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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."
why all the fuss? good question, i think...
/. comments...
<conspiracy>
maybe it benefits "someone", to make a fuss out of this. so now they can say "SEE! we told you it was no good!"...
</conspiracy>
we just cant really trust the media anymore.. i just trust
I got a scarier one for you.
:-O
I am reading a proposal from CATSA (the Canadian version of TSA) right now. They are an ENTIRELY MS shop...desktops, servers, directory etc. Not only is that scary, the RFP is to create "secured" web apps that will share personal information, CAD drawing of airports and check points, counts of people passing through those check points and lists of the stuff that has been confiscated between all 89 Canadian airports and CATSA head office in Ottawa.
They want this to run on their existing infrastructure.
The information is CLEARLY classified info (that is, it will be SECRET or even TOP SECRET). There is no way this stuff should be any where near an MS system except maybe for a desktop, and even then, it should be accessed through Moz instead of IE.
I find it absolutely outrageous that MS will make money while putting our national security at risk. I hope they can be convinced to at least store the data on Trusted Solaris....
Since the RFP is still live, you will understand why I post ANON...
I'd like to know how an agency so clearly centered around security has an MS server infrastructure in the first place. I know CSE (Communications Security Establishment - our NSA) and the RCMP don't use Windows except on the desktop, why should CATSA.
Somebody suure sold them a bill of goods.
But instead of paying $23.7 million for the Microsoft solution...
Don't forget though that Microsofts initial proposal was $36.6m! Ballmer flew out there do demonstrate how keen MS was to keep Munich's business. MS then subsequentally cut the cost to $31.9m and then finally $23.7m.
A similar thing happened in the UK where Newham Council in London considered migrating away from a MS environment to a Open Source environment. A Linux based desktop (not sure about backend stuff) was designed, built and trialed. MS sponsored an "independent" consultancy firm to do a TCO Investigation which, surprisingly, found that the MS Solution would have a lower TCO. The most interesting aspect of this case is that it became quite high profile in the UK and it soon became apparent that MS where very eager to secure the deal. However, in no small part due to the media exposure this story received, MS where given two choices; either aggresively discount their proposal or risk a humiliating defeat (remember the "Under no circumstances lose to Linux" memo?). Newham Council eventually chose to stick with Microsoft, citing the difficulties of getting a reliable Exchange 5.5 client for Linux, but not before they had secured a deal that was apparently an order of magnitude better than the deal that the UK Govt. has! Not bad for a poverty-stricken East-London Council!
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.
This is concerning special administrative software that has to be (frequently) updated when regulations change. As I read elsewhere, vendors are not willing (or reluctant) to come up with LINUX solutions.
A chance for startups, I guess.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
I am working in Munich for a large publishing house in IT and what I heard (partly, though, from munichs Microsoft workers) the whole project isn't doing well. When I met a MS employee lately he had that evil grin when he said: "If there is one thing that won't bring OpenSource on the Desktop it will be the Munich migration! They [the Munich IT department] are rather incompetent, they are currently even trying to run Winapps inside VmWare, and they don't have the manpower to get the thing flying."
I am not sure how far he really is into the subject but from what I know from living in munich for 20 years now is that the city is cutting back on finances, and that there was more than one project that wasn't really thought through before making the decision. I really, really hope they can handle it, but the latest relaunch of www.muenchen.de, the cities new online-portal, was a catastrophe (a friend of mine worked at the project) and if that's any indication than they might be in trouble...I don't have any inside information, I am just stating what I learned from watching the "Rathaus" through the years as a munich citizen...
Lispy
Are we comparing apples and apples? The Microsoft figure was just for the licensing (from all indications), not counting the pain and agony of migrating 14,000 PCs to XP and 2003, a process that I promise would not be painless. Not to mention the four or five (or more) "critical updates" and patches in mid-project. The IBM SUSE figure was a guesstimate at the whole project. Wouldn't you have to add a huge deployment chunk to the MS figure for a fair comparison?
"If no one tilts at windmills, the damn things will take over the world!"- christian simpleman
Most people I know resist change. In my shop we upgraded from Word 6.0 to Word 95 (years ago) and so we rewrote all of the Word Macros from the old scripting language to the new VBA.
We tried to keep the look and feel exactly the same. But we had complaints from users about things as trivial as button sizes. The application didn't look the same. And of course anything that goes wrong after a change is blamed on the change even if it is totally unrelated. It's just human nature I guess.
Anyhow, we spent a lot of wasted time during the convention dealing with bogus user complaints. It just goes with the territory. You have to do it to keep the users happy and you should do it with a smile on your face.
This change was no where nearly as drastic as switching from Windows to Linux. I can just imagine what the poor IT people are going through. All I can say is: Hang in there. Do what you need to do to keep the users as happy as possible. Things will get better and once use to Linux they won't want to go back to Windows anymore.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Give me a ssh connection to some servers and tell me what you need. I would be happy to configure machines for them.... total cost 0$ . Give me a couple servers and a stack of cd's and I can show you how to bring online 500 clients in one day.
If you had the typical windows IT shop they would attempt this by trying to deploy linux as you would windows which is not the way to do it. Linux in a business or government environment should always be deployed thin client. Remember the MS deployment model is geared towards "selling licenses" and not efficency.
Any open source user is a friend of mine!
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