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The State of Munich's Ongoing Linux Migration
christian.einfeldt writes "The Munich decision to move its 14,000 desktops to Free Open Source Software created a big splash back in 2003 as news circulated of the third-largest German city's defection from Microsoft. When it was announced in 2003, the story garnered coverage even in the US, such as an extensive article in USA Today on-line. Currently, about 60% of desktops are using OpenOffice, with the remaining 40% to be completed by the end of 2009. Firefox and Thunderbird are being used in all of the city's desktop machines. Ten percent of desktops are running the LiMux Debian-based distro, and 80% will be running LiMux by 2012 at the latest. Autonomy was generally considered more important than cost savings, although the LiMux initiative is increasing competition in the IT industry in Munich already. The program has succeeded because the city administration has been careful to reach out to all stakeholders, from managers down to simple end users."
This blog chronicles the failure of this project: http://limuxwatch.blogspot.com/
Nobox: Only simple products.
The project will not be complete until they have a logo with Tux the Linux Penguin lofting a good German beer.
A truly excellent pizza parlor is a delight unto the heavens. Treasure the sauce and the toppings!
I love good news in the morning!!
Here's the blog from Floria Schiessl, project leader of the LiMux distro and the Munich migration: http://www.floschi.info/
Here's a blog from someone who believes the Munich migration was a failure: http://limuxwatch.blogspot.com/
From reading both, I tend to gravitate towards the failure side. It's 2009 and only 10% migration? Wasn't this suppose to save money? It's a frigging embarrassment! How are you suppose to point to Munich as an example of free and open-source software working on a city scale when they can't even implement it in a reasonable time-frame?
upgrade of the then-existing Windows NT4 operating system to Windows XP would have been as much as two million euros cheaper
Installing Linux has been costly enough already. One can only imagine the effort to keep everything going, that could potentially be even heavier expense.
Reminds me of the Cuba's Linux Nova.
I'm wondering if they have a percentage of the city employees who, after using Linux at work, have migrated over to Linux at home?
Over the years I've read a great deal about various efforts to belittle and undermine it. The Munich Limux Watch blog seems like an attempt to systematically discredit the entire project. I'd love to find out who's behind it. I doubt it's directly supported Microsoft, but I'd wouldn't be surprised if there is some business interest, perhaps a disgruntled IT supplier or even a public sector employee who doesn't want their desktop system changed, behind it. Perhaps some clever Slashdot reader can find out more.
Don't be surprised that there are unexpected costs on a project of this size and complexity. Think about similar projects in the (semi-)public sector, some of which had factor 10 cost overruns and were abandoned (for example: Denver airport luggage processing system). In the end, the ability to actually complete the project, even if years late, and the long-term cost savings will determine its real success. [See my signature below]
We shouldn't expect Limux to have an instant pay back. Even though the operating system is free, the installation scripting, customization, roll-out, training and support have real costs, which will take years to amortize. The gain will only be in the long-term when the infrastructure to support Limux is in place and saves from not having license costs associated with forced upgrades are realized.
Further, you must bear in mind that Munich is a pioneer in even attempting to replace a major Microsoft based infrastructure with open source software. They are having to to do everything from scratch, which I'm sure increases the cost.
Munich's Limux project is a battleground for Microsoft. It it succeeds then it will become the model for similar initiatives. This could make non-Microsoft desktop systems a real alternative for large institutions. This is Microsoft's disaster scenario, and could ruin their monopoly hold on the marker. They might even have to, gasp, compete.
---- It won't be as bad as you fear or as good as you hope, but it will take twice as long as you plan.
And which dates are not clear to you?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Several big failures of the UK's government's IT strategy has been due to the sheer incompetence of the *private* contractors.
Or what about train companies in the UK, or highway operators in Mexico. In both cases the original "investors" cashed in on their shares as soon as they could and left a mess behind that the government has had to paid.
I can also say that, having worked all my life in private industry, your comment, which seems to imply government=ineptitude could easily apply as well to major well known corporations.
It is ironic that now that governments are having to bail out banks (not for the first time mind you, in Mexico we got deeply into debt to avoid the collapse of the financial system during the 90s), car manufacturers and insurers there are still people out there equalling government with incompetence.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
To whom is that blog directed? (a blog that started barely 6 months ago).
Not to the German public it seems.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Google, Red Hat and others must be shitting their pants ...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Unless your company is a "protection" racket Mafia or something similarly ethically dubious (like abusing your monopolistic position in a market for example).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Then you could not have missed this one:
http://www.floschi.info/2009/02/great-news-limux-got-its-own-anti-lobbyist/
The most interesting quote:
"Itâ(TM)s not only a dump troll reservoir, the site owner really tries to deal with facts - of course facts interpreted by him in a very strange manner. He is repeating the same lies again and again, trying to hide them behind real quotes⦠his thoughs have no basis in facts, but who will know this?
Who is interested in doing this job? I donâ(TM)t know. Iâ(TM)ll ask ;-) "
That is hardly the voice of somebody leading a failed project.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
At the bottom of the /. page for this story, the quip of the day reads:
You can always tell the people that are forging the new frontier. They're the ones with arrows sticking out of their backs.
The sound byte that only 10% of the workstations have been migrated in X years doesn't scale to mean that it will take 9 * X more years to complete to rest of them. I know you didn't state this, but the LimuxWatch blog implies this in many of their schedule slip lists.
Yeah, everyone knows things are expected to take O(X log X) time with a slip list.
Making an assumption here, but perhaps Open Office's release of two major versions during the project's lifecycle may have something to do with the delay.
If I was running this show, I'd have uber-time blocked off for compatibility testing to make sure key stakeholders (see, "important people with important spreadsheets") were happy, even if that meant delaying roll-out for the next major OOo release.
body massage!
Or are you saying that if the EURO drops against the dollar that not spending more dollars is going to make things worse in trade deficit?
This was on the internets yesterday: http://blogs.computerworld.com/digg_dug_buried_how_linux_news_disappears
German society and culture is different from the English speaking world. They only accept perfection, anything less is off the radar. They also indulge in Grundlichkeit (excessive thoroughness) which means that everything must be done all out, Unter Voll Dampf (under full steam) and if it costs time or money to do it, they'll take a first class ticket everytime. Not only that but in engineering they test everything to absolute destruction, build it completely new, break it again and then build it completely new and continue this process with the dedication of a Zen master. You just need to take a walk up any mountain in Germany to observe this in action. No one is wearing Jeans and a T-shirt and everyone is toting the sort of equipment required on expedition to summit K2. They even have similar equipment for their dogs.
So ten per cent success rate considering the incredibly short work week state employees enjoy is not just going well, it's an unprecedent level of efficiency.
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
What is this, time travel?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
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I'm living in Berlin now and of the things which hits me hard just about every day (literally) are the bloody doors.
German doors aren't mere convenience items, they are designed to stop tanks. British doors in comparison are made of cardboard, mainly for show, you can swing one open with a flick of the wrist. Attempt that with a German door an you will be nursing a sprained shoulder for the rest of the week. Clearly it's a design intention that going through a door should be something one does with care and aforethought.
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Like the article says, âoethey reached out to all stakeholdersâ. I think the amazing part is that they got enough stakeholders to agree to the change. Change is not something that a lot of people âoeembraceâ if you will, especially government agencies that entrenched in their ways of doing things. I could easily imagine them taking ten years just to make a decision never mind getting the project started. I would say that to have gotten as much done as fast as they have would be considered the speed of light in a lot of situations.
So what you are saying is that you want evolution, but that is one of the few options you never explored? ... and don't tell me it doesn't work. It does. I have used it any time I had to deal with Outlook servers. It works fine (i.e. as good or better than Outlook) when configured properly .
P.S. - Because it is a Gnome project the page makes it sound like you need to use the Gnome Window Manager. You don't. It works great with KDE 3.x and KDE 4.x. I suspect it works with most or all other WMs as well, so long as the gnome libs are on the system.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
10% of desktops running Linux 6 years after the migration started?? It's an utter failure.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
At the start of the early 2000s there was essentially a controlled experiment about implementing Linux on the desktop.
In the first category we had companies like AutoZone, Burlington Coat Factory and Pep Boys that never had developed a Windows culture to begin with. These were Unix shops (generally SCO or Solaris) and they transitioned quickly (within a year or 2) and easily (say under 100 man years) to Linux.
In the second category we had technology knowledgeable companies that wanted to transition to all Unix/Linux, and considered it important but not critical. IBM, Oracle, Sun (Sun Java desktop) being leading examples. They failed, believing it was not worth the distraction even though this failure was quite embarrassing. In many people's estimation they gave up much too quickly.
In the third category we had places that wanted to transition to Linux for ideological reasons. Most of them found the processes daunting and gave up. Munich is a great example of the 3rd category. They have some technical depth but not a technical user base. They have financial resources but are somewhat cost constrained. And they had a Windows culture. That is Munich is sort of a good case study for most companies that are not IT focused. When Munich is successful they will provide a wonderful example that it is possible and how to do it. Right now they provide a caution of the complexities.
Do you think there is a time limit? Munich is nearly 900 years old - what would be the rush? I think they are going about it in an interesting fashion; first transition to open source software that runs on Windows (OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird). Only when people are used to this software do they start transitioning the desktops. Seems pretty sensible to me and it looks like they are playing a long game here.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
Damn, Twitter, looks like you took a writing class.
Munich's now a State! Way to go, Linux!!!
If you live in Berlin, then you could see Germany's imperfection. That's what makes that city so enjoyable. However, I have to agree, that Germans tend to seek perfection in their engineering work. Sometimes they over-engineer something.
trolling or not but the guy might be onto something with the last one, what profit did Canonical make recently?
I don't know about Canonical but Red Hat's Q1, first quarter, profits were $140.57 million and Novell's Q2 were $170.31 million. Those aren't in Microsoft's ballpark but there is profit being made. Now IBM's, who's a big player in Linux, Q1 profit was $9,430.00 billion whereas Microsoft's was 10,834.00. MS beats IBM but only by $1.4 billion.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
well if you have 0% revenue
Can you tell me how a business with no revenue can make $140 million in profits in the first quarter? Or did you mean Apple not Red Hat? Apple's Q1 profits were $2,971.00 billion.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I might concede however NT4 is normally used on servers (it's a bit expensive for the desktop)
For my personal use, I have NY 4 Workstation on an old PC. I don't recall how much it cost but I don't think that NT4 was that expensive.
And BTW it was the best version of Windows I've used.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
The Declaration of Independence: The LiMux Project in Munich has more info on the failure. For instance one reason the migration has been delayed is because of concern about software patents, the city wanted to do a study because of legal insecurities.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Bearing in mind that the have migrated only 10% of desktops in 6 years
One reason the migrations has been slow is because in 2004 they decided they wanted to do a study, the "study was conducted to clear up legal insecurities related to software patents. The actual migration has been running since 2005." Still it has been a long tyme.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Previously I thought you were an idiot. This comment suggests you're just a troll.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
I used to follow some small stocks on Yahoo for a while. The message boards became almost useless because there were a few trolls who would post endlessly the same things over and over again on totally obscure stock message boards. They would usually get replied to but would never argue. They would just post the same thing over and over again. This is probably the best indicator of a sock puppet or troll. They never argue or reply to criticism. They just keep posting the same crap over and over again and just wait for non-sock puppets to get bored of them and stop posting which lets them dominate the forum.
Most of these robotic stock bashers were probably paid by hedge funds that were shorting stocks. Microsoft has an enormous marketing budget. It would be easy for them to run a campaign like this.
Except their plumbing. Half-assed is the word that comes to mind...
A 5 to 10 year time frame seems quite reasonable for a project like this - if anything it's a bit on the tight side; technological revolutions in other industries like manufactoring usually take considerably longer. This is not about migrating a couple of office destops and a server or two - this is about migrating the complete IT infratructure of Germany's third largest city and affects pretty much every piece of software that is currently used in the public sector. Already the interal and external interoperabilty issues (with other administrative bodies, contractors and the public) pose a formidable challenge. And you have to do it as an early adopter in the worst possible environment for change - after all, this is not a "dictatoric" private company but a city government with politics, hidden agendas, entreched formal and (even harder to identify as well to change) informal work flows and bureaucratic procedures, subborn tenured civil servents and legal issues behind every corner. It's in many way's the worst case scenario for Linux migration, a really Herculian task! If you can make it there, then anywhere else will seem trivial by comparison.
Barking.... But I don't think Berlin represents Germany.
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They don't even have to be paid... they just have to have a personal interest in a competitor product. This is primarily why people say a true democracy and truly social sites (like Digg) can't be non-bias. You remove the ability for someone to compete for fair reporting. If you notice your favorite newspaper is swinging one way or the other, you can always go to a competitor... for example. You can't really have this in a socially run website because any competitor will also have the same affect. At least, that's my viewpoint on it. ;)
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
The people that buy Microsoft products are funding these marketing programs. Thus in a sense everyone that buys microsoft products is part of this. That is part of 'free market' that many don't realize. Where in 'free' is the idea of 'fair and unbiased'? It isn't. Free market simply means people are free to do what they want with their time and money. If that is buying microsoft rather than something else that is their choice. Also, if your newspaper is biased and you don't like it; start your own and propagate your own opinion.
Every source of information is biased, people only get pissed when it's not biased the way they want it. I think you can have this in a socially run website but the people that are part of that website must all agree on what they want their opinion to be. Bigger websites inevitably have a broader group of people that represent the averages. The average in this case is microsoft. Thus in large websites you are going to have many more microsoft supporters while in niche sites you are going to have people that support that niches products. Slashdot is bigger now and is growing out of the niche stage. Digg never had a niche.
Go to a linux forum though and see how many people talk about microsoft's awesomeness there.