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Linux in Munich Followup
Rican writes "Wired has a story that details some of the difficulties that Project LiMux seems to be experiencing in Munich. Including financial and technical issues. On the positive side it looks like despite these setbacks they are continuing with the project and have a positive attitude about its completion. Let's keep our fingers crossed and do what we can to support this monumental effort that will benefit the whole Open Source Community."
Wherever it is to succeed, it will need something established and stable. Debian, RedHat, SuSE. Flavors like Lindows will whither and give us bad publicity throughout the world. Robertson and his buddy Carmony spout off tons of crap, announcing vaporware but never delivering.
What we REALLY need is a strong back end, stable and secure, with apps on the desktop. That will bring the masses.
Lindows Steals Copyrighted Art and Promotes Porn
The difference is that Microsoft has already spent the money to test and perfect the migration path. Munich is spending that money all by their lonesome.
Were I a taxpayer there, I would be raising hell over the stupid waste of time and money.
From article: In late December the Munich city council demanded a full breakdown of the projected financial costs of the project, including the costs involved in retraining city employees accustomed to working with Windows 98, 95 and 3.1. The council has also requested a detailed migration schedule.
The cost analysis and schedule is to be presented to the council by May at the latest, according to council reports. The city will then decide how to proceed with the planned migration from Windows.
Seems it would have been MUCH smarter to get a cost analysis done BEFORE they started DOING the project!! Oh well, I used to work for a German company. Their IT guys always were going off half cocked, thinking up ways to justify playing with technology. We always had an uphill battle to get them to leave stuff alone, or to not wildly inflate projects with goofy shit. Seems Munic had the same problems, except since they are all German, there is nobody to be a voice of reason.
I predict a failed migration, millions of euros in lost money and productivity, and a scandal involving lots of high paid consultants 'talking' somebody influential into pushing this as a good idea.
But instead of paying $23.7 million for the Microsoft solution, Munich's city council opted to spend roughly $35.7 million to switch to open source, saying that the higher price would be offset by lower costs and more flexibility in licensing fees and software choices over the long run.
Good ol' Germany. Always thinking short term, and never looking at the big picture.
But according to Computerwoche and other reports, the city lacks the funds to invest in the planned testing and development of an open-source solution. IBM and Germany-based Linux distributor SuSE are expected to help offset the costs of the migration by supplying technical support and conducting some of the studies that the Munich city council has requested.
Because these two companys have just as much at stake with seeing this migration actaully happen as the ill-advised city council.
Its a shame the council didnt think of network security, and even more a shame that their technical advisors wanted to play rather than thinking of what was best. No matter what OS you are going to use, gutting your network is never a good idea. Even worse is that they went and did it without adequate planning.
Reports in Computerwoche also stated that local vendors who currently code applications for the city were experiencing problems in developing applications for the open-source operating system, since they are more familiar with Windows than Linux.
Yep, another one of those hidden costs nobody is ever willing to tell you about. Another funny thing is that those Germans werent even good at writing Windows applications. Their apps were buggy, poorly designed, and usually couldnt even be run over a network. We started doing WinNT on the desktop, and most of their apps couldnt even run on NT. Heck, many of them were still programming like the apps was for Win3.11!
Munich may opt to install an emulation program on city workers' computers that will allow Windows applications to run on Linux.
So, now they need to run their Windows software thru a flakey emulator. Smoothe move! This is also going to jack up their support costs, offsetting any savings in software licensing. But on the bright side, IBM can learn from their expensive mistakes, so at least a US company will benefit.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
They're migrating from early 1990's software. It's not "big bad MS forced migration, blah blah blah". I wonder what they're running Win 3.1 on? Probably not P4's. Apparently they've been stingy for years and now they need to spend a wad of cash no matter what system they go to. How is this Microsofts fault?