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Munich Finally Starts to Embrace Linux
sankyuu writes "After years of rumor and vacillation over fear of patents, the city of Munich has decided to trickle in its first 100 linux terminals. The floodgates are scheduled to fling open by 2008, when 80% of government PCs should be running Linux."
They fail to mention how many government servers have been running linux behind-the-scenes for years. Changes are, at least a handful. I realize the excitement of this is in bringing Linux to the desktop, but people aren't always aware of its presence, even when quietly surrounded by it. Now I don't have any facts on Munich's server architecture, so I could very well be wrong.
Snarkiness aside, I think this is a cool project. It'll be interesting to see who else follows Munich's lead, and what ol' Ballmer aims to do about it. Maybe he'll chuck a chair (doh.. there's that snarkiness again... time for me to creep back into my hidey hole).
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That's upwards of $3k per computer, how in hell did it get to this ridiculous figure?
Being an european myself and in-the-know about the ways of social-democracy I have some nice theories indeed, but being less than IT--related I'll spare the rest of you.
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Most of those computers are probably used for almost exactly the same. The first 200 computers are probably representative for the 80%.
So they use the first 100-200 to learn and to develop deployment procedures etc. When that works, they roll it out to all the similar computers.
Just like in some smaller places, they use days to test something on one or two computers. When it works they spend an hour putting it on all 500 company desktops, most of the time just waiting for network transfers and rebooting.
But seriously, I am surprised more governments don't move to Linux as a terminal/front end solution anyway. With more services being handled on central computers far away from the actual customer access points, it doesn't really make sense to have full-featured OSes put in place only to hobble them with security software. It is better to create simple remote terminals which can run programs remotely over the network, saving hardware costs and reducing IT headaches.
I honestly think it has something to do with them having been convinced once already to move away from that type of architecture(their old mainframe systems) towards PCs, and in the process, getting reamed nicely for the effort. At least the government agencies I'm aware of here in the states. IMO, the best line of attack for opensource adoption is through the apps, and not through the OS. It's a lot easier to teach people new apps, than it is to teach them new operating systems. It's also a lot easier to teach them new operating systems, if their apps will be the same on the new OS. My 2 cents.
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They're taking a big one-time hit although. Once they've rewritten/replaced all their software and migrated their data the cost to add new units will be significantly lower.
I agree with you and I don't understand why so many people assume that a migration from a Windows infrastructure to an OSS one will cost €0.00? If Munich is going ahead and doing this in the first place they might want to make some fundamental changes to their IT infrastructure since they will be ripping the guts out it anyway. Take for example the proposition of replacing dumb Windows PCs that just stand around all day giving users access to a single application (Why pay a Windows XP license for every one of those PCs?) with Linux based thin clients. In this case they might be factoring the replacement of some quantities of computer equipment and infrastructure changes into that figure of €30 million. Then of course there are the costs of testing the whole system, the costs of writing custom software to aid in the migration of entire data bases, websites and other applications previously hosted on Windows 2003+MSSQL+IIS to open source platforms, porting custom made GUI applications/clients to Linux or replacing them with new webapps. I can see why the costs would go up but in the long run I agree with you that their costs should go down as a result of this measure if they handle the project properly which, admittedly, is asking a lot of a German bureaucracy. I would really like to see a financial breakdown and progress report of this project when they are done, this project is really interesting due to it's scale.
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You obviously missed the part where they are paying this money to IBM, so your point was?
As far as I can see, its not only not cost efective, its not even going to be complete. The project lead himself admits they can only migrate around 80%, theres also a quick gloss over the 12 month pilot extension because of unspecified 'problems'.
So slipping deadlines, increasing costs, less than complete and beset by problems. looks like a typical software project to me and not the poster child for migration some people round here think it is.
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I, for one, think a migration to windows Vista would not be much cheaper; licenses, new hardware, 3 praty and home grown application rewrites, and a lot of tests. however, the license costs for OS and many desktop apps will vanish in the future with the linux solution. also, it looks like they are going for linux terminals, so i guess a lot of maintenance work will be saved on the new clients as well.
But most/all of the cost is consulting, of which a significant percentage will go to salaries to people locally.
I wonder how many of the custom apps they're building on Linux will also be open source, and therefore available to the next government looking to switch. It could be that Munich is taking a _really_ big hit, but each organisation which follows the same path will find it progressively easier to switch.
I've often thought that commercial software vendors are taking an immense risk in not porting to Linux, thereby allowing the whole FOSS application stack on the platform to be developed without commercial-grade competition.
This sort of migration could start a cascade effect, where each successful adoption catalyses the next, and there are damn few commercial software houses prepared to take advantage of that.
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You can hire some guy to "correct this nasty bug in XXX OSS software". You can't hire some guy to correct this problem in IE or in Windows. It is technically more difficult, and legally questionable. That is what is meant when someone talks about independance in the OSS community.
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Are you seriously trying to compare the adoption of a standards-compliant, free and open-sourced platform which guarantees backward compatibility and even compatibility with other standards-compliant platforms with the dependance on a platform which is as closed as it gets, has always compatible problems even with it's predecessor and even patched versions, has a history of very dangerous security problems and to top things off, costs hundreds of dollars per seat and per version?
Let's not even mention that by adopting linux they will not be tied down to a OS, let alone distribution. Are you capable of trying to compare both cases and still keep a straight face?
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