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The Woes of Munich's Linux Migration
mikrorechner writes "The H Online has a writeup of the problems encountered by LiMux (Wikipedia entry), one of the most prominent Linux migration projects in the world, trying to introduce free software into the highly heterogenous IT infrastructure of the City of Munich. Quoting: 'Florian Schiessl, deputy head of Munich's LiMux project for migrating the city's public administration to Linux, has, for the first time, explained why migrating the city's computing landscape to open source software has taken longer than originally planned.'" Here is Shiessl's blog, in which he details some of the transition problems.
Then their IT infrastructure will be homogenous.
Either buy a proprietary system or pay to do it yourself. You pays your money and you takes your chances.
...open source or otherwise has easily replaced anyone's highly heterogeneous IT infrastructure. Sounds like all those overpromises by endless ERP vendors.
From what I've seen, the most successful endeavors deal with a highly heterogeneous IT infrastructure as a fact of life and learn to manage that most effectively. Those that try one-stop reformulations are doomed to failure. Open source or proprietary.
Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing.
Everyone always underestimates how long anything non-trivial is going to take. In this case it seems like not only were they trying to migrate to a new platform, but also trying to undo every past mistake, oversight and quickly implemented solutions that appeared on the surface to work just fine. That's going to take just a little while to get done.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Converting all computers to the Open Document Format (ODF) standard has overcome dependency on a single office software suite.
Does ODF now define formulas for spreadsheets? because my understanding was that this was still ambiguous in the spec, and it is a pretty big problem if it is.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
But we couldn't find a catchy pun or play on words to name the project, so we ditched it altogether.
1. Move them all into CLOUD computing 2. ??? 3. Profit!
I recommend to read the blog as it's more informative and it's also rather optimistic. Not just woes as the title would lead you to believe. Of course making the switch to free software takes work, but it's a great opportunity for constant improvement and as Mr. Shiessl points out, there is much digital waste to be cleaned up on exit from the proprietary.
Yes it does, same as it did before: Do It Like MS Office 97. Which, oddly enough, Microsoft couldn't manage...
The advantage with FOSS is that Germany can hire German programmers to modify the software used by Munich's government (which is also German).
If they stuck with proprietary products, who would they be paying to improve it?
They're installing Debian, which takes approximately 18 - 19 years for a full install.
.iso images, burning and installing each disc on to every computer.
This task involves downloading 142909
sounds like they spent a lot of money. what is the difference in spending the money on OSS compared to MS software? the software might be free, but it sounds like you will spend the same amount of money on making everything work like it did before with the same functionality
You can't convert a bureaucracy like this anymore than you can build a political/military empire by invading a dozen good size countries and trying to integrate them all at once. Rome wasn't built in a day. They should have gone in first with the intention of standardizing things, straightening out all of the kinks and quirks each little fief had. All of the file servers here where possible, all OpenOffice there...
Well, they tried a horizontal migration strategy, moving from location to location and department to department. That meant the problems never stopped.
A better approach might have been to do a vertical top-down migration: Servers: first roll out a directory server infrastructure, then a CIFS strategy etc.; Clients: migrate away from MSIE / Active X, then to CUPS, then away from MS Office etc.. And then, finally, to change the desktop OS out from underneath.
A suggested strategy for those planning something similar: 1: migrate the server services (and create a shiny new unified and consistent infrastructure); 2: migrate the desktop apps to FOSS alternatives (chose apps which will work under your target desktop OS); 3: switch out the desktop OS for linux (the users retain the apps they have become used to).
Just my 0,02
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security - Ben Franklin
More to the point: Moving away from a vendor-locked-in infrastructure is hard.
Any time you build on top of quirks and such that deviate from standardized protocols, upgrading will be hard.
Regional government of the autonomous community of Valencia (Spain) also switched to free software, last year they released a detailed report (english) of the problems they found and how they fixed it. It took a lot of time to complete it (4 years) and they still depend on propietary software for some systems. These migrations need a lot of work...
It's good that they're talking about it to the community, maybe there's something we can do to help.
http://www.floschi.info.nyud.net/2010/03/quality-over-time-in-munich/ may work at some point in the future.
Why is the Linux migration project in Munich so prominent, as mentioned in TFS? I know of much larger migrations, both in terms of the number of computers and the geographic area covered. The Brazilian government has been migrating to Free Software in mass. The Bank of Brazil, for example, has over 100,000 computers running Firefox and BrOffice. As of last June, the estimate was right at 100,000, with 65,000 of those machines running Linux and 35,000 running other operating systems. The Bank of Brazil has branches and offices all over Brazil, which is a very large country. The mass migration happened in 2006, before the migration really began in Munich. The number of machines involved (counting the Linux boxes only) is about 5 times as large as the number of machines to be involved in Munich, and instead of being located in a single city, they are spread out all over a country that's larger than the US would be if it didn't have Alaska, but smaller than the US with Alaska (i.e., larger in area than the "lower 48" plus DC plus Hawaii). In the year 2006 alone, the Bank of Brazil estimated that it saved R$20MM by using Free Software.
FWIW, I've also seen Linux desktops at the ITI (Brazil's IT Institute). Even totally non-nerdy ITI employees seemed perfectly at home on Linux desktops when I was there as long ago as early-to-mid 2005. The Bank of Brazil branch where my company has its account has all Linux desktops. The managers who take care of my account think it's funny when I crane my neck to look at their monitors and geek out on the software their 'puters are running. They are total non-nerds and not only appear to be happy with the Linux desktops, but told me they are. It took them a minute to figure out what I was asking - they didn't think of using Linux desktops as anything all that unusual.
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
Because ripping out an infrastructure that relies on closed-source proprietary software and replacing it with free, Free software is hard. Really, really hard.
Yes, it's easy to rip out that clunky old Exchange server that has never really worked right, and slap in something running Exim and Courier-IMAP. The tricky bit is all the little edge cases and micro-applications - things that are *really important* that rely on someone running an Excel macro on the right machine at the right time. No, I'm not saying they should keep those - but you've got to make a very compelling case to get rid of them and have someone write an equivalent in $favourite_language.
It's harder than you think. If you don't think it's hard, send in your CV.
la la la la la la la ...I can't hear you ...la la la la la la la la
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
How does this compare to the problems experienced by people migrating 15,000 clients running various Windows releases to Windows 7? Is migrating to Linux more or less costly than migrating to the latest release out of Redmond?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Countdown to Microsoft using this situation for "the REAL cost of Linux" in 3...2...1...
You sneak into a store and steal it.
Deleted
But honestly, a lot of the problems he's talking about aren't Linux migration problems, they're problems with how things were being done. Converting this city from where it was at to Windows 7 and Server 2k8 doesn't sound like it would have been any easier. At least when they're done with this, they'll be on an open platform instead of another closed one.
The real problem then was that they didn't made an in-depth analysis of what they were using originally. It's always the same. Lately (it's more often lately, I have to recognize that the wall of MS starts to show some cracks) some computer guy in a company will get to me and say "we are planning to move to Open Office (not full Linux, not yet). What do you think?" And then I ask: "What do you have mounted on MS Office?. I mean macros, Access applications, complex Excel sheets..." And they don't know. They have some general idea of the bigger Access apps, but nothing else. And regardless of it, they dare to make a plan of migration. Not only that, they, as very likely the manager in charge of the Munich migration, get paid much more than I do! I guess blind optimism is more valued than knowledgeable pessimism.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
The Open Office team (if such a thing exists) is going to have to grapple with VBA sooner or later. There are millions of apps running as VBA extensions to Word and Excel. I have more than a few myself and I'm not about to give them up.
Open office is always in catch-up mode. The next play in the game is in "quantitative analysis for the middle manager". The Excel-compatible tools and extensions are already in use while Open Office is still fixing layout bugs.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
Seems that the good ol' Limuxwatch troll woke up again:
http://limuxwatch.blogspot.com/
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
I can see here in Vienna, Austria, what influence M$ has on local decisison makers:
The migration project of Vienna weas cut short ( or terminated ) because there was a Kindergarten Software in VB which would not run under Linux. ( The SW-company offered to rewqrite it for Linux, but that was turned down )
Another poster here wrote that they can have now German Programmers modifying the programs to what they like. And the money stays so to say in town.
The US economy - under B. Obama will try to push their IP laws onto the whole world, as that is the only thing bringing enough cash for the US: a 2 cent plastic disk is sold for hundreds of Dollars. Thats business.
The US economy depends on it - if they can not keep it up, then there is trouble ahead.
they would have the same problems migrating to anything, and even if they werent naive. observe the picture below :
Previously, around 1,000 staff had been maintaining the 15,000 PCs making up the Munich computing landscape in 21 independent IT centres. There was, according to Schießl, no common directory, no common user management, no common hardware or software management. There were more than 300 applications in use, many of which did the same job. On the desktop side, there were 21 different Windows systems with different update levels and security settings.
Read radical news here
> Licensing costs are pretty negligible
I'm not sure about that. Microsoft's bid for upgrading Munich was $23M (negotiated down from an original bid of about $36M). Even if they would only have to pay that every 10 years, that's still $2.3M/yr. That doesn't sound negligible compared to the cost of "making it keep doing that" (especially after everything has been moved to open standards).
When I read TFA, what he said was as predictable as the sunrise the next morning. They were surprised because a Microsoft network had apps that had dependencies on Microsoft products? That there were large numbers of VBA and macros? That vendors weren't particularly gleeful about supporting Linux?
Christ, as clueless as these people were, it's a wonder they're able to migrate their asses to work each morning let alone one OS to another.
That is all.
Why do you say that? If you interpreted khasim's statement as implying that Germany can and should hire German programmers out of some kind of nationalism..., then that's offensive no matter which government we're talking about. ["besides myself"] I hardly ever hear people... saying that things like "Buy American-Made" is offensive...
I'm sure you haven't thought it through, but I find what you said highly distasteful. Faulty logic like that allows greedy sociopaths to destroy the American economy (and others). Let me tell you the dirty little secret of free trade.
In the USA, we've legislated a minimum level of ethics: Minimum wages, child labor laws, work condition laws, environmental laws, etc. These laws are very good things (generally). Many countries around the world have implemented these (and better), but many have not. Businesses very rarely outsource work to places where labor is more expensive. They'll pick places where labor is cheep, places that have no decency in their employment practices. Some of these places work children at slave wages under inhumane conditions for almost every waking hour of every day.
The bosses of such shops claim that working for foreign (1st world) companies is a boon to their employees. Sometimes that's true. Sometimes it's just a very sweet lie. I'm going to set this aside for a moment, and come back to it.
Where does that leave 1st world countries like the USA? Our work force cannot compete within our own markets with cheep imports from places with unethical labor practices. It's an insult to common sense to believe otherwise. As a result, we have a greatly reduced industrial/manufacturing sector. Our spending on imports leads to a trade deficit and debt (on several levels). It is only a matter of time before this house of cards falls apart. (This is only one of the problems that is leading us to economic collapse.)
I propose a reasonable accommodation. Companies that opt in and follow USA federal law can import without tariff. Companies that don't, get charged. Yeah, it is a bit protectionist, but not unreasonably so. It's sad that it's necessary, but that's life. The upswing for foreign employees? They get to enjoy the fruits of their labors. Even without employment through American shell companies, their markets will continue to "emerge" if their efforts and their governments are properly focused. (Both are really required, and both are their responsibility.)
Does that mean that all imports are evil? No. It does mean, though, that there is value in favoring "Made in USA". That will be true whenever an import has an unfair advantage. (Better skilled artisans and smaller bureaucracies don't constitute unfair advantages.) "Free trade" sounds good. It is a desirable ideal. Unfortunately it has become a code-phrase for "Let us skirt around these inconvenient laws." Until that is dealt with, true free trade will forever be elusive.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
It was mostly micosoft saying 'whoa'. I have no doubts that there are some people who are paid by them to be an obstacle. The thing those people have to understand is: the new system *really is* better, and being too big an obstacle, and being too stubborn will get you an opportunity to offer your skills somewhere else. The thing to do is to embrace the new system, discover what it can do, see what problems it solves, and move on.
I would bet linux has changed a bit since that 'old saying' making its point totally irrelevant.
Although I always thought that saying was bullshit in the first instance. What does Windows cost? $300? That is 3 hours of my time but does it do *everything* for me? Shit no! Not even close. I still used to have to tweak the crap out of it to get what I wanted. Linux is the same, as is OSX. Linux won in the end for me cause I could get it exactly the way I wanted a system to behave the fastest.
It was a saying that was dished out and pranced about by those who didn't want to upgrade their skills.
.
How come in these discussions noone ever mentions the software they're using (eg. GOsa, see https://www.gosa-project.org/ ) ? GOsa is a web admin front-end which allows management of clients and servers through an LDAP based infrastructre and RPC backend. Services that can be managed include Samba+PDC, email+groupware, FAI & OPSI (for auto-install of Linux and Windows clients), DNS, DHCP, Squid, Asterisk, Linux terminal server clients, and quite a bit more. It IS very hard to get working though.
Hmmm... I just noticed that Munich is no longer listed as a reference on the GOsa site - I wonder if there is a story there.
You didn't provide a single link to back up your assertions, so maybe it is important but not prominent (I know of a big bank, one of those involved in the global financial crisis, that just in one location has 500 Red Hat desktops, but they don't go around talking about it).
In a place I know about (massive, their IT operations have more personnel than most technology companies) Windows XP is still widely available, this has to do with cost and complexity: lets say that people start producing documents only with the newest MS formats (which are not backwards compatible), then you find yourself having two different formats per applications from the same software provider you have to contend with.
Of course you can tell people to use the older standard, but then you should ask yourslef why do you need the newer software if you have to stay with the old features.
My point being that anybody telling you that Migrating from MS to MS is simpler is lying to you.
At least if you move from CLosed to Open you know that the document format should not be an obstacle any more.
Their "Eierlegende Wollmux" also sounds useful. (translation: "including the kitchensink"??)
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?