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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.
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."
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.
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?
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...
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.
It's not really possible to asses that. The article really doesn't have much to say about Linux, so much as it was about all the crufty patchwork of multiple systems they were using before. There's a big cost associated with continuing to use the current kludges, though it is difficult to assign hard numbers to, since they come in the form of lost opportunities and inefficiency spread throughout the whole organization.
Moving to any modern, unified system, whether based around Microsoft software or OSS, is a tremendous task for a big organization like that. And without a parallel universe (that made the other choice) to compare to, you cannot really say which choice was better. You can only guess. Sure, you can try to make an educated guess by trying to figure out how much of the legacy applications will still work on the new system without changes, but until you try to actually do that work, you won't know how wrong you were. [99% compatible is worthless if you were depending upon the 1% of things that don't work.]
They hope to save in the future. As a lot of the costs are consolidating their terrible IT landscape it is not clear, what a migration to the latest MS offering would have costs, either. It is not as if it would have been free either, who knows how many of the macros would have broken down when run in a current version of Excel, who knows how many old programs might stop working on Vista (and be it due to a stupid installer). It would have been cheaper, at least probably because a lot would have still worked, but when they write that they found 21 different Windows setups with differing patch levels and security settings, I am not so sure if it really would have been cheaper.
What they probably hope is, that the next migration will be cheaper, the OSS they use won't cost them to upgrade, the costs of the upgrade in work to be done by their IT department are probably not very different when upgrading a Linux solution from a MS solution. But all the work to get their systems closer to a common base might actually make the next big roll out simpler and therefor cheaper.
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.
The problem with converting the desktop OS last is that it creates a *lot* of extra work. First, you do all the work to make everything work with Windows as the desktop OS. Then, just when you get that working, you turn around and flush it and switch to Linux instead? Talk about a lot of wasted effort.
aren't you missing something, in between closed source and custom ? like .. open source ? which is what TFA is about ?
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Why is the Linux migration project in Munich so prominent, as mentioned in TFS?
Because the guy who wrote it is German and lives in Munich.
There's nothing stopping you from writing up a submission about Banco do Brasil yourself. You seem to have access to a source with a whole bunch of good information, I'm sure a success story like the one you described would get coverage on slashdot too if someone made the effort to submit it.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.