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."

Comments

Re:The problems

[t0ny]

I almost soiled my pants reading that. There is noting "perfected" coming from MS. I work at a fortune 500 with 140,000+ employess. MS came in and told all the PHB's that they just HAD to upgrade our Exchange server to Exchange 2003 running on MS Windows 2003. What a nightmare. The server is constantly going down, and our corporate email is not dependable. These problems cannot be blamed on our IT staff since several of MS's people have been here a few WEEKS trying to get it running smoothly.

I question that last part. A key point in any project is being able to roll back; sounds like somebody fucked up. Also, any IT shop which thinks its going to be all cool because they are an early adopter deserves to be completely fired. Sounds like they just didnt care: dont blame MS for your company's bad project management skills. They didnt force anybody to upgrade.

Also, its really easy to upgrade, as long as you arent flying by the seat of your pants and thinking you are going to migrate thousands of users over a weekend. What most of you yahoos dont understand is that the majority of the work should be done BEFORE you start doing even a single step in the migration: testing, planning, research. Ya, its tedious and boring, but thats the job; if you dont like it, become a pro wrestler.

Now do you really think IBM will let that happen? Of course not. With Novell in the picture for SuSE, they will be there too to make sure that it gets finished. There is no such thing as a large scale migration of anything without problems. Migrating with MS's own products to newer versions can be a nightmare. We have had tons of issues doing large upgrades in addition to the one I pointed out above.

Again, I can personally attest that this isnt true. Ive migrated many places either to NT, or from NT to Active Directory. If you know what you are doing, its pretty painless. Sounds like the guys at your company dont know what they are doing, and are too stupid to contract with people who do.

Yeah, you sound like you have done a lot of large scale migrations. There are only so many senarios you can plan for in advance. After that you just need a little luck and good developers/admins working for you.

I sure have. And from what I read, they didnt have enough time/money/intelligence to do a planned conversion. So what did they do? A non-planned conversion. Really fucking smart, and they didnt test jack shit. Like I said, Germans just like to play; very few professionals, by US standards. Most are just glorified hobbyists. Thats why anywhere with real IT pros wont convert to Linux; for a government I guess its ok, because A. nobody is going to get fired, and B. they arent going to go out of business. Government work is a whole other realm of incompetance; I have so many stories to tell.

In about 1 year, all the positive press will come out and MS will be scrambling to play it down and MS weeines will be making excuses.

LOL, yeah, right. They are going to bulldoze their way into a 'successful' migration, and forcefeed Linux to all their employees. I'll bet if you interview anybody who actaully does any work there in one year, they will have tons of complaints.

But you wont see those interviews, you will only see IBM saying "Mission Accomplished!". Makes me think of GWB standing in a flightsuit on the deck of an aircraft carrier. We got it done! Truth be damned!

Re:The problems

[t0ny]

We have a custom COM object that talks to the Exchange server to get calendar/email for users to display on our corporate portal.

So your original statement was misleading. Its locking up because you are doing non-standard things, not because you are doing a plain vanilla Exchange 2003 server.

Well, MS comes in and says if you upgrade now, you will save money, if you wait 2 years, it will be almost twice as much. That is pretty much forcing the upgrade.

Come on, now you are making stuff up. And, even were that the case, they still arent forcing you to do anything. Thats like saying Jewel is forcing me to buy oranges because they are on sale this week.

blah blah blah... I guess none of these companies have _anyone_ that knows what they are doing. Maybe they should all hire you since you are the only It person in the world that knows how to run things?

You are talking about servers, not desktops. There is a difference between running a Linux server farm and a 1000 desktop linux network. So point out some companies which have converted all their users to Linux, and come back and talk. M'kay?

Umm, you can interview users at just about _any_ company NOW and here tons of complaints about MS software, so what is your point?

I hear very few complaints about Windows. Office, however, I have very many complaints on. They are getting better, though, but I still think Word Perfect really dropped the ball; they had a well designed program, but technically it was way to buggy (I was at a company which did an early mass-migration to Office97, same story. Users loved it, tech support hated it. Tech support buys the software and sets policy: guess who won?).

Because we all know just how "honest" the MS PR machine is right?

A lot more honest that the Slashdot zealotry, thats for sure.