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Munich Votes for Linux Migration Plan
JoScherl writes "The German news site Heise reports (German, Babelfish version) that the city council of Munich (3rd biggest city in Germany, 1.3 million inhabitants) has voted for the detailed concept of the LiMux - Linux for Munich (German, Babelfish version) project with votes from all parties except the CSU (Christlich Soziale Union, christion social union). With this decision the 13,000 Desktops and Servers of the city administration will be migrated to Linux. CSU, which has just won the European elections, said they won't support Linux since its Feierabendprogrammierer ('leisure-time coders') would destroy Munich's IT-landscape (Microsoft Germany and other big companies are located in and around Munich) and they also fear that the personnel would have problems with learning how to use OpenOffice and other migrated systems. The migration plan has the following steps: This year the Windows NT desktops get OpenOffice and Mozilla as their default office and browsing suite. In 2005 and 2006 the systems will be migrated to Linux, with some applications running on Windows application servers. In 2008 all applications should run native on Linux."
...of those bargaining things where they are just trying to get a better deal from Microsoft?
Is IBM going to donate the services (as in lots of IT help for free, again) of a large crew of techs to assist in the transition like they did for the earlier part?
Well, they will first be trained in OOo and mozzy while still running windows. Then a few years down the track comes linux. I would expect that in a few years, linux will be a lot easier to use than it is now. Even now, if you are given a linux desktop box that has already been set up, its easy to use.
Can your karma go above being Excellent?
Linux fans had better hope that this goes well because if it doesn't you can guarantee that Microsoft will be hopping up and down screaming "I told you so".....or "Ich tolden youze sozen" (in German)
Those are all pretty much platform-independent. Interacting with shared files and printers? Pretty much the same on either platform "\\server01\accounting" is the same in Windows or Linux.
These people won't be installing hardware drivers or trying to get the latest game to run or tweaking .conf files. Relax.
Fact is, virtually none of my 150 users know how to use Windows, so why should Linux be any different? Its the applications that users care about.
In fact, one of the biggest excuses for them not trying is "i'm afraid I'll break something".
If they're not logged on with a root account, they can't really break anything, so if anything, Linux will be easier for them to learn, too :)
Besides, the re-training thing is just as bad when switching from Windows 98/NT to Windows XP anyway....
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
European companies buying for their European offices pay with (currently strong) Euro, so it's not neccessarily meaningful to convert it to USD. Also, consider that migration project budgets typically include hours and buffer - 2000 Euro per machine isn't that unreasonable, especially if you take for granted that it's worth it to escape the "MS tax."
In an office environment, most workers are using a limited number of apps. Even further, they are using them in limited ways to perform a limited number of tasks.
We recently migrated from W95 to a locked down SOE of XP, with commensurate migration to Office XP. 3000 people in my local area. 50 000 across the state. It was (and still is) a very big job (mostly) ably handled by the IT staff.
Users' biggest complaint? They can't customise their desktop picture or use their own screensaver.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
Do you have any idea how government / business works when implementing / changing new technology? 4 years is actually a remarkably quick time to change ALL software over to Linux.
So they have decided to do this. Firstly, they have to determine what problems they will encounter. What apps might they need that they may have difficulties finding under Linux? Code may have to be migrated from ASP / whatever. Excel / word macros rewritten. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Implementing a radical change in a very large organisation goes beyond just deciding "hey, Ive got this really cool idea, lets just format all the hard drives and install Linux".
Even training, each hour the employees are in training is not only costing for the training, but also for lost productivity. The IT support has to be re-trained in the new software.
And on the server side, any code / app migration is no "simple" task.
So no, it is not "extremely simple".
While this may be hard for you to understand, most people (strange as it is) could care less what operating system or browser they use. All they know is how to accomplish their jobs using the tools they've been trained on, and most of them spent hours upon hours learning those tools.
As a result, when they turn on their computer and their icons aren't in the same place, many people assume that the machine is broken and conclude that the best option is to call IT and open a trouble ticket.
That said, "babying" them, as you put it, can never be done enough. Switching to Linux isn't that simple for someone who couldn't tell the difference between Intel and InDesign. You can replace the word "Linux" with any operating system, application, or even desktop theme.
A smart IT plan never doubts the inability of the users to -not understand-, and the CTO/IT staff who remembers this keeps his/her job. On the other hand, the unemployed IT staffer "-just does it-, giving them courses for -maybe an hour a day for a couple months-".
Add to the fact that this is a government we're talking about, and taking 3-5 years to migrate an entire city IT infrastructure into as yet uncharted waters is probably being -too-optimistic.
bash-3.00$ uname -a
SunOS panda 5.10 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2
As others have pointed out, the CSU is "Christian" in name only.
/.'ers hate religion in general, so it's not a surprise they would hate religious parties. A matter of opinion, I guess.
However, I don't understand why you think that religious parties don't belong in a democracy. People who are serious adherents to a religion tend to feel in a similar way about certain issues (death penalty, abortion come to mind), and thus it makes _sense_ for parties to come together under a religious guise. This does not mean they should be exclusionary, of course, but it's not at all unbelievable that the party would initially form under a religious core.
A religious party does not necessarily mean imposing your religion on everyone else, either. The strict Islamist party won in Turkey, yet Erdrogan hasn't rocked the boat like some people imagined he would. Obviously, in the more liberal European states, the idea of imposing a state religion is even more laughable.
Of course, some
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
Do you mean Microsoft Deutschland Gmbh losing out to IBM Deutschland?
$30m divided by 13,000 machines = $2300/machine? Is this the reasonable cost companies should budget for to migration from Windows to Linux?
It is. Actually it is a bit more expensive than staying with MS for the moment, but the main criteria were stability, security and removal of the dependency of one company only (MS). The move is expected to pay of in the long term (>10 years). Cities are long-term planners, or at least should be.
That is why Balmer failed to convince them to stay with MS by offering better prices. The fundamental motivation was not the current prices, but strategic reasons.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
It sounds as if they're going from a Wintel fat-client/server architecture to a Lintel fat-client/server architecture. Whether or not you agree with me that this is a dubious decision, consider that deploying a true multiuser operating system in effectively single-user mode is a lot like deploying chainsaws to a bunch of chimpanzees.
In my experience *nix's strengths become apparent when you use it as it was meant to be used: a lot of terminals plus maybe a few high-powered standalone workstations. For many standalone machines it's no less of a headache than Windows and in some ways more of one.
I know, I know, thin-clients never took off, yadda-yadda. But I maintain that the biggest part of why they haven't is that deploying Office this way is prohibitively expensive. If you're moving to OO.o, it starts to look a lot better.
(One nice thing about a Linux thin-client setup is that legacy Windows machines can act as terminals with Cygwin/X, allowing Windows and Linux apps as to be deployed in parallel.)
Google confirms: Ruby is the world's most beloved programm
$30m divided by 13,000 machines = $2300/machine? Is this the reasonable cost companies should budget for to migration from Windows to Linux?
It's not that simple. This is an I/T plan covering the operational and support costs of the next several years. Keep in mind that if they didn't decide to do this, they were looking at having to pay, IIRC, some 23M Euro in licensing fees to Microsoft to stay on Windows, plus some hardware upgrade costs. So a better estimate of the Linux migration cost would be something less than 7M Euro divided by 13,000 machines, call it 300 or 400 Euro per machine. That's not so bad when you consider all of the migration labor and the retraining costs.
Whether or not it's worth 7M to get off the Microsoft treadmill is a pretty subjective and speculative question. I'm glad they think so.
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You missed the most important fact -- computers (hardware and software) age exponentially faster than the physical counterparts you compare them to. Sidewalks are always useful, so long as they're in good repair. Sure, you may occasionally need to widen a walk to handle more human bandwidth, but in general you could pour some concrete for sidewalks and then leave it alone for decades (but for a periodic cleaning and weeding), and never have a problem.
Try doing the same thing with computers. Go ahead, get some ancient computing hardware from the 70s, 80s, or even early 90s. Install the ancient software. Now try to use that effectively in a technologically-advancing world. Oops! You can't! At least, not as user desktops and such, if you want to keep productive and happy users.
Now let's flip it around. What you're suggesting already exists. How often did you hear about banks and financial institutions using 20-30+ year old software because it still worked during the lead up and fizzle of the whole Y2K crap? And what did those institutions do when a serious threat came around? They started hiring people to fix the current software (patch the sidewalk). Very few chose to upgrade their systems instead (rip up the sidewalk and repave).
Switching from Office 97 (what everybody really uses) to Office 200x is as traumatic as switching to OpenOffice. As Microsoft points out, OpenOffice is comparable to Office 97. And Office 97 is about as good as Office ever got. Beyond that, it's tons of features you don't need, and integration with stuff you don't want to integrate with.
Microsoft Office -> Microsoft Office
You imply there are no retraining costs here, which isn't true. Staying on a supported version of Office will mean moving your users from Office 95/97/whatever to Office XP, and the tools are just as different from each other as they are from OpenOffice.org.
Internet Explorer -> Internet Explorer
I agree there are no retraining costs here, but moving to a different browser like Mozilla or Konqueror is also pretty seamless, unless you have IE-only web applications deployed. Munich is being smart here, they're migrating the browser and Office suite first so that by the time they get around to dealing with the OS, these issues will be dealt with.
Frankly, I think there are lots of good reasons to switch to OpenOffice.org and Mozilla even if you keep Windows.
Outlook -> Outlook
Take a look at Evolution. If you actually use all of the calendaring features of Outlook/Exchange server, then this is going to be a painful one. Otherwise, there are plenty of excellent tools on Linux.
Windows Explorer (or predecessor) -> Windows Explorer
There are a variety of tools that pretty seamlessly fill this role on Linux as well. No one who can navigate Windows Explorer should have any trouble doing the same thing with Konqueror, for example.
Half Dozen Productivity Tools -> Same Half Dozen Tools
This is often the kicker. To take a trivial example, consider my wife's computer, which I'd like to migrate to Linux for a whole raft of reasons (the biggest being that it requires more administration effort than the other four computers in my house, which all run Linux). But I can't migrate her easily, because of Quicken, PrintMaster and some of the kids' games. There are Linux equivalents, more or less, but she doesn't want to learn them.
In the office environment, depending on what kinds of apps and how many, there may not even be any replacements. Munich is going to handle that with Window app servers, which minimizes retraining costs, but imposes others. For other cases, it may be necessary to build or buy new apps to replace the old ones. In some cases that can be a good thing even after considering retraining costs, if the old ones were terrible, but most likely it's a pure cost with no upside. This may kill a migration.
In this case, Munich has worked out all of the details, estimated the costs and decided they think it's a good deal.
One of these scenarios has drastically higher training costs than the other.
As I've explained above, I don't think this is categorically true. In every category but the last, retraining on the OSS tools won't be much greater than the cost of retraining on the newer versions of the MS tools. In the last category, it depends on the details too much to make any kind of a blanket statement, except to say that it won't be free.
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Haven't seen an office yet where almost everyone doesn't run at least some sort of custom app.
- A zillion Excel spreadsheet macros to be converted to OOo
Whatever their payroll system is.
- Custom reporting in Access out of the Oracle/SQLServer backend needs to be rebuilt
- The city engineers need some new CAD package to manage the sewer sytem. Oh, and all those existing files may need to be converted.
- All of their current Word/Powerpoint files need to be bumped against OOo for compatibility. It's not quite as seamless at it appears.
- All of their current development tools
Converting the one machine in your living room is one thing. Switching a whole business/city is quite another.
> 1,000 Euro will get you a name brand PC with monitor and MS operating system and > Office licenses.
But that does not include installation, administration and infrastructure costs.
> You have to really build up a lot of hatred for a vendor to consider paying
> maybe 14,000,000 Euro over the top to oust said vendor
Certainly you're right, and some people hate MS, but from where I'm standing, most people just hate depending on one thing and paying out the nose for it when they KNOW there are better alternatives. Ask any avid linux user who admins both platforms - if he's worth his salt, he'll tell you that eliminating Microsoft at any cost is not practical or even desirable - but allowing better alternatives in, where they exist, is crucial to saving time, money and aggravation.
Also, you're not considering that those 14,000,000 extra Euro are seen as an investment for long term savings. Corporate licensing for MS is even worse then retail. At least you know in the short run what you're paying for and OTS application - the corporate licensing schemes have totally arbitrary terms (despite what is advertised on the MS site) and have you chasing your tail trying to figure out what you're entitled to. Forget explaining it to a CFO once you've got it nailed down. Then the whole paradigm changes with the next wave of releases. When using mostly free software, you have relative certainty in the form of more-or-less predictable labor and hardware costs - planning is much easier, a little less air needs to be added to the budget, and you have a better chance of staying within budget.
I'm personally counting on this to pressure MS and other big software vendors to either drop prices or increase quality, as well as provide me with the odd chance to roll out something that works instead of dealing with certain packages I know are not worth trying to support.
I think it's turned out OK in cases where MS has been forced to compete. IE was free and improved for a while (at least until they had a dominant lead, IE6+ has been a nightmare) and Exchange got better by version 5 in order to compete with Lotus on the groupware front and sendmail on the MTA front... meanwhile, MS cut server package deals that basically gave it away. Their OS has gotten a bit more stable, probably in response to the perception of Linux kernel as being rock-solid. Maybe MS Office or Citrix will get cheaper faced with the prospect of Linux desktops running centrally-managed open source office productivity software over X.
If you view the migration away from MS-Windows to anything else to be inevitable, then the migration costs should be largely accounted as removing-MS-Windows costs rather than buying-Linux costs. In which case Linux costs an awful lot less than MS-Windows.
You also have to figure in the ongoing cost of maintenance, along with a number of so-called "extraordinary" items like cleaning up after the next CodeRed or MSBlast hits you. Linux is extremely unlikely to ever raise such costs.
But the big reason is that Germany really, really hates being run by foreigners, particularly Americans (but they have other pet peeves too), in any way.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing