Slashdot Mirror
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."
If there is one place that will be the turning point for OSS and Linux, it will be Europe and Asia. Wait: I guess that isn't one place! :)
MOUNT TAPE U1439 ON B3, NO RING
Interesting that all the problems are interoperability with proprietary software. There haven't been any problems with the people using linux.
..i dont think there is the need to start making up big stories out of this. Of course this kind of migration takes a lot of time, specially for the training.
I really hope that everything proceeds as planned.. a project like this is important for the public opinion of Free Software and Linux...
I think part of the problem with migration is that in many instances many people who use linux and love did it because they were disenchanted with proprietary OSes for personal reasons, and these guys are trying to migrate for a multitude of reasons, including monetary ones. Add on to that the fact you're retraining thousands of people, and you've got one heck of a mess on your hands.
Nonetheless, hopefully they persevere.
Wired has a story that details some of the difficulties that Project LiMux seems to be experiencing in Munich. Including financial and technical issues.
What this experiment will have to do is prove that Linux can do it for less money and be more efficient than proprietary solutions such as Windows.
Studies on open-source security, desktop ergonomics and the software components' stability and compatibility with other applications will be included in the process.
For my money, I would have bet on OS X providing a better system from these perspectives.
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.
This will most likely be of huge importance in maintaining this transition, but more support may be needed in bringing custom applications from Windows to Linux.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Munich Council Press Statement (translated)
Stefan Hauf
Presseamt Muenchen
http://www.muenchen.de
Munich goes with Open Source Software
The city of Munich will use Linux as the operating system for their 14,000 PC clients as well as open source software for their office applications.
With the votes of SPD, Alliance 90/Die Gruenen/Pink list, FDP, OEDP, REP and Party of Democratic Socialism, the town assembly followed Mayor Christian Ude's proposal.
An appraisal given by the city in order to evaluate the pro and cons of a conversion of the present urban standard "Windows NT/Microsoft Office" alternatively on "Windows XP/Microsoft Office" or "Linux/Open Office" comes to the conclusion that there is a clear strategic-qualitative projection/lead for the open source solution.
Mayor Ude: "With this trend-setting decision Munich secures itself as the first major city to have a major portion of its IT infrastructure be supplier-independent and sets also a clear indication of more competition in the software market. The prehistory of this decision already showed that a competitive situation helps the formation of prices pretty well. "
Regarding the decision, mayor Ude pointed out that this is not a decision for a specific IT partner, but a strategic positioning based on a noncommittal market evaluation.
Until spring 2004, a detailed concept of implementation and migration will be developed. Based on the results of this evaluation, the city council will decide how the migration to Linux will take place.
IBM Germany Statement
May 28th 2003
The city council of Munich today made a key decision to deploy the open source operating system Linux instead of alternative operating systems. This initiative will see Germany's third largest city migrate 14,000 desktop and notebook computers to Linux. Their objective is to deploy information technology that stimulates more commercial and technological flexibility at a lower cost to the public sector. Although the council has not made a decision on its choice of vendor, Linux distributor SuSE AG and IBM Germany will be participating in the resulting contract bid.
Walter Raizner, Country General Manager IBM Germany: "In the public sector in Germany we have seen a variety of new implementations of open standards-based software such as Linux. And worldwide, more than 75 IBM government customers - including agencies in France, Spain, UK, Australia, Mexico, the United States and Japan - have now embraced open computing and Linux to save costs, consolidate workloads, increase efficiency and enact e-government transformation. With Munich's decision, one thing is clear - it's open season for open computing. Linux represents freedom and flexibility. This is essential in e-government - they need more flexibility to serve their constituencies better and faster, and freedom of choice to do it at less cost to the public. Munich is leading the way."
Massive by Design
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
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.
That's an initial difference of $12.5 million, or $892 per system. They say that they'll make it up in the long run, but they must really mean long term.
I love linux as much as the next guy, but the duty of this agency is to provide the cheapest solution to server their constinuents. This whole project smells to me like the council had a beef with Microsoft, and allowed that bias to lead to a poor business decision. Now they're trying to justify it so they don't have to admit that they made a mistake.
There are probably organizations that are ready for a wholesale ms to linux migration, but this doesn't look to be one. All of their staff have to be retrained, the price is more expensive, and a considerable custom windows application base seem to make this a bad idea. The linux community can only be hurt by a square peg linux solution being shoved into a circle microsoft hole.
Microsoft is loving this, and preparing marketing material right now that shows that replacing Microsoft with Linux doesn't make business sense. Business realities, not propoganda, should dictate migration to linux. Forcing the issue (as it appears they are doing) only hurts linux in the long run.
Here in Canada, most government departments and agencys are either undertaking, or considering the migration from Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 95 to Windows 2000. I once added up the total cost of Windows NT 4 Workstation licences, NT 4 Server licenses, NT 4 CALs, and MS Office 2000 licenses for the government agency that I worked for (~20000 pcs served by ~500 NT 4 servers) and the figure wasn't pretty. A signifigant portion of the operating costs for many government offices goes to buying access to Microsoft's IP; I would like to see my tax dollars used in a more productive manner. Kudos to Munich and best wishes that their problems will be overcome shortly.
An eye for an eye... leaves the whole world blind.
Volunteer to man an IRC channel.
Write some documentation.
Pretty up some already written documentation.
Answer questions on the newsgroups without griping or insulting people.
If you are German write the politicians praising them for their courage in choosing this solution and vote for them in the next election.
If you are not German then write to them anyway and see if it's legal for you to send them some money. Even five or ten dollars would be a highly effective symbolic gesture.
War is necrophilia.
--Mark
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
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)
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
All the damn time I'm reading "Linux isn't ready for the desktop".
I'musing Linux on the desktop.
It works fine. Does this mean I'm doing something wrong? I mean, it's not meant to work, is it?
Linux is ready for the desktop, as shown by the countless people using it on the desktop. Hell, you're at Slashdot, look around you...
The real issue is that Linux isn't ready for mass consumption in the same way that Windows is, but that's largely because people have had Microsoft stuffed down their throats for... ooh... 20 years? Something like that. People have issues with Linux because they're so used to doing everything the Microsoft way. People are taught that computers run Windows, and for 90% of people there is no other OS. Most people wouldn't know what an OS even is! It's inconveivable for computers to run any other way.
There are distro's combatting this though. I mean, first up there's obvious candidate's like Lindows; but things like Redhat (Fedora, whatever) and Mandrake are getting extremely user friendly. For the average end user a decent RedHat install will do most things - e-mail, internet, Office type stuff. It's only the hardcore minority among us that need more complex stuff and thus spend sleepless nights tweaking the kernel, trying to get Wine to run properly, trawling the net for those obscure drivers... But most people never even think about that type of stuff
Long story short - Linux is ready for the desktop, but people just need a bit of re-education to get their head round it, same as a lot of people need education to use Windows in the first place. A lot of end users need training to use Windows in the first place, and then need training with each new version of Windows, so training in Linux shouldn't be too much harder.
Here endeth the lesson.Linux is a pretty tough change. Gradual migration is necessary for continuty of operation, so you must work with interoperability.
I have set up in the past a Linux intranet servce in a Windows IT environment, precisely because I thought that it would be "better" in the long run to work with Tomcat/Apache/Linux than WebLogic/WebSphere/Windows.
The basic set-up was very easy, as always. But soon we got into things related to security & authorizations, for which we needed to interface with Active Directory... I'm glad we had some time to do this right. "Active Directory access from Java over LDAP with Kerberos authentication to a Win2K domain controller" is very sparsely and partially documented, and then what you can find on the net relates to earlier versions of software, other distros... A lot of testing and trying with some very good people on the task, and finally we got it off the ground. It's not the kiddie-script grade stuff or burn-a-distro-and-enjoy story we like to hear.
This was in a top-tier R&D lab, with research-grade time on our hands. Basically our core business. Now I'm not sure the municipal office of Munich can do these kinds of things themselves... And if they hire consultants to do it for them, you can be pretty sure they'll take advantage of their unawareness.
In that particular case, we got for a short period of time a MS Consulting dude to help us. The poor guy knew less about MS' own products than us! Now imagine the same guy "advising" the Munich city office on how to better interoperate with Microsoft's products.
Here's the timeline
1- City of Munich goes Linux
2- City of Munich realizes during the migration it will need to interoperate with Windows
3- City of Munich to MS: one more thing, guys... before we ditch you, how do we interoperate with your products exactly? No, not for us (we don't do, we make others do), but we need to tell our IT subcontractors.
4- IT subcontractors blame bad interop on MS, who blames it back on these sloppy-Linux-hackers--and meanwhile, computers kaputt
5- ???
6- One good "TCO" sell point for MS?
Over 75% of all IT projects fail totally, is late or over budget. Most of them are not Linux projects.
So, Microsoft is in no position to gloat over any Linux setbacks in Munich.
This is a problem that probably has more to do with leadership, management methods than with any specific technology like Linux or Windows.
Even if the up front cost for switching to Linux turns out to be higher than expected, it will probably be cheaper in the long run. Using Linux they will be in much better control of their future upgrade costs.
Not to mention that, money spent on Linux stays in the local economy instead of feeding a foreign company.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
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!