

Re:Linux competitiveness.

[dspeyer]

Just because Microsoft stops supporting a product doesn't mean the cracker community does. IIRC, MS recently refused to patch a major vulnerability in NT4 saying that it wasn't worth the effort so close to end-of-life. Since it's closed source, no one else has patched it either. Security (especially for Microsoft, but really everywhere) is a race between the crackers ripping things apart and the patchers putting them back together again. When the patchers stop running, the software starts looking like swiss chees.

And that doesn't even get into compatibility issues....