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German Foreign Ministry Migrates Desktops To OSS
ruphus13 writes "Here's another example of 'German Engineering' — The Foreign Ministry in Germany is migrating all of its 11,000 desktops to GNU/Linux and other open source applications. According to the article, 'this has drastically reduced maintenance costs in comparison with other ministries. "The Foreign Ministry is running desktops in many far away and some very difficult locations. Yet we spend only one thousand euro per desktop per year. That is far lower than other ministries, that on average spend more than 3000 euro per desktop per year ... Open Source desktops are far cheaper to maintain than proprietary desktop configurations," says Rolf Schuster, a diplomat at the German Embassy in Madrid and the former head of IT at the Foreign Ministry ... "The embassies in Japan and Korea have completely switched over, the embassy in Madrid has been exclusively using GNU/Linux since October last year", Schuster added, calling the migration a success.' The Guardian has additional coverage of the move."
I certainly hope more countries follow this lead.
Dear Sir,
The chronometer in your time machine appears to be off by a few decades.
You apparently landed in the early 21st century, instead of the mid 20th.
I'm afraid a time machine repair shop won't be available for another 200 years. But hey, we have cable TV!
Is it really the " year of the Linux desktop"?
My humor is probably your flamebait
The 'additional coverage' is from Sunday June 22 2003...
Just now Microsoft made a statement to the press...
"OSS is not cheaper to maintain for the following reasons"
1. Employees will waste that extra time they get not waiting for reboots instead of using it for texting & other 'social' activities.
2. We pay people to stick their fingers in their ears and say "La La LA MS is cheaper La La Laaaaa".
3. Any money left will encourage your employees to steal it.
4. Steve Balmer needs it to develop sweat-proof chairs.
5. Windows 7 wont have any of the existing lock-in as previous versions of Windows. It'll all be new kinds of lock-in.
6. ???
7. Profit (for us not you)
On windows environment you use active directory and sus.
How do you centrally manage software installs and permissions on thousands of machines with oss?
Handful of servers is easy to handle but how are logins and home directories handled in environment this scale?
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
It's not just a matter that they're trying OSS - it's whether they'll stick to it. A lot of governments/other organizations try it out and end up switching back after a while. Good thing that they're trying it, but not the end all, be all. We can just hope that it goes well.
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
According to the article, the migration is already well underway. From the 11.000 desktops, 4.000 already are migrated to Open Source and about half of the embassies are on Open Source Software now. That explains where they get their maintenance cost numbers from, good to see that the cost savings seem to be real and backed by their own data instead of being estimates :)
They also started the switch a long time ago, according to article, the infrastructure switch started in 2001 and the decision for the destop migration was done in 2004, so I think they have some solid experience with handling Open Source now, which I think is good.
Well, at least Germany had the balls to stand up to Microsoft and actually go with the GNU/Linux solutions vs most other countries and corporations that just do this to get a discount from Microsoft. Here's a good quote from the article:
The conversation between Ude and Ballmer was confidential, but anyone who knows the Microsoft CEO can guess how it went. Let us say negotiation is not his forte. Ballmer is no more designed for the art of persuasion than the Abrams tank is for delivering meals on wheels.
Life was hell, then I discovered Linux...
Interesting. Does that mean that there are still reasonable people in the world? Even in politics?
The article made a fascinating speculation about the German software development culture and German culture in general. It was the reference to German geek culture that made me chuckle. What a site best documents numerically GNU/Linux progress on the desktop? A little competition for the big OS and software makers is good for everyone. - nicht wahr?
Because Joe TwelvePak and Joe the Pluduhmber say so!
--- "Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to speak it to?" ---Clarence Darrow, Esq.
Being "like the Nazis" is not always a bad thing. After all, Hitler did make the trains run on time!
They know what GNU is, or at least use it by name. That's really the biggest story here.
Wasn't that Mussolini?
Mussolini made them run on thyme...
I wank in the shower.
From the Guardian article:
(emphasis mine)
And this is why, ladies and gentlemen, we won't be seeing this in many countries outside Germany. They have a politician who knows what he's talking about, and doesn't pander to the whims of industrial lobbyists.
I'm going to transform myself into a mighty hawk. Either that or I'll just go and work at Dixons, haven't decided yet.
The real story would be if they got the Interior Ministry to convert. In Europe, that (and the Agriculture Ministry) is usually where the deadbeats end up.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Why not laptops as well?
This Sig is removed due to factual inaccuracy
Das Jahr des Linux Desktop-Computer.
This space up for sale.
Get the Facts!
I wonder if this has anything to do with the (then, 2001, when this started) german Foreign Minister (Secretary of State) Joschka Fischer being a member of the Green Party.
The german Green Party has a tradition of rather sane maxims regarding IT. In late 1998 Germany elected a Social Democrat / Green Party coalition and 2001 seems like a reasonable date for the implementation of descisions made shortly after 1998.
This, of course, is pure conjecture, i'd be grateful if anyone from Germany had any background information on the reasons for the switch.
sig? Oh, that sig...
Out of curiosity, since you seem to know what you want, and you've asked the questions, have you considered simply firing up a web browser, pointing it at google, typing your query, and seeing what you get back? You've got me curious now to see how hard it would be to look up the answers to your questions, and how useful the information is.
Ballmer is no more designed for the art of persuasion than the Abrams tank [is for something else]
Cute, but. That was almost a decade ago. In Europe.
Gates no longer goes around saying the poor don't need computers either.
And an Abrams can be quite good at persuasion. Deployed poorly, a tank is vulnerable. That doesn't mean you can laugh at the army behind it. Gates, Ballmer and Microsoft, are very very accomplished at persuasion. And more destructive than tanks. And more poorly reported on as well.
Now, in Africa, Bill Gates wields not just discounts, but also Microsoft international development funds, and most importantly, the Gates Foundation.
And is a renowned philanthropist, not the aggressive imperial CEO of an American monopoly.
Gates and Microsoft now have more leverage, more access, in much poorer countries, with more biddable public officials. And with vastly less US/EU oversight, legal and PR restraints.
Despite repositioning himself as a philanthropist, Bill Gates still doesn't view Microsoft's ongoing way of doing business as illegal or unethical. Still doesn't distinguish the general good from what's profitable for Microsoft. And still has great trouble recognizing conflicts of interest.
OSS has had a brief happy time the last couple of years, as Microsoft's efforts to lock in trusted computing had distracting birthing pains. But Microsoft never went away. Never became less aggressive, or more ethical.
"If it's good enough for Nazis, it's good enough for me. Hey everyone: let's all be like Nazis! Make Hitler proud!"
Be careful what you ask for. They gassed retards instead of modding them down.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
It'd be "rechner", not "komputor". The word "desktop" in the non-computer sense translates to "Schreibtisch" (lit. "writing table", same as in danish).
I don't know which words Germans use to distinguish between desktop/laptop/workstation systems and servers/clusters/phones/*, though.
"Jahr des Linux an die Schreibtisch Rechner" =~ Year of Linux on the desktop computer. Not sure.
Digg it!
Jorge was explaining how to handle my new role ...
"So when the updates come in, Karl looks at them and if they look sticky he applies them to the VM and runs the unit tests. As we update applications from our upstream providers, we test them against the same VMs. Our in-house developers write to the same VMs, and when they implement new features or use new libraries, they have to include unit tests to test the interfaces to validate that they work in the required ways. Each night the system builder builds a new VM from the latest updates. All you need to do is check the unit tests reports and make sure Karl knows right away if something goes wrong - just put the error report in the trouble ticket. The trouble ticket system will also notify the advocate teams for the specific package that fails. Usually it doesn't and we push the patch a few minutes after it comes in."
I wanted be mindful of security: "But Jorge" I said, "what if a horrid exploit happens overnight?"
"We're partnered with five other trusted NOCs that give us 24 hour coverage. We share unit tests so that if a patch has to be included any hour of the day, it's morning somewhere. We don't even come in anymore.
We used to have to come in on weekends too, but this new system doesn't have exploits as often so it's been a couple years since that happened."
Thinking to show I was interested in the long term, I asked "What do you do when you get new hardware?"
"It's weird. Once upon a time, the virtual machines were there to simulate the physical machines. Now it works out that the new hardware is just physical hardware to implement the virtual machine. We get samples, build the image from the VM and run the unit tests on them. If we can't make our software pass the tests, or we can't get our required upstream packages validated, we don't buy the hardware. If the vendor won't sell us hardware that works, we get a new vendor. If somebody wants to advocate some special hardware, they're responsible for maintaining the software for it, maintaining the fixes, and of course pushing them back upstream so that everybody can have them. The desktops sync to the user accounts on the server continuously so if they remote into their desktop from the road or from a thin client, they get the whole deal with all their preferences, email, files, desktop items and shortcuts intact.
Once a quarter we get together and compare the pots and pans of new hardware. That gets pretty lively. Wait 'til I show you my USB device collection. Did you know they made oscilloscopes?
Anyway, You wouldn't believe the system we had before. It was horrid. Applications didn't even come with the source code."
"What was it?"
"At the end, the very worst one was called Vista. They probably didn't even mention that one in school, it came and went so fast. When it was clear that this was as good as that software vendor was ever going to get, we had no choice but to change. I fought it at first but now I'm glad. The new system is, well, rational. I don't know how we survived before.
Now let me show you the cafeteria. We have our own Starbucks..."
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Take that linuxhater!
That, that really grinds my gears!
Well, that figures - if you've got 200 MCSE drones hanging about looking after your systems, it's going to take a bit of work to convince them to learn new skills that don't depend on clicking here, there and everywhere.
Still, it looks like they've got it all up and running now, and at least some of the original drones must have blossomed into real admins along the way.
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
Troll? Oh for Pete's sake I wasn't serious...
Mods are retards. Should all be gassed.
I hate printers.
It's called "Linux", not "GNU/Linux". Ask Torvalds!
Precisely!
Try the other way: How do you get Microsoft's OS's and applications to help migrate to Linux?
You can't.
How do you get Microsoft's OS's and applications to play nice with Linux hetero systems?
You can't.
Oddly enough, though Windows is LESS CAPABLE than Linux in working with "non Linux" OS's than Windows is with "Non Windows" OS's, it is taken as a fault of Linux in that it can't handle a hetero system as easily as Microsoft's offerings handle a homo system.
Why?
And the best developers in the world works for free. We eat moms food and don't own shit.
The answer above is a bad cop-out.
It is frankly a poor excuse to invoke flexibility as the reason to abandon simplicity. Something that is flexible should by extension be configurable in a simple way that will fit many common cases.
A system administrator, even a competent one, is faced with an uphill struggle when faced with the diabolic combination of kerberos/LDAP.
The way this should work should be to get a basic install by means of a package install which works in simple, defined ways.Once this is done, the system administrator can configure things as needed, but for the time being he could show something that is up and running in a short time.
We are short changing ourselves against the Windows based competition by erecting a high barrier of entry to a replacement to Windows AD.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
MS thrives in lock in, which by extension means lowly paid Systems Administrators.
We are putting ourselves in a competitive disadvantage by failing to understand that the high earning Linux SA is not seen sympathetically by HR people and managers trying to optimize depleting budgets.
We know a Linux/UNIX SA is more cost effective in the long run because the technology he is experienced in is more cost efficient, but the cost of entry to a position (high salaries combined with the perception that Linux is more difficult) is something that should not be dismissed lightly.
The comment above in the thread is very insightful: by being too complex, Linux fails to entice its natural constituencies: small and medium businesses.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
If you present the non extensible AD solution against the extensible one in Linux, but the appearance is that AD gets up and running faster and in a simpler way in comparison to Kerberos/LDAP complexity, the decision making people will move to AD, past that point is moot point if Linux would be most extensible, since it was dropped at the start. That is the point of vendor lock in, to sell you something inferior that you can't drop easily any more.
To give Linux a better chance in small and medium environments we would need a solution with kerberos/LDAP generic enough to be perceived as equally simple as AD, at that point lock in would be challenged and what you talk about
would have some applicability.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.