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.

Comments

They should switch to all Macs

[Anonymous Coward]

Then their IT infrastructure will be homogenous.

Re:They should switch to all Macs

[Em Emalb]

Newsflash there, AC. Not all mac users are gay. Sheesh, this is 2010, not 1995! Get over it. (I don't need to explain this is a joke, do I? Oops, I think I just did)

Re:They should switch to all Macs

[plague3106]

Of course not. You don't turn gay immediately after buying a mac, it takes time.

Re:They should switch to all Macs

[ColdWetDog]

Of course not. You don't turn gay immediately after buying a mac, it takes time.

How much time? (Looks around furtively).

Re:They should switch to all Macs

[Em Emalb]

Aw man, what do I tell my family? Especially my wife? I've been using macs pretty consistently for the last three years...am I slowly turning gay right now as we "speak"? Or is it more of a "you'll first slowly stop allowing your wife to pick out your clothes for you" followed by trimming your eye brows? What's next? A man purse? Oops, sorry, I meant a "European Shoulder bag".

Aw hell, I'm almost gay, aren't I?

Voice mode=Brando The horror! THE HORROR! /Brando

Re:They should switch to all Macs

[commodore64_love]

>>>You don't turn gay immediately after buying a mac, it takes time

My Quadra Mac was my third favorite computer.

Right after my amiga.

Re:They should switch to all Macs

[Darinbob]

You see, with Amiga it doesn't matter if you turn gay or not since you won't have a sex life anyway.

Re:They should switch to all Macs

[spazdor]

Parent link is super nasty. Do not click.

Re:They should switch to all Macs

[Stormwatch]

Don't worry about what your wife will think: chicks dig yaoi.

Re:They should switch to all Macs

[ailnlv]

I bought a macbook pro four months ago and everything seems fine with cock... i mean me

There is no free lunch

[rshol]

Either buy a proprietary system or pay to do it yourself. You pays your money and you takes your chances.

Re:There is no free lunch

[Sir_Lewk]

Or you know.. buy an open system....

Re:There is no free lunch

[El Lobo]

Now seriously, I've read that all this migration has cost MILLIONS from public fonds and there are rumors that some heads are going to to roll soon because of this. In the university I am working for some IT-boss though it was a great idea to replace a well working First Class conferencing system that had been working GREAT for years by the Open Source Sakai. Well, the results: several millions have been wasted in this, there are (maaany) problems with the new platform, teachers hate it, students hate it... The "brilliant" IT chef is now working somewhere else after that disaster.

Re:There is no free lunch

[dave562]

...and then pay in house developers to reproduce all of the functionality that your proprietary system was providing. As the OP said, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Did you read the article? It mentioned a lot of VBA macros that had to be converted into a similar system that managed templates, automation, etc. In other words, the functionality had to be re-created.

Re:There is no free lunch

[binarylarry]

Poor IT chef.

But on that note, what an awesome IT department. They had a CHEF on staff? Fuck yeah!

Re:There is no free lunch

[Sir_Lewk]

Aaaah, I see now. If once piece of software is rubbish, then surely any other pieces of software under the same license must also be rubbish!

With this in mind I think it is safe to say that we can write off proprietary software from seriously competeing in the real world, you would not believe how many stories about proprietary software messing up I can find...

What is that? That's not actually what you were claiming, you were just being offtopic? Oh, I see...

Re:There is no free lunch

[RightSaidFred99]

Yeah, I think he covered that ("pay to do it yourself"). Or do they have snazzy open systems that just automagically analyze your environment and deploy themselves successfully?

Re:There is no free lunch

[mcgrew]

No free lunch? Poor guy never had a grandma. Some other incorrect old sayings:

"You get what you pay for". If someone says that, hold on to your wallet, because you're likely to pay for far more than what you get. You usually pay for what you get, but you don't always get what you pay for. Ask any con artist.

"Money doesn't grow on trees, you know." Tell that to someone who owns an orchard.

"Nothing worthwile is free." Air?

"You pays your money and you takes your chances." OK, that one is usually correct.

Re:There is no free lunch

[edmicman]

Shouldn't that have been evaluated before starting the project in the first place? If you rely on a lot of legacy proprietary functionality, you should probably determine costs beforehand of either a) replicating that functionality in the new system or b) justifying whether you need the functionality in the first place.

That sounds like you have a bunch of xbox 360 games but don't want the console...then buying a Mac and wondering why the games won't work on it...

Re:There is no free lunch

[h4rr4r]

Sounds like they failed at evaluation. They picked these shackles when they used VBA, sounds like piss poor planning.

Re:There is no free lunch

[wall0159]

...because, of course, there were never installation delays with a proprietary system...

Re:There is no free lunch

[lastgoodnickname]

Yah, OO writer has macros, so no prob, boss.

Re:There is no free lunch

[wjousts]

Bitching about past decisions (to use VBA) isn't going to fix anything. Clearly you're not the kind of person who can solve problems.

Re:There is no free lunch

[dave562]

VBA was probably their only choice. In 2000, where was OpenOffice? Where was the Linux desktop? VBA has been around for a "long time" when measured in IT years. At the time they probably went with the "free" tool built into the application that happened to be compatible with the majority of their other applications.

People bag on VBA like it is worthless. If was totally worthless it wouldn't have been used as often as it was. If there were good alternatives it wouldn't have the market penetration that it does. It is only now that there are alternatives that people are complaining about it. It's kind of like bagging on a 10 year old application for not being optimized for a dual-core CPU.

Re:There is no free lunch

[IntlHarvester]

Sounds like they failed at evaluation. They picked these shackles when they used VBA, sounds like piss poor planning.

No IT department ever planned to based business processes off spreadsheet macros, its more like "Hey did you know this guy in accounting wrote a big nasty spreadsheet with 25,000 lines of VBA code?"

One of the the things mentioned in the article was that their IT support structure was decentralized and non-standardized, which would make for a difficult project even if they were doing a Microsoft-to-Microsoft migration. You could argue they bit off more than anyone could chew, which is why this is taking so long.

Re:There is no free lunch

[huckamania]

When considering open source software, you should never, ever consider the costs of replacing an existing closed source system that works in every possible way with an inferior open source offering. You should consider instead all of the very fine software projects that are produced by the open source community. You should also remember that closed source systems are, by definition, thought and deed, inferior to any open source software, even when it isn't, don't be lazy, you stoopid noob, you have the source.

I apologize for this post about replacing closed source software with open source software in a discussion about the city of Munich replacing their closed source software with open source software. It is obviously off topic.

Re:There is no free lunch

[Sir_Lewk]

Are you human? This post looks like some thing a markov chain barfed out. As far as I can tell, I wasn't even responding to a post made by you. Hell, this is the first comment you've posted in this story, unless of course you are a sockpuppeting whore.

Re:There is no free lunch

[commodore64_love]

>>>Shouldn't that have been evaluated before starting the project in the first place?

Yes. On my previous job they asked me to create a schematic, and of course I had to wait a week for the IT staff to show-up and install the necessary machine on my machine. While I was waiting I searched for OSS CAD alternatives, gave each one a quick spin, and determined they were all inadequate.

This Munich IT Chief should have done the same, rather than just suddenly decide "OSS is the answer".

I've found that OSS is typically good for common software like browsers, media players, word processors, and so on, but not for specialized tasks like CAD or ASIC development, or for operating systems. In the latter case it's better to stick with the "standard" Windows system and proprietary software. It causes fewer headaches.

Re:There is no free lunch

[Sir_Lewk]

Open source only seems to work if it's backed by a major contributor, like Firefox and seaMonkey by Google. Otherwise it tends to be buggy and non-user-friendly.

I'm fairly certain that Firefox is an excellent counterpoint to that assertion actually...

I'll raise your examples one Debian and FreeBSD though.

Also, floppies?!? Really? It's been over a decade since I've had to touch one of those, but to my recollection dd will in fact work perfectly fine to image them.

Re:There is no free lunch

[joebok]

Yeah - VBA is huge. A relatively intelligent power user can get a lot done using VBA. Of course they use all kinds of globals and don't type declare anything, have never heard of source control, - indenting?? scalability?? etc etc - they will create the most horrific program as seen by the eyes of a "real" programmer... but it will have got the job done and - on balance - solved more problems than it caused.

Re:There is no free lunch

[david_thornley]

You know, I have yet to find a closed-source OS that can run everything I want. In fact, there's no single OS that will run everything I want. For my personal preferences, Linux (along with Wine and similar programs) does a good job. For yours, I don't know.

Re:There is no free lunch

[commodore64_love]

>>>Also, floppies?!? Really?

If you know how else to install Damn Small Linux or Kolibros onto a 386 machine, which only has a floppy for external input, please share.

Re:There is no free lunch

[JWSmythe]

    A long time ago, I decided to start making copies of my floppies onto hard drives, so I'd have images of them before the deteriorated. I made that decision because I had a never opened boxed version of Novell UnixWare (from around 1994). It had sat in a professional air conditioned office until sometime around 2000. It was given to me, and it sat in my computer room for a long time. I finally decided to unbox it and give it a try. It came on floppy disks (3 of them, if I remember right). I went out and bought a floppy drive for this adventure, since all mine had either gathered such an accumulation of dust that I couldn't find the opening, or I had simply thrown them away.

    I put the first disk in, and half way through reading it, there were errors. The disk, although in the original unopened envelope, in the original unopened shrinkwrapped box, had deteriorated. {sigh}

    I tried several other disks that I had been carrying around with me for years, "just in case" I needed them for something. As it turned out, about 2/3 of them were unreadable, just from age.

    So, I tossed them all, and gave the drive away to someone else who wanted to use it. He had a better success rate, something like 75% were readable.

    I was talking to some kids not too long ago, about disks. I kept asking them, to see if they even had a clue what a floppy disk is. One correctly described a 3.5" floppy, but none had seen a 5.25" floppy. :) It's probably all for the better, they really sucked.

Re:There is no free lunch

[Darinbob]

Reading the fine article, it seems the big problem was not propriety versus not proprietary, or Microsoft versus non-Microsoft. It was that they were trying to fix a very heterogenous and confusing mess with a homogenous consistent infrastructure. All stuff that should be upgraded and fixed, but doing that takes time and effort and often isn't worth the hassle. Ie, a proprietary system with non-open standards can't be ripped out and quickly replaced with something else, no matter how bad the proprietary system is. Or say some department has critical applications based on ActiveX, you can't toss that out if you don't have a compatible replacement.

Just like most IT infrastructures, there's a lot of duct tape architecture. It's easier to start from day 1 with a new infrastructure than to try and revamp an existing one.

Re:There is no free lunch

[commodore64_love]

>>>You know, I have yet to find a closed-source OS that can run everything I want.

What could you possibly desire to run that Windows OS will not execute? I cannot think of anything.

Re:There is no free lunch

[StayFrosty]

Amarok, F-Spot.

Re:There is no free lunch

[micheas]

>>>Also, floppies?!? Really?

If you know how else to install Damn Small Linux or Kolibros onto a 386 machine, which only has a floppy for external input, please share.

I would install an ethernet card and install over tftp. I would recommend reading the debian install guide for examples.

floppies are so unreliable and slow that this may actually be faster than using floppies, even including the time to set up the tftp server, dhcpd, nfs, and install the card.

Re:There is no free lunch

[Mathinker]

> I've read that all this migration has cost MILLIONS

Yes, there's a lot of shilling going on, trying to paint this transition in a bad light. man_of_mr_e provided me with a link to the Microsoft bid which was $23M. The original Linux bid was $36M. And it's probably cost more. But as I replied to man_of_mr_e, this is still probably a good fiscal decision for Munich, since I find it hard to believe that if they save MS relicensing costs of about $23M every, say, 6 years, they won't pay for the extra conversion costs fairly quickly.

And that's not even counting the advantages to being free of lock-in.

Re:There is no free lunch

[micheas]

>>>You know, I have yet to find a closed-source OS that can run everything I want.

What could you possibly desire to run that Windows OS will not execute? I cannot think of anything.

There is a difference between execute, and run well.

PHP web apps have much less of the language available to them, as many (less frequently used) modules do not work correctly on windows.

Another example of that is not pro-one vendor is that chrome runs faster on Linux than Windows, while Firefox is much faster on Windows than Linux. If you are choosing your OS based on the web browser you are running, whether you are running chrome of firefox will influence which os you perceive to be better.

Re:There is no free lunch

[Bert64]

If you rely on a lot of proprietary functionality then that's a serious problem - you don't want to be relying on anything that's tied to a single supplier... Getting rid of proprietary lock-in is a valid business goal on its own.

Re:There is no free lunch

[Bert64]

It is actually extremely rare for anyone to do a proper evaluation...
I know people who will evaluate multiple options based on their marketing literature and create a spreadsheet comparing feature checkboxes...
Some people won't even pay lip service to doing an evaluation, and will just choose something quite arbitrarily.
In the munich case, he chose open source and open standards for the significant long term benefits they will provide...

Give it a few years and noone will be able to argue against it, and the costs of migration and retraining often cited as reasons not to use open source will actually work the other way.

Re:There is no free lunch

[Bert64]

VBA was used because there were no other options when you're already locked into an MS stack...
Corel always made a much better suite than MS, and yet they were pushed out of the market by an inferior product... It's not about how good something is, its about how heavily marketed or pushed via other means it is.

Re:There is no free lunch

[Bert64]

Yes, such a messy infrastructure would always be difficult to migrate... It needed to be centralised in any case and moving it all to a uniform microsoft system is likely to have been even more costly and time consuming.
The fact that such a setup is being successfully migrated to linux in the end is actually a positive endorsement of linux. I have seen similar situations where decentralised systems like this were moved to a centrally managed windows network and it always took a long time and went over budget...

Re:There is no free lunch

[Sir_Lewk]

It's called "pay someone else to do it for you", just like you pay someone else to install closed source solutions.

Not really a hard concept.

Re:There is no free lunch

[profplump]

DSL, while useful at the time, is years out-of-date, and has no intentions of updating. There might still be applications for it, but none where you would be worried about a floppy drive. It's a little like complaining that your C64 requires floppies -- of course it does, because that was the only option at the time it was built.

Ignoring the fact that you can do a full install of almost any linux distro on a $12 flash drive, there are a lot of options for "fits on a X megabyte drive" distros that are newer and easier to load and use than DSL.

Re:There is no free lunch

[Korin43]

Pidgin (with webcams), Gnome-Do, Banshee, KCacheGrind, GParted, apt-get..

Re:There is no free lunch

[Insanity Defense]

What could you possibly desire to run that Windows OS will not execute? I cannot think of anything.

Dolphin.

Re:There is no free lunch

[elashish14]

Of course. He left after joining the Super Adventure Club.

Re:There is no free lunch

[Anpheus]

No, I think the suggestion is that the City of Munich, his IT department head both had the mistaken notion that an open source solution was better because it was open source. Not because it was cheaper than keeping the existing solution after exhaustive cost benefit analysis, not because it would provide better features or improve productivity... They wanted to switch to open source because it was open source.

This ideology is just as bad as an IT head or a politician going against open source because it's scary and new, and moving toward a completely proprietary or closed source system.

Re:There is no free lunch

[Anpheus]

Forgot to close </em> tag. Oops.

Re:There is no free lunch

[Elektroschock]

Use LXDE

Re:There is no free lunch

[Elektroschock]

No, just that they didn't know about the complication. In any case, a lock-in is a strategic problem of your IT infrastructure which needs to get fixed.

Re:There is no free lunch

[Elektroschock]

In other words, someone hacked VBA shit without any central knowledge and they had to provide that functionality and now they hack their shit with Linux.

Re:There is no free lunch

[Runaway1956]

I'm not going to swear to it, but I think my old 386 did network booting.

Sorry, I'm not going to try to find all the parts and put it together, just to find out.

Re:There is no free lunch

[hairyfeet]

Step one, pop drive out. Step two, use cheap ass USB IDE adapter to put OS on drive Surpluscomputers has a nice one for $20. Step three put drive back in. Step Four...there is no step four as you are done.

See how easy that was? Hell of a lot nicer than dealing with...gag shudder wretch...floppies.

Re:There is no free lunch

[whoever57]

I've found that OSS is typically good for common software like browsers, media players, word processors, and so on, but not for specialized tasks like CAD or ASIC development, or for operating systems. In the latter case it's better to stick with the "standard" Windows system and proprietary software. It causes fewer headaches.

Yeah, that's why most ASIC development is done under Windows..... oh wait! It's not! You can't get a complete set of ASIC tools under Windows from the major vendors.

Re:There is no free lunch

[whoever57]

What could you possibly desire to run that Windows OS will not execute? I cannot think of anything.

Considering that in another post you specifically mentioned CAD and ASIC tools, you are clearly being disingenuous here. Go and look at the tools from Synopsys, Cadence, Magma Design Automation and Mentor. Yes, they have some tools that run under Windows but you can't get a complete tool chain from them if you want Windows-based tools.

Re:There is no free lunch

[Nefarious Wheel]

VBA was probably their only choice.

I worked at one of the major Australian banks; Excel/VBA was the norm, not the exception. It was uniformly horrid (except for the stuff I wrote, of course ;P). It was also highly portable, and standard enough to send betweeen different financial organisations (we're talking "financial instruments worth billions").

The real reason for all that VBA code, and one that nearly caused me to post this AC, was a bit more back-door.

A department can hire people to write a few Excel macros locally, but anything that looks like a "programming project" is, by policy, sent off shore for development, which can double the cost and triple the duration of a project. Off-shore development seems wise at the C-level, but the poor sods who have to get a report out for the tax people have an entirely different perception.

So, a few thousand lines of "it's only a macro, really" keeps middle management away of the - rather painful - outsourcing mill. This is not speculation, this is how it worked.

These middle managers are the equivalent of the senior staff sergeants who creatively interpret orders to avoid getting themselves and their platoons killed.

Re:There is no free lunch

[gwjgwj]

I've found that OSS is typically good for common software like browsers, media players, word processors, and so on, but not for specialized tasks like CAD or ASIC development, or for operating systems

I wonder, what operating system you are using to design your ASICs. There is no Cadence port to Windows yet, and probably never will be.

Re:There is no free lunch

[gwjgwj]

"Nothing worthwile is free." Air?

Not for long. Ever heard about CO2 quotas?

Re:There is no free lunch

[purpledinoz]

You should tell your boss to memorize this: If it ain't broke, don't fix it!

Re:There is no free lunch

[PeterBrett]

Yes. On my previous job they asked me to create a schematic, and of course I had to wait a week for the IT staff to show-up and install the necessary machine on my machine. While I was waiting I searched for OSS CAD alternatives, gave each one a quick spin, and determined they were all inadequate.

Inadequate for what? gEDA has been successfully used to design several satellite payloads, at least one multi-FPGA number crunchers, software-defined radio equipment, SDSL modems, and very high power converters for wave power applications. The only major downside is that it's not supported on Windows.

(Disclosure: I'm a developer.)

For ASIC design, every IC design shop I've worked at has used Cadence and/or Synopsys running on Serious Hardware in the server room, accessed by engineers using some sort of remote desktop system (either X over SSH or a VNC-alike).

For mechanical CAD, ProE runs just fine on Linux.

The issue isn't that Munich wants to switch to Open Source for everything -- even as a FOSS developer myself, I'd be the first to admit that for some (many?) applications there isn't a FOSS solution on the market -- but that they want to standardise on a single, open platform that includes all of the standard "productivity" applications, and as much other stuff as makes sense.

Re:There is no free lunch

[hairyfeet]

Don't know why you would actually want Amarok (seems kinda clunky to me) but you can run it on Windows if Amarok is really what floats your boat. Personally I would go with Media Monkey or if you are strictly FOSS then I'd go with Songbird, but whatever. You can probably run F Spot too, but again why would you want to?

Re:There is no free lunch

[Sulphur]

An IT chef? No more burned Guinness. Mmmm.

Re:There is no free lunch

[RMS Eats Toejam]

Aaaah, I see now. If once piece of software is rubbish, then surely any other pieces of software under the same license must also be rubbish!

Quite wrong, in fact. That's not what he intended to say and not what the rest of us interpreted. Rather, he was providing some much needed balance that is often missing here on Slashdot. FOSS advocates like yourself are rarely objective enough to admit than Open Source is not always the best solution to any given problem. El Lobo was on topic, so kindly take your cheap sarcasm elsewhere.

Re:There is no free lunch

[joebagodonuts]

"In any case, a lock-in is a strategic problem of your IT infrastructure which needs to get fixed."

This is just a peeve of mine, but any chance this is a myth? I mean, really - who gets harmed by being "locked-in"? I can think of senarios, but how much do those senarios actually impact real world? I think this strategic problem that needs fixing exists only in the minds of MBAs.

With all of the mergers/acquisitions that have happened in the last10 years, I'd think it would be increasing difficult NOT to be locked in, in spite of efforts to avoid it. Do you think there folks who went with hp and Compaq, to avoid being locked in? I know of some. So much for that effort. Or someone who bought Mercury monitoring because they didn't want to increase hp presence by purchasing OpenView?

In spite of their efforts, they are increasingly "locked in"... and despite the lock in, they aren't suffering. Other than angst over strategic problems

Re:There is no free lunch

[Elektroschock]

In simple market terms a lock-in is a serious dependency of your infrastructure which means higher prices.

The lock-in has commercial value for your vendor because it weakens your negotiations. You have no choice to take another product.

Re:There is no free lunch

[fritsd]

This is just a peeve of mine, but any chance this is a myth? I mean, really - who gets harmed by being "locked-in"? I can think of senarios, but how much do those senarios actually impact real world?

Well, this is just a hunch, don't get me wrong, but.. the city of München (est. 1158) is 850 years old. Let's assume it will still be around in 150 years when they have their 1000-year celebration. Do you expect Microsoft to be still around by then? If not, and the vendor lock-in is complete (which is of course an exaggeration) then they will have quite a problem upgrading.. at some unspecified point in the future when MS (est. 1975) ceases to exist. So, they can either upgrade to an open-standards-based solution then, or do it now.
(Note I'm not claiming Linux will be around in 150 years, but it's not impossible, and anyways document longevity is more important than software implementation longevity)
The problem is that individuals and companies don't have to think on larger timescales but governments do. Or, at least they should. That means the governments need to set the parameters (open standards, no vendor lock-in) for the companies they contract to adhere to. I realize I'm describing a bit of an utopia here :-)

Re:There is no free lunch

[joebagodonuts]

Ah. I was thinking of it from a technical standpoint (go figure), rather than a market one. Thanks

Re:There is no free lunch

[joebagodonuts]

Thanks for the reply. The longevity point is well made.

Re:There is no free lunch

[dobster]

5.25" floppies suck? Funny, my disks from 1983 are still working. Well, most of them.

Re:There is no free lunch

[DaVince21]

Well, you need to consider when and where to replace a system. Replacing one that works well with one that might not have matured fully yet definitely won't come over well, especially since it DID work well before.

Re:There is no free lunch

[commodore64_love]

Open source only seems to work if it's backed by a major contributor, like Firefox and seaMonkey by Google. Otherwise it tends to be buggy and non-user-friendly.

And I have yet to find an open-source OS that can run everything I want. (Of course the same is true with Mac OS - can't run a lot of Windows software on OSX.) Just yesterday I asked a guy how to copy a .img file to a floppy and this was his response: "sudo dd if=/path_to_image.img of=/dev/fd0" which I tried and of course did not work. So then I searched the web and found a nice easy-to-use WinNT program that worked flawlessly.

I wish the ReactOS would get off the ground, so we could have a Windows-compatible alternative without having to support Microsoft. Just as we had IBM PC clones, we need to have MS Windows clones.

Re:There is no free lunch

[commodore64_love]

The problem with all your suggestions is that it involves spending money on an old 386 machine.

My solution (install off floppies) means no money wasted. And once the DSL or Kolibros is on the hard drive, I never need to use the floppies again.

Re:There is no free lunch

[commodore64_love]

>>>There is a difference between execute, and run well.

Well in my experience Windows and Mac aps run a hell of a lot better than Linux aps. I've lost track of how many DAYS I've wasted on Ubuntu Linux trying to get crap to simply run. For excample: Opera 10. I still can't get it to install on my machine. In contrast Windows and Mac programs simply work.

Re:There is no free lunch

[micheas]

As I tried to say in the grandparent of this post, you can find examples in favor of almost every operating system by selecting specific programs.

One other thing to consider is how hard is it going to be to keep all the programs on the machine updated.

Windows, and some windows programs are very easy to keep updated. Some windows programs are a nightmare, as you have to visit a website, or write a screen scraper, to find out if you have to update, and then you have to manually do the update.

Debian, if you don't need to venture outside of the repositories, and there is a reasonable chance that this is true, as Debian has tens of thousands of packages in the official repositories, is trivial to keep updated, even if you have a few thousand packages installed on your computer.

I have a hard time believing that it takes days to install opera on ubuntu, but this page does seem to make it seem like there are issues with opera on linux, something one would think that opera would be interested in fixing, you might contact them. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/OperaBrowser

Re:There is no free lunch

[JasterBobaMereel]

The problems they have had seem to be twofold ...

Trying to rationalise multiple systems doing the same thing in different often poorly documented ways - would be a problem no matter what system they were upgrading to, even Windows

Trying to change to a non-windows system - would be a problem no matter which system they chose (other than Windows)

What is surprising is how few problems they seem to have had ....

Because every project is late

[0racle]

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.

Re:Because every project is late

[WrongSizeGlass]

Indeed.

Every major project always takes longer than expected because so many small details are exposed as you uproot any existing system or workflow process. Instead of looking at this as something that may have been "more trouble than they bargained for" we should learn from it and understand that migrating to Linux won't be any easier than migrating to or from any other platform. I think there are two things to take away from Munich's Linux migration:
* It can be done.
* Being on the leading edge carries with it a lot of responsibility to those who will follow you.

Re:Because every project is late

[Hatta]

Everyone always underestimates how long anything non-trivial is going to take.

That's Hofstadter's law. "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law."

Re:Because every project is late

[shutdown -p now]

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.

Just like Vista, then? ~

Re:Because every project is late

[Locutus]

but it sounds like most of the problems were due to underestimating how many non-standard development tools and products were used and the trouble getting those over to GNU/Linux. Many of them required either the original vendor to port to an open standard or replacing the existing product with one which was based on open standards. The first option meant that most likely a Microsoft Partner Program member would have to be hired to provide the same product for the GNU/Linux clients. This might normally be an easier option except being a _Microsoft Partner_ often times means you are not allowed to work on other platforms. So the 2nd option is most likely their only choice and that is more expensive in that it would require all users to change the underlying software they currently use for the task.

All in all, this sounds like confirmation that Microsoft's strategy of proprietary API's and patented IP was successful in making it costly to leave their platform. It also shows that it is not impossible and in the long run, it will probably be shown that getting off the Microsoft treadmill might be expensive up front but over time, become very cost effective. Rip and Replace most often ends up resulting in a better, faster, cheaper solution when managed well.

LoB

Re:Because every project is late

[shaitand]

"Every major project always takes longer than expected because so many small details are exposed as you uproot any existing system or workflow process."

Yep, that and because if you don't underestimate cost and time to completion then nobody will ever agree to pay for it. For some reason people don't like to face real costs and time involved. They prefer fantasy unrealistic numbers.

Re:Because every project is late

[Anonymous Coward]

Also it should be considered that (1) much of the cause of the delays were due to proprietary lock-in on several levels of the existing systems and (2) they could have done it quicker, but they chose instead to take a slower approach and fix several problems along the way. This doesn't stand out as a bad thing to me at all, it simply proves that doing this type of migration will take time and should be planned as such, but will be worth it in the end.

Re:Because every project is late

[Locutus]

just more AC weenies feeling like they need to defend Microsoft. FYI, I knew a guy who build a business around MS .NET and when the .com crash hit, he told me that he had to turn away Java work because of the partnership he had with Microsoft. He was laying of some of his developers and had to turn away Java business.

This type of thing is SOP for Microsoft and so is complicating APIs just to make it difficult for developers to change platforms. These things have been documented many times over the past couple of decades and has nothing to do with open source.

naive little ACs need to get out and look around alittle bit before they go off protecting their beloved Microsoft.

LoB

I find this interesting

[AvitarX]

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.

Re:I find this interesting

[KarmaMB84]

I believe you have to use the non-ISO versions of ODF for formulas. I'm not sure OASIS has submitted anything newer than ODF 1.0 to the ISO.

Re:I find this interesting

[Todd Knarr]

It's not ambiguous in the spec, it's undefined in the spec. But one thing is defined in the spec: a way to do application-specific spreadsheet formulas without breaking the standard and without conflicting with a standardized way of expressing formulas when it's finally standardized. The expectation is that applications will do formulas their own way, possibly recognizing other application-specific formulas (there actually aren't that many different formats). When formulas are finally standardized applications will begin using the standard and will convert any non-standard formulas they recognize into the standard form when the spreadsheet's read in, resulting in a quiet upgrade to the standard form.

And in the meantime, ODF can be used for things like word-processing documents that don't require formulas without having to wait for one spreadsheet-specific feature to be completed.

Re:I find this interesting

[dave562]

What happens when you want to say... paste a spreadsheet into your document?

Re:I find this interesting

[Todd Knarr]

Then you end up with a neatly-formatted table with columns and rows corresponding to what was in your spreadsheet. Tables were part of the ODF 1.0 spec, no problems there.

Re:I find this interesting

[Bearhouse]

Ahhhhh...right. I'll just run that down to the finance drones who have umpteen gazillion Excel macros, (representing an equally huge number of man-hours), doing 'vital' stuff.

What projects like this really need is someone, (hello IBM?) to come up with a smart way to migrate all this shit, (macro-laden Office Docx - it's not just Excel, guys) to FOSS. Don't get me started on ActiveX...

I'm a big fan of Ooffice, but all too frequently you'll open an (Office 2203, not even the latest..) Powerpoint presentation in Oo and all kinds of stuff is broken.
So how far away are we from seamlessly migrating complex spreadsheets? A long way....

Which is, of course, what the boys in Redmond have always wanted...

Re:I find this interesting

[lazybeam]

I'm a big fan of Ooffice, but all too frequently you'll open a [...] Powerpoint presentation in Microsoft Office and all kinds of stuff is broken.

Fixed that for you. Office often can't seem to elegantly open its own documents when transferred between differing computers. Unless it is a really simple document, formatting and layout can be completely off. I don't deal with Excel so much but I've seen PPTs and DOCs mangled horribly. I'm not saying ODF (or OOo) is perfect: I'm saying MS definitely isn't!

Re:I find this interesting

[fritsd]

Yes, ODF 1.2: It's been worked on since 2007 or so and now in the stage "public review of committee draft" (here (as PDF, replace .pdf by .odt for the ODF). AFAIK, next stage is "committee specification" and that sounds like it's nearing completion.
The formulas are in a separate (IMHO well-written and useful) sub-spec called "OpenFormula".

Re:I find this interesting

[fritsd]

Nobody is using ODF for any non-trivial interoperablilty, its just freetard code for "we use OpenOffice".

Sorry, but I believe that's just wrong. Google for "ODF plugfest". I quote:

The previous plugfest in The Hague was visited by over sixtyfive participants from forty different companies, open source projects and governments.

doesn't sound like "OpenOffice only" to me.
Or test your document out at http://officeshots.org/; I spot 12 Linux/BSD word processor programs there and 8 MS Windows word processors. 5 of which are OpenOffice/StarOffice on the different platforms.

Re:I find this interesting

[DaVince21]

Like docx is "MS needed a new document format, looked at ODF and made a butchered version based on that"?
File extensions don't dictate "look what I use". ODF is an open format which means you're free to implement it in any office suite. And several that aren't OpenOffice already have.

Move them all into the CLOUD

[Spy Handler]

1. Move them all into CLOUD computing 2. ??? 3. Profit!

Re:Move them all into the CLOUD

[WrongSizeGlass]

1. Move them all into CLOUD computing
2. ???
3. Profit!

I believe #2 is "pray", unless you're a 'cloud host' and then it's "prey".

Bad title is bad.

[Statecraftsman]

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.

Re:Bad title is bad.

[bluefoxlucid]

kdawson is a Microsoft shill. At least that's what I'm told.

Re:Bad title is bad.

[MozeeToby]

Very true, by the sound of the blog most of their problems stem from how poorly the systems were managed before. Different versions of Windows running different levels of updates; hundreds of authorized apps, many with overlapping or duplicate functionality; unauthorized applications that had made their way into the work-flows without being documented; proprietary software that didn't follow open standards. I wonder how much of their effort has gone into just getting their infrastructure should have been before the transition even started.

Re:Bad title is bad.

[MightyMartian]

Can't speak to that, but having read the article, it bears little resemblance to the posting title. From what I can tell, this sounds like some mistakes in planning the migration early on. That would happen if you were moving to any new system, FOSS or proprietary.

Re:Bad title is bad.

[Obfuscant]

there is much digital waste to be cleaned up on exit from the proprietary.

This is not a proprietary/FOSS issue. Every programmer knows that version 2 of the code is better than version 1. More than once I've "rm * .o" and gotten rid of more than just the objects on the way to recompiling them all, and every time that happens, the code I write to replace what went away is tighter, cleaner, and runs faster. I already know what works, I already know the processes, and I usually come up with a better solution to doing the same thing. (Of course I never benefit from that now, since it taught me to use RCS...)

This would happen with a change from Proprietary A to Proprietary B just as much as from Proprietary to FOSS. Or FOSS to proprietary.

Re:Bad title is bad.

[Anonymous Coward]

kdawson doesn't actually exist, its a sockpuppet the regular editors use because they're ashamed of associating with their juvenile userbase of lintard wingnuts.

Re:Bad title is bad.

[mikrorechner]

OP here. I have to defend kdawson this time - he just posted what I submitted.

Myself, I'm certainly no Microsoft shill - I'm a Linux proponent, and interested in the LiMux project because I live in Munich.

If the title seems overly negative, I apologize - I'm no native speaker and might have chosen the wrong words.

Re:Bad title is bad.

[hoggoth]

> If the title seems overly negative, I apologize - I'm no native speaker and might have chosen the wrong words.

Yes, "WOES" may not have been as optimistic as you were thinking. Perhaps "TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS" would have put a more positive spin on it?
Or "UNMITIGATED DISASTER", I always like that phrase for a boost in my mood.

Re:Bad title is bad.

[nstlgc]

wait what

Re:Bad title is bad.

[mikrorechner]

Well, the article is about the woes of the linux migration. The blog post it refers to also mentions the positive aspects...

Well, I guess I can't salvage this one.

Re:Bad title is bad.

[Lulfas]

It was also a great opportunity to waste $10m at a time when Germany is about ready to get bent over to pay for the useless Greeks.

Re:Bad title is bad.

[frank_adrian314159]

Very true, by the sound of the blog most of their problems stem from how poorly the systems were managed before.

If they weren't smart enough to do the research to know this before they started, they were unqualified to do the migration.

Re:Bad title is bad.

[Kjella]

The thing is, this is business as usual at many places. Being nimble is how IT departments survive, if you get people skilled in some tools you hand them those tools instead of retraining. If there's money in the budget to buy new hardware you might upgrade your laptops and use a new OS, if you don't you stay and the old OS stays. Companies split and merge and reorganize and there's never the one unified global perfect IT solution.

I have met companies where it was utterly impossible to get the tools you needed because they had to be run up and down the whole chain of command and tested to work for all users and often they'd try to give you something else that didn't do the job. Everything was raised to the level of Policy with capital P, it was full of absurdities like we could only get machines with the new corporate image but vital software was not approved, only for the old but we couldn't get the old image because that was Policy straight from the top. My estimate, just from the time they were messing us around - and we were consultants and billing - I suspect they lost at least 10,000$ between the three of us.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for systems handled by a competent system administrator, with proper images and procedures to operate like a real department and not hodgepodge central. But this "you can have any software you want, as long as it's a black T-Ford" is not productive at all. Most of the time, it works quite fine for all of them even though they different solutions, because they've all been adapted to what they're doing and whatnot. The only real problem is when you try coming in and think we'll replace all of this with a Linux solution. Then you discover that there's thousands of little gotchas everywhere and you're "one system to rule them all" is almost as unworkable as the old system. Or you manage to pull it together for a short while only to see people tearing it apart in ten different directions again.

It's always safer to make changes you know the impact of. Maybe there's some magical company out there that's avoided it, but in every company I've been to there's been a gray mass of "I don't know enough about who and how is using this to say if we can change it." even from the people who should be the most authoritative on it. There's no real way of making sure everyone's been asked, but you can bet the screaming will start once something breaks. And so people don't want to do it, they don't want to do the big corporate-wide changes. Run it by the local IT department, make the changes locally and if it works, great. No need to wake the slumbering beast of trying to push it into the standard application list unless you got a fetish for paperwork and meetings and writing documentation.

Re:Bad title is bad.

[fritsd]

Thank you for keeping us informed, regardless of positive or negative spin :-)

Re:Bad title is bad.

[Eunuchswear]

Every programmer knows that version 2 of the code is better than version 1.

Yes, every programmer knows this, and like many things everyone knows it isn't always true. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect

Re:Bad title is bad.

[bmajik]

From reading the blog post, I was surprised by the # of city staff and # of separate IT departments. From my time in munich [living there for 2 weeks, taking classes at BWS with my wife], I liked the city very much. However my impression is that Munich and surrounding areas that could be considered extensions of the city have a population of only 1M persons. Munich seemed very well developed for this size population, i.e. the u-bahn and s-bahn systems were very extensive and efficient [much better than Berlin, which contends still with re-unification].

Is my assessment of the population of Munich inaccurate? Does Munich have extra functions (perhaps from acting as a seat of government for Bavaria?) that this project is also addressing?

It seems like a large IT infrastructure with many employees and departments. For instance if there are 3000 desktops in use by city workers, on a population of 1m, there is a .3% ratio of humans to government desktops. What percentage of munich's population is a city government employee?

Re:Bad title is bad.

[mikrorechner]

Good to hear that you enjoyed your stay here - and even took the time to take classes!

The City of Munich has a population of about 1.36M, not counting the surrounding municipalities that are often connected to the S-Bahn and hard to tell apart from the actual city.

The city administration has about 30,000 employees. That might seem a lot, but Munich provides many services that often are outsourced in other cities, e.g. garbage disposal. There are many Bavarian state agencies located in Munich, but these are completely separate. I don't know your background, but keep in mind that generally speaking, European cities keep many more people employed in the public sector compared to cities in the US.

I don't know why there are so many separate IT departments - probably a mixture of grown stucture and bad planning.

Re:We thought about doing this in Canada

[Anonymous Coward]

How about LinuxEh?

No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[khasim]

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?

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[Em Emalb]

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?

This is an insightful post. However, I firmly believe if a US poster made this comment (about the US government) their comment would be labeled a troll comment.

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[haeger]

Yes, because it's not like there's a large number of german companies that specialize in windows development and managing windows. That's only something that open source has.

Let's be a little honest about the benefits of OSS please. There are plenty, but saying that proprietary software is bad for the local economy is just misleading.

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[gestalt_n_pepper]

God help the users if German developers and engineers modify the software. It will all run perfectly until someone makes a trivial human mistake.

Sorry, just trying to get over my BMW/VW nightmares. The flashbacks are terrible.

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[dave562]

They'd be paying German programmers if that was important to them. Otherwise they'd outsource it to India like every other large organization. The article mentions that the IT department was somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 employees. Employees are trainable. It doesn't matter if they are running Linux, Windows, Unix or OSX. Their systems required trained administrators.

To all the OSS zealots, where is the cost savings on labor? Where is the meme that it takes more labor resources to manage Windows servers? Is Munich going to downsize their IT department once they're done with their Linux migration? Or are they going to find themselves living in the real world and realize that x number and y number of applications requires z number of staff to support?

I wonder how much of the "cost savings" on software licenses is being consumed by developer hours recreating functionality.

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[mqduck]

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 (which isn't how I interpreted it), then that's offensive no matter which government we're talking about. Still, I hardly ever hear people (besides myself) saying that things like "Buy American-Made" is offensive anyway.

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[h4rr4r]

It seems more like practicality to me. If you are a government and have to spend similar amounts of money might as well spend it where you get some back as taxes. Exporting your wealth is generally a bad idea.

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[Em Emalb]

Nationalism:

1.national spirit or aspirations.
2.devotion and loyalty to one's own nation; patriotism.

Nationalism gets a bad rap, IMO. There's nothing wrong at all with being loyal and/or devoted to your own country. Heck, it permeates everything, just about.

Anyway, the point was exactly what I said, there's a double-standard on here where it's perfectly fine for someone from another country to look out for their country, but if someone from the US does it, it's troll-bait/flame-bait.

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[h4rr4r]

No, but paying for windows is exporting a heck of a lot of wealth. Proprietary software made in the local country would have this advantage too.

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[h4rr4r]

I wonder how much of the "cost savings" on software licenses is being consumed by developer hours recreating functionality.

Even if it consumes every last cent, it would still be a big win. That is money you spent in the local economy not exported, plus it means they are free from future payments for this tech.

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[mcgrew]

I'm surprised that there aren't any Microsoft fans with mod points today, or he would have been (incorrectly) modded troll anyway. Hell, yesterday in the thread about which AV software was best, I was modded troll for mentioning that Windows was the only OS that needed AV.

And they think Apple and Linux fans are bad!

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[dave420]

Surely the world would be much better off without nationalism. Just as the world is better off without Townism, Caveism, and Familyism. We are bigger than our countries make us look. Being proud of other people's achievements makes as much sense as being full after someone else eats dinner. You didn't do it, so why be proud of it? Simply because the person doing something cool was accidentally born in the same place you were accidentally born? How does that make sense? It's just people trying to find pride in anything that will, in their opinion, make them seem better to other folks. Only the insecure need nationalism & patriotism. Those secure enough don't need to wave someone else's flag to feel good about themselves, or to feel like they belong.

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[mcgrew]

Just be glad you don't have a Toyota!

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[dave420]

Antivirus software exists for both Linux and OS X, by the way. Your argument is trolly, as it's not even true. But anyway, you had your ass handed to you by the moderators already for that one, so fair enough.

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[dave562]

So rather than benefiting everyone, they benefit the local economy. That seems sort of selfish, in a nationlistic, protectionist sort of way. (I'm just teasing, I tend to promote local solutions whenever possible). The real meat of my question is what the savings really are. They are spending a certain amount of money on "licensing fees". They are going to stop spending money on licensing fees and start spending it on "in house development". What I'm curious about is the real difference between the two.

I used to do IT work for a local city government here in California. Their building and planning department used a Windows based permit system. It was the same permit system used by government agencies all over the state, and the country. Permits aren't that complex and the functionality could have easily been recreated as a web app, or even a local app. Lets say that Munich uses a similar permit system. Where is the benefit of having their own system that is different from everyone else? The permit system I was familiar with exported to Word (.doc), Excel (.csv) and PDF. It supported OCR of the city's specific forms.

The only way I can see the Munich solution being a win is if they sell or lease their code and applications to anyone else who is willing to pay for them. If they don't, they're simply replacing one system with another. On top of it, they're replacing one system that is used by numerous organizations (and understood by that many people) with a system that only they understand (and is therefore that much harder to find / train people on). I'm not talking about Samba and OpenLDAP and what have you. I mean the day to day applications that support the government processes.

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[Em Emalb]

As soon as they abolish taxes, or tax everything equally all over the world for use in a global fund, I'll stop concerning myself with what happens in my city/state/federal government.

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[Maxo-Texas]

The benefit is if they develop an open source permit system, then many people can use it for free.
Many people will contribute to the open source permit system.

If it's based on open standards, then other folks will be able to develop compatible permit systems in the future.

They won't have to buy a copy for version 1992, then version 1995, then version 1998, then version 1998se, then version 2000, then version 2003, then version 2005, then version 2006, and finally for version 2010.

With closed data and closed source- you pay and pay and pay. (and will continue to pay in the future).

And it they go belly up or stop supporting the product, then you are really screwed.

---

All of my personal software stack except dragon dictate is now opensource products that use open source data formats (and support most proprietary formats as well).

When the 2007 versions of office came out- they were damn hard to climb the learning curve (about 5-7 months to get back full productivity and some of my 2003 documents became unprintable-- which I solved by moving them to openoffice).

Munich had a real hairball. At the end of the move, their systems will be much cleaner. And they won't have to rebuy the same software 10 more times over the next 30 years (if the current track record holds).

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[dave562]

Is it safe to presume that Munich has similar "open" access to the city budget processes that we enjoy here in America. It would be an interesting project to monitor their IT budget for the next five years. If it goes down then we can agree the project is a success. If it doesn't, I think we can say that they did a great job of re-inventing the wheel.

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[oatworm]

Right - it's about trade-offs. If you can create more wealth than you'd lose by switching to a more efficient product created out of your municipality, everybody wins.

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[pipatron]

Just because software exists doesn't mean you need it.

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[m.ducharme]

I have a Toyota, you insensitive clod! (and it runs just fine too)

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[KDR_11k]

You can try making those accountants explain their requirements to an Indian developer.

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[Bert64]

It wouldn't really benefit the local government in texas to send all their money to washington... It would still be much better for them to hire local texans and pump the money into their own local economy...
When the government spends money in the local economy, a chunk of it comes back to them in the form of tax. When they give it to a foreign corporation it's all gone.

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[Bert64]

Most Linux/OSX AV software is designed to detect windows viruses, and is usually intended for unix servers which serve files or other data to windows users... If your unix boxes don't serve windows users there's really no need for any antivirus.
I run all unix based systems at home (2 laptops, 2 desktops, 3 embedded linux boxes, 1 small server) and have no antivirus on any of them.

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[Bert64]

Those companies which specialize in windows development and management can only do so to a limited degree, they cannot modify the core of the system or provide proper support (ie bugfixes)...
They are effectively limited to providing first line support, and have to defer to a foreign corporation for anything more advanced.

And even if you buy through a local reseller and buy whatever support you can locally, the price of the software itself is still going out of the local econony.

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[Bert64]

But when talking about long term, the benefits of not being locked in to proprietary products are huge.

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[b4dc0d3r]

Running, sure. How does it do in the "stopping" category?

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[Lulfas]

It's not the running that's a problem, it is the stopping!

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[tftp]

They are going to stop spending money on licensing fees and start spending it on "in house development". What I'm curious about is the real difference between the two.

A licensing fee, especially one that is sent abroad, is not contributing to the education or employment of citizens of the country. If you hire local developers, they will become good at programming and will be able to design more software later. This is exactly the question of giving a man a fish or a fishing rod.

If you take this situation to the extreme, as an illustration, you can have a country that spends $100M yearly on licensing and still has not a single programmer who can write "Hello, World". This means that those $100M will have to be spent year after year.

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[Bert64]

The development costs will be a one off...
Having maintained windows, linux, solaris and novell based networks my experience is basically...

You require competent staff to manage any system properly, microsoft marketing says otherwise so windows networks often end up being operated very badly by incompetent staff (and have major security and stability problems as a result)... Generally only more competent people even know linux exists, so the cheaper less competent staff will never even think to try linux - if they did the results would still be bad but probably not as bad as a poorly deployed windows setup.

If you don't mind a poor setup, windows will cost more than linux but you will probably not be able to find as many extremely cheap low skilled staff pretending to have linux skills as windows...

If you want a good secure linux setup you need decent staff...
If you want a good secure windows setup you not only need decent staff but also a lot of third party software...

It's also my experience that you need more staff to maintain a windows setup unless you cut corners...

The problem is corner cutting, people think they can cut corners with windows but the end result is a huge insecure mess.. 99% of the companies i've ever been to simply don't have the budget to maintain a windows network properly..

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[Bert64]

Buying proprietary software doesn't benefit everyone, it only benefits the single vendor of that software (to your own detriment often, as you get locked in)...
Buying locally shifts that benefit away from a single foreign entity, to one or more local entities which is beneficial for government who get their tax revenue from those same local entities.

However, by using open source they are contributing benefits to everyone... Any development they contribute back will benefit everyone, even any bug reports they make will ultimately benefit the community as a whole.

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[Elektroschock]

I didn't know the US first nation was into programming.

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[ffreeloader]

I would say nobody who runs Linux, other than the absolute Linux noob whose only computer experience has been on Windows, runs any AV other than on mail or file servers that have Windows clients. It's sole purpose is to stop viruses from spreading on Windows clients, not for protecting the server OS.

I looked at ClamAV when I first started using Linux. I spent days looking at virus definitions and there wasn't a single definition for a Linux virus. They were all for Windows viruses. That, along with leaving a fresh Debian install without a firewall connected directly to the internet for a month with no problems, convinced me that there was no need for AV on Linux. I've come across nothing in the 6 years of using Linux exclusively since then that would cause me to think any differently.

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[Elektroschock]

A strategic dependency from a company is a problem. For a larger client doing a Linux migration, even a fake one, is just the smart thing to do. It helps you to identify and overcome your lock-ins.

In Germany the government provides a nice guide for platform independence.

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[Philip_the_physicist]

Not just that, but if you have the choice between hiring people and paying them the dole, you might as well get something useful out of them.

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[Barsteward]

The world would be much better off without religion. We'd all get along much better and be friendlier to each other. Religion is the real poison.

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[Muros]

It depends on the circumstances. I'm not a fan of blind nationalism from the citizens of any country, but getting modifications to software made by local developers makes perfect sense. The software will have to be localised, so you don't want any stupid mistranslations by some Indian or Chinese worker converting from English to German, English to Spanish, American to English, etc., and developers will have a better chance of providing what is needed if they are actually able to be in the same room as their customers and be shown what they want, rather than trying to talk about it on the phone.

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[PeterBrett]

Is it safe to presume that Munich has similar "open" access to the city budget processes that we enjoy here in America. It would be an interesting project to monitor their IT budget for the next five years. If it goes down then we can agree the project is a success. If it doesn't, I think we can say that they did a great job of re-inventing the wheel.

Even if it doesn't go down, it would be worth looking at where the money spent is going. If it's going to businesses in Bayern instead of to Microsoft, it'll be a bonus. Also, don't forget the non-fiscal incentives for moving away from the previous setup, particularly data lockin.

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[hairyfeet]

Actually I would say what slaughtered the Germans was the Soviet T-34 which was like the Sherman cheap to crank out and tough as nails. The Panzers and later KTs were damn nice pieces of machinery but like the rest of the German tech they were too much of a PITA to fix.

As for TFA, it sounds like they didn't do much of a cost/benefit or migration plan before starting. If you fail to plan you plan to fail, simple as that. I don't care if it is proprietary or OSS, any time you are doing a huge change over like that serious planning better be done beforehand if you don't want it to bite you in the ass.

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[dave420]

Being concerned with where you live is not the same as equating yourself with where you live. I don't know where you got that impression.

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[mcgrew]

Don't worry about my karma, I don't. It's just an annoyance when shills get mod points. Other commenters handed you your ass and straightened you out about Linux AV, so I won't redundantly repeat that it isn't needed in Linux. Educate yourself about other OSes than Windows and you won't look like such a fool.

And what do trolleys have to do with moderation?

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[quickOnTheUptake]

Why did you stop so soon?

3. excessive patriotism; chauvinism.

The problem with nationalism is that it tends to make race the basis of political loyalty. It is just tribalism on a grand scale. Wikipedia does a nice job on this:

Nationalism generally involves the identification of an ethnic identity with a state. The subject can include the belief that one's nation is of primary importance. . . . In some cases the identification of a homogeneous national culture is combined with a negative view of other races or cultures. In former eras, people were generally loyal to a city or to a particular leader rather than to their nation.

Much later it goes on discussing criticisms:

Nationalism is inherently divisive because it highlights differences between peoples, emphasising an individual's identification with their own nation. . . . Nationalism has often been exploited to encourage citizens to partake in the nations conflicts. Such examples include The Great War and World War Two, where nationalism was a key component of propaganda material. . . . Famous pacifist Bertrand Russell criticizes nationalism of diminishing individual's capacity to judge his or her fatherland's foreign policy. William Blum has said this in other words: "If love is blind, patriotism has lost all five senses." Albert Einstein stated that "Nationalism is an infantile disease... It is the measles of mankind."

Not to Godwin the thread but in this case it is quite appropriate, Nazis were nationalists par excellence.

The real reason its late

[Alanonfire]

They're installing Debian, which takes approximately 18 - 19 years for a full install.

This task involves downloading 142909 .iso images, burning and installing each disc on to every computer.

Re:The real reason its late

[calmofthestorm]

1995 called. They want their opinions back.

Re:The real reason its late

[maxwell demon]

They're installing Debian, which takes approximately 18 - 19 years for a full install.

I thought that was Gentoo?

Re:The real reason its late

[NormalVisual]

But only if you're not putting X on it.

Re:The real reason its late

[shish]

People download more than the first debian ISO? I don't even do that; just grab the netinst, boot, and hit "enter" to select the defaults for a couple of minutes; total process about 30 minutes including download time...

Re:The real reason its late

[Alanonfire]

I almost took it seriously.

Re:The real reason its late

[Alanonfire]

And you thought space was big...

Re:The real reason its late

[elashish14]

That or he meant a new version rather than a full install.

Re:The real reason its late

[xtracto]

They're installing Gentoo, which takes approximately 18 - 19 years for a full emerge.

You're welcome.

Re:The real reason its late

[Alanonfire]

Oh man, I'm typing this so no one gets on my case for a one-word-'lol' response.

Re:It's like the old saying...

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows costs $$
You can either deploy it yourself or hire someone to do it for you.

OS X costs $$
You can either deploy it yourself or hire someone to do it for you.

Linux is free
You can either deploy it yourself or hire someone to do it for you.

how much did this all cost?

[alen]

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

Re:how much did this all cost?

[obarthelemy]

with MS, you've got the pleasure of renewing licenses and/or upgrading every few years ?

Re:how much did this all cost?

[sammyF70]

They aren't trying to make "everything work like it did before with the same functionality". They could have

We could have switched to linux clients in just a few months, giving the order to all 21 IT units to set up a linux client until end of 2008. No further specifications, no standardization and no consolidation. I’m pretty sure they would have done this excellent and then I would have published great news in 2007 or 2008 “LiMux done, Munich completely on free software”.

but the aim is/was to move from a very heterogeneous network (in terms of used OS and software solutions) to some overall standard, which is why it takes so long.

Can I still keep my geek card if I actually read TFA?

Re:how much did this all cost?

[CityZen]

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.]

Re:how much did this all cost?

[LWATCDR]

I can think of some befits.
1. The money be spent on in house staff and or local consultants instead of on Microsoft Software. That money will say in country and flow through the economy and not be exported out of country.
2. Long term savings. Once the migration is done there will be no need to purchase new versions of Office, Windows, and other proprietary software.
3. Enhanced expandability. To add a news server or clients do not require purchasing more CALs. also if you have spent the money on in house talent then you have more development staff to implement new projects.

Re:how much did this all cost?

[diegocg]

If I remember correctly, switching to open source was more expensive than keeping the propietary software. But they still went for open source and open standards, because long term it would be more cheap - no licenses, possibility of choosing different software that implements the same protocol, posibility of choosing better software vendors, not just one...etc etc.

Re:how much did this all cost?

[Josef Meixner]

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.

Re:how much did this all cost?

[dave562]

With in house you have the pleasure of spending money on developers. Either you pay Microsoft developers or you pay your own developers. Don't like MS developers? You can pay IBM devs, Oracle devs, India devs, Vietnamese devs, American... (who am I kidding).

You CANNOT escape the fact that software requires maintenance. It comes down to cost. Is it more cost effective to do it yourself, or to pay someone else? There are benefits to each solution. You don't get a free lunch. How is an in house solution and less "locked in" than a proprietary one? You have access to the source code? Whoopie. What happens when your lead dev gets hit by a bus, or asks for too much money? What happens in five years when nobody can remember what function(23) does?

If you go with a known vendor, you are getting an application that a lot of people are using. Other organizations might find problems with the software before you do. The vendor will patch them before you have problems. With a big vendor they have the resources of all their licensing fees. It doesn't matter if the vendor is developing using Linux, Windows or BeOS. The real question is who does a better job of managing developers and development resources?

Re:how much did this all cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can I still keep my geek card if I actually read TFA?

Hell yeah. Those haven't been bound to the /. Card for years.

Re:how much did this all cost?

[calmofthestorm]

I wonder how much of the cost is migrating away from Windows and how much is migrating to Linux.

Re:how much did this all cost?

[Todd Knarr]

Well, migrating an entire organization to the newest version of Windows (with the accompanying upgrades to all the other MS software) isn't exactly cheap. That's why so many corporations are still running XP: they can't justify the costs of upgrading to Vista or Windows 7.

I note that a lot of the problems they ran into weren't problems with the Linux-based software, they were problems with the proprietary (Windows and Windows-based) software not wanting to play nice with anybody else. One advantage of moving to open-source, standards-based software is competition. In the proprietary environment all those lock-in "features" that caused all the problems during the Linux migration also act to keep you locked in to a single vendor who can then charge high prices because you've no alternative. Once you're on standards-based and open-source software, though, any vendor can come in and take it over. That leads to lower costs down the road because you can dump vendors who try to over-charge without any disruption to your systems.

It also leads to lower migration costs the next time. OpenOffice doesn't provide some features you need? You can replace it with any other software that handles ODF without any disruption and without any problems with document formatting. Need to talk to another organization that doesn't use OpenOffice? No problem, as long as their software understands ODF you should be able to read each other's documents reliably and correctly (and right now I think the only major word-processing software out there that doesn't handle ODF correctly is Microsoft Word).

Re:how much did this all cost?

[Maxo-Texas]

Which also means faster/easier projects.

Clearing money for licenses regularly takes 3-5 months at my corporation. Imagine if we could just start because we knew the licenses were free?

The goofy thing is licenses good for activity "A" with the product but not good for activity "B" with the product (i.e. okay for testing web, but not for test flash web). Same testing product. physically could be used- but legally can't. So $50,000 for "flash web" licenses. So testing canceled.

Re:how much did this all cost?

[obarthelemy]

aren't you missing something, in between closed source and custom ? like .. open source ? which is what TFA is about ?

Re:how much did this all cost?

[guruevi]

What would've ended up happening is that they would've purchased 15k licenses for Windows desktop @ $500/piece and 500 licenses for Windows Server @ $10000, 100 SQL licenses @ $5000, 200 SharePoints @ $15000 and 30000 all-in-one CAL's @ $1200/client. Then they would've sent disks to each department so they could install them but some local departments would've already purchased what they needed on their department credit cards, a bunch of them would go to Dell and buy all new machines and servers with licenses so they can run the new software only to discover it's already been pre-installed and overall maybe 1000 desktops and 50 servers would get the software with licenses central IT purchased.

This happens all over in government, educational institutions and large companies. The organization ends up spending 1000% of the necessary cost on the 'upgrade' while Microsoft double-dips on just about every level of the organization. But the higher-ups don't know/don't want to know so nothing ever gets done about it and the process repeats every 3 years.

Whether they would've stayed with Microsoft or not, the overhaul was necessary and would've saved them money no matter what. Switching to another platform doesn't really matter - there is virtually no cost associated with 'user-training' - that is FUD spread by the sales associates of whoever tries to sell you their stuff and maybe an excuse from the end-users that don't want to work, people really aren't that stupid, they will figure out what they need to do to get their job done or they will deserve getting fired for not doing their job

Re:how much did this all cost?

[Bert64]

It is quite common for commercial vendors to offer loss leaders, ie the initial purchase has very thin margins or even incur a loss (unlikely in the case of software as the production cost is close to 0)...
Now this only works in situations where you can lock people in, eg games consoles and locked cellphones etc. You couldn't do this with a standard product such as a dvd player, because there is nothing to stop users from buying their dvds from someone else thus denying you the profit.

It is also fairly common for suppliers to outright lie about the costs, they provide a really cheap quote and the project gets started, once it reaches a certain point the budget suddenly starts slipping... By this time, they've already invested (ie lost) their original budget and got some progress so they have to continue pouring money into it because thats less risky and hopefully cheaper than starting again. There are countless projects which have gone massively over budget, and many suppliers actually design their quotes that way.

Re:how much did this all cost?

[mikechant]

OK, here's a simple example (which has actually happened several times to my company).
a/ Buy/License proprietry product A from company X
b/ Company Y buys company X.
c/ Company Y has product B which is 'similar' to product A
d/ Company Y discontinues support for product A and 'suggests' you move to product B, which has lots of extra functions you don't need, is missing some that you do, and costs twice as much.
e/ Further alternatives from company Z etc. are even less attractive.
f/ You are forced at some point to migrate to product B (e.g. to get it to run on supported OS) regardless of cost and functionality.

In the FOSS case, you have the option of employing someone to maintain product A (which may or may not be economic). In the non-FOSS case this option does not even exist (unless you have the money to buy company Y or you are the government or something).

As per above, this is not a theoretical problem; it has happened repeatedly to my company and I read of examples of this happening frequently to other companies.

Re:We thought about doing this in Canada

[WrongSizeGlass]

But we couldn't find a catchy pun or play on words to name the project, so we ditched it altogether.

Really? What about "Canux"? Isn't that already your nickname?

Re:We thought about doing this in Canada

[Yvan256]

LEhnux

Here's his problem...

[MikeRT]

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

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...

Re:Here's his problem...

[oatworm]

By the sounds of things, that's kind of what they ended up doing. Thing is, when you have a hodgepodge like this, you have to standardize on something, and that's going to affect and change whatever is around that isn't already adhering to that standard (i.e. most everything). The problem that they had, near as I can tell, is they decided on the solution before they determined what the problem was - they decided they'd standardize on their LiMux client, then started filling in the blanks. Granted, with a project this size and given the free-for-all nature of their original IT structure, there's going to be a fair amount of blank-filling anyway; if you try to document every single dependency before you go in on something this size, half of them are going to change and mutate before you get done with the documentation, which means you're going to have to update your documentation, which will then be out of date somewhere else, so you'll have to... you get the idea. Even so, it sounds like they got bit by the things they didn't know they didn't know, which happens quite frequently.

Wrong approach

[Sub Zero 992]

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

Re:Wrong approach

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

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.

They seem to have taken a more blended approach. A separate project was revamping many of the servers at the same time. They did immediately move away from MS Office to OpenOffice and ODF because they could do so without having to worry about the servers and they laud it as one of the biggest benefits so far. I don't know of any good reason why they should have held off on that. The problem with a top down migration is that many times you don't know what all the services inside your organization and out are actually used. So rolling out a series of Linux clients in every department allows you to discover what your platform specific dependencies are. In some cases they changed the Linux client to work with those services and in some they changed the services to work with Linux.

A suggested strategy for those planning something similar: 1: migrate the server services (and create a shiny new unified and consistent infrastructure);

The problem here is in your first step you may have broken a bunch of things and users will have to start changing the way they work. From their perspective you've downgraded the system. That's because they're using a client that does not work as well with your new servers as your Linux clients will. So you've just given the majority of your users a bad taste for the whole thing and generated tons of pushback that can kill your whole migration.

I think it would make more sense to switch to as many platform agnostic applications as possible, first. Then implement the servers and desktops simultaneously in one part of the company, while letting the users have access to their old desktop via a remote session. Fix the compatibility problems and move on to the next chunk of the company until you can start repurposing the old servers and getting rid of the remote desktop sessions altogether.

Re:Wrong approach

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Wrong approach

[Anonymous Coward]

That was not your 0.02, that was more like your millions of dollars over budget and never able to recoup those loses.

Theres a point where everyone looks around and says, "you know the estimates on this job have long gone over budget and we will forever be in debt trying this"

problem: poor standards compliance

[Onymous Coward]

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.

Re:problem: poor standards compliance

[ClosedSource]

I guess what you mean is once you want to adopt new standardized protocols that differ from the ones commonly in use, upgrading will be hard. Let's not pretend that these standards have been around for decades, they represent a change.

Re:problem: poor standards compliance

[Obfuscant]

Any time you build on top of quirks and such that deviate from standardized protocols, upgrading will be hard.

Don't for a minute think that FOSS doesn't have its own quirks and deviations. Even just the "extensions" can be viewed as quirks, since that make moving from one system to another more difficult.

Re:problem: poor standards compliance

[Onymous Coward]

I'm referring to TFA and its situation in particular. You'll note as you read the article that there are references to protocol issues.

In general, having protocol noncompliance and "extensions" is still worse than having protocol compliance and "extensions".

Similar stories

[diegocg]

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...

Re:Similar stories

[seifried]

These migrations need a lot of work...

So did the creation and implementation of the original network, but because it grew organically over a decade or two this isn't noticed as much, but when you decide to rip it all out and replace it people tend to notice that (because for one thing you need to figure out what exactly you have and how you are using it).

Re:Bad title is bad. (coral cache)

[Statecraftsman]

http://www.floschi.info.nyud.net/2010/03/quality-over-time-in-munich/ may work at some point in the future.

Why so prominent?

[Mark_in_Brazil]

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.

Re:Why so prominent?

[Josir]

Why is the Linux migration is so proeminent? because it's damned late. If it was done on planned schedule, people would not talk about it. In fact, for some bureocrats, if it on time, it is fine even if the final product quality is questionable. What matter is to fill the Gantt's chart!!! If the Banco do Brasil project failed in any aspect, a lot of "analysts" would be talking about them daily!!!

Re:Why so prominent?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

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.

Re:Why so prominent?

[iksrazal_br]

"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. "

As an American expatriate, living in Brazil, who has a bank account at the Bank of Brazil, and until recently worked for the Brazilian government doing everything from linux embedded to java, lets not get carried away. The ATM's all run OS/2 from what I've seen. Their online site uses java security which ironically often breaks both opera and firefox access for linux users - if you call their support they will tell you they don't support linux.

And imho don't trust any numbers you see from the Brazilian government - any mandates are ignored at will. Their is lots of open source in the government, but its used in pragmatic way, not because its required.

Re:Why so prominent?

[iksrazal_br]

https://www2.bancobrasil.com.br/aapf/login.jsp?url=relacionamento/mcib.jsp

Site doesn't work in the latest opera. Works in the latest FF if you delete the default iceTea jvm and "ln" the latest jdk.

Re:Why so prominent?

[Mark_in_Brazil]

I use Ubuntu and Firefox on the 'puter I use to access my company's Bank of Brazil account. And I usually just start by going to bb.com.br or jumping straight to the login page for a company account. A couple of months ago, I started having some difficulties logging in. I called Bank of Brazil's internet banking support, and they asked me to make sure I had the latest "version" of Java installed. I thought that couldn't be the problem, but I did check and it turned out I was an update behind (i.e., I was using version 6, update 17, and the latest was version 6, update 18). I didn't think that could cause the problem, but I figured that in order to continue with B of B's internet banking support, I'd have to be able to say that yes, I had the latest "version" of Java installed. Once I got Ubuntu to install the latest Java update, I tried logging in, and the problem was solved. Live and learn.

As for ATMs, I can tell you that at least some, and possibly all, of the ATMs at the Vila Leopoldina branch of the Bank of Brazil in São Paulo are Linux-based. I actually noticed that around Christmas of 2009. But that's not really relevant to my earlier post. I was talking about desktops.

By the way, I've had to deal with the following banks in Brazil: BBVA, Bradesco, Itaú, Santander, Unibanco (now part of Itaú, but it wasn't then), and Bank of Brazil. People like to speak ill of government employees, but the best service I've gotten, and not by a little, has been at B of B. Oddly enough, my experience with Bradesco was relatively positive too. Itaú is ridiculously expensive and has piss-poor service, but Unibanco must be the worst bank in the world. They make everything harder than every other bank does, but without adding any additional value. I could deal with, for example, additional security measures that made things a slightly bigger pain in the ass, but Unibanco just gives you the pain in the ass without any benefits. And even though I explicitly asked three times on the day I was opening the accounts at Unibanco and was told that the internet banking was compatible with non-Windows operating systems (important since my life has been completely Microsoft-free for a couple of years now), I didn't find out that Unibanco's internet banking only worked with "Ruimdows" until after I had wasted a lot of time and effort setting up the accounts and then trying to get the internet banking to work (which, by the way, even under ideal conditions and using Windows, would require at least three visits to the branch, which I find ridiculous). With all the passwords Unibanco gave me to memorize, the only way I could possibly keep everything straight was to have the passwords written down somewhere. I found creative ways to hide my passwords in my cell phone's address book, but all the stupid passwords not only didn't add security, they made it impossible to use the bank without writing down passwords somewhere, which is terrible.

Why has it taken longer than planned?

[Gordonjcp]

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.

Problems with linux installations

[bigredradio]

la la la la la la la ...I can't hear you ...la la la la la la la la

Perspective

[Locke2005]

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?

Re:Perspective

[Nadaka]

Exactly. Any major rollout of a different technology is going to have a lot of issues, especially if you have to have some kind of incremental release and backwards compatibility. It doesn't matter if it is FOSS or proprietary.

Re:It's like the old saying...

[maxwell demon]

Of course the "free" in "free software" doesn't refer to the price.

Re:We thought about doing this in Canada

[mcgrew]

gesundheit

Windows is only free if...

[Colin Smith]

You sneak into a store and steal it.
 

Re:It's like the old saying...

[Arthur Grumbine]

That's why I never liked the "Free, as in beer" label. It's more like:

Windows:
Paying for Bud/Miller/Coors Light

OS X:
Being given, at no extra charge, a frosty, draft micro-brew, poured for you in a set of premium beer steins you severely overpaid for. (Refills are kinda pricey, too)

Linux:
Being given a sack of barley, a dizzying array of hops, some yeast, and water. Derision from self-taught master brewers comes at no extra charge.

Sounds painful

[Anonymous Struct]

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.

As usual

[OpenSourced]

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.

Re:As usual

[gnasher719]

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.

That is not how I understand the blog. They started the transition, and realised that yes, they could do a transition in the allocated time frame, but they wouldn't get the maximum benefit that way. So the plan changed. Instead of saying "we planned to do it in X months, so we do it in X months", they said "we could do it in X months, but we could get much better long term results if we do a better job that takes 2X months".

Re:As usual

[dotancohen]

blind optimism is more valued than knowledgeable pessimism.

The truest quote I've ever heard. I am going to use that, what's your real name so that I can properly attribute it?

Re:As usual

[TheRealSlimShady]

So the original poster is correct - they didn't do their analysis properly. If they'd planned properly they would have figured out that they could get maximum benefit by doing the migration properly. Of course, if they'd done their analysis they would have realised that their problems weren't to do with windows, rather to do with how their infrastructure was operated and managed.

VBA

[thethibs]

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.

Re:VBA

[shutdown -p now]

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.

Thing is, Microsoft itself is nudging users to switch from VBA to VSTO (that is, using .NET languages, such as C# and VB.NET, to programmatically process Office documents and extend functionality; VBA itself is essentially VB6, and is hopelessly outdated as a language today). Even if OpenOffice goes for full VBA support now, they will still be hopelessly out of date by the time they can realistically complete it.

Re:VBA

[oatworm]

They're already grappling. The problem here is that MS Office and VBA are moving targets and Microsoft isn't perfect at adhering to its documented implementation. To Microsoft's credit, when you're dealing with something as big as VBA, it's difficult to line up documentation and behavior; that's part of the reason why standards committees take so long nailing down how something is specified and how it should be implemented.

Re:VBA

[Tubal-Cain]

Which raises the question: is any work being done at OOo to implement VSTO?

Re:VBA

[shutdown -p now]

Technically, VSTO is a set of COM APIs exposed by Office, that is callable from .NET via COM interop. Mono has some platform-independent support for the latter, actually, but hardly enough to support this.

The alternative could be to reimplement the API as purely managed, though this may expose some quirks that are unique to COM interop support, and the absence of which is potentially breaking.

For example, in COM, classes don't have any API surface of their own, and must always implement one or more interfaces to expose any members. One of interfaces can be designated as default. Now, the trick is that if you have a COM class Foo, implementing an interface IFoo as a default interface, when dealing with all this from C#, you would be able to write "new IFoo()" - i.e. "create an instance of an interface". Under the hood, it instantiates the associated class instead. I'm not sure what the point of this feature is - I suspect it's there to placate migrating VB6 devs, which had something similar - but regardless, existing VSTO code may rely on it. So far as I know, there's no way to mimic this in pure managed code - you can declare a class and an interface, but you cannot "new" an interface. You can make IFoo an abstract class, but then client code might try to implement it as an interface, and break...

In addition, I doubt that it would be feasible to implement MSOffice APIs in OO.org in general. For the most part, these things deal with DOMs of the respective formats, and, so far as I know, document model is somewhat different in MSOffice and OO.org, and not easily reconcilable (which is why it's not trivial to convert OOXML ODF for more advanced cases, for example). That might preclude a straightforward wrapper approach towards implementing them.

Re:VBA

[Bert64]

Not only that, but OO already supports macros, and does so in several existing languages as well as their own nonstandard language...
As you said, MS are trying to deprecate VBA so everyone will have to drop it sooner or later (and lets not forget that msoffice had a different macro language before VBA which is now long deprecated)...
I would much rather write macros in python or javascript as supported by openoffice - languages which have other uses and will teach me other skills i can reuse outside of writing office macros. Also being based on standard languages, there is nothing stopping third parties implementing openoffice compatible macros.

Limuxwatch

[ultrabot]

Seems that the good ol' Limuxwatch troll woke up again:

http://limuxwatch.blogspot.com/

Re:Limuxwatch

[BlindBear]

He's mostly harmless, intelligent people can see that he has pent up anger issues inside of him, I like to check on him once in a while just to see if he is still going. He probably doesn't 'get it' --- freedom and all that stuff, maybe he is worried that Microsoft stock is about to tank, I would be! Who would buy that stock after Microsoft lost the LSE platform deal last year after those catastrophic failures. What a recommendation! I still chuckle.

Re:Limuxwatch

[RMS Eats Toejam]

It's also a chuckle for me to watch FOSS extremists (twitter, schestowitz, and the like) go through the mental gymnastics required to spin 'truth' into 'trolling' and distance themselves from the 'lost and ignorant'. The only reason you don't see everyone else laughing at you is because they have their backs turned. It's OK. You'll show them. You are fighting the good fight!

Re:Limuxwatch

[BlindBear]

You can't blame an old bloke for getting enthusiastic at my age, Linux,FOSS and all that,the Munich changeover is a big domino for FOSS to win and from memory years ago it was a big personal kick in the nuts for Stevie Ballmer; good to see him 'take one for the team'. I must admit to observing a bit of rabid commenting all round, it adds colour to a conversation I reckon. Mr Schestowitz is prolific if nothing else but the guy from Limuxwatch is just plain wrong. Where everyone becomes a winner in this type of situation is that companies, like Microsoft as an example, will lift their game to produce better services and choices to their customers and customers will stop feeling like victims. Let their never be boredom, keep arguing, this is /.Thanks for reading.

Re:It's like the old saying...

[The Mighty Buzzard]

I would have went with Schlitz, Natural Light, or Milwaukee's Best for Windows but then I'm just a dick sometimes.

Re:It's like the old saying...

[oatworm]

Pabst Blue Screen.

its irrelevant

[unity100]

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.

Re:its irrelevant

[thethibs]

Not just to anything, but from anything.

If they weren't on Windows, they'd be on a few dozen variants of Linux, Unix, and SunOS. Their problem's a lack of discipline, not proprietary infrastructure. (Germans with a lack of discipline; hoodathunkit?)

Re:It's like the old saying...

[shutdown -p now]

But, of course, people who make switching decisions often think that it does (and use that as the basis for decision).

Re:We thought about doing this in Canada

[shutdown -p now]

Actually, it was ditched because they couldn't agree on the relative order of "English" and "Français" in the language selector in installer: Quebec threated to proclaim independence if they got it wrong, and Alberta said it would vote the other way just to see that happen.

Somewhat true, but simplistic

[Mathinker]

> 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).

Re:It's like the old saying...

[Lulfas]

The funny part is, from the article, they chose to go with Linux even though the estimates were almost 50% more than the Windows based solution.

Clue... less

[frank_adrian314159]

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.

The lie of free trade

[gd2shoe]

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.

Re:The lie of free trade

[mqduck]

I'm not a proponent of "Free Trade", which tends to harm people in poor nations even more than it harms some workers here. But taking the attitude that we should have preference for people inside our imaginary borders than outside them is not the solution.

Re:The lie of free trade

[Philip_the_physicist]

In a nice, theoretical representative democracy, a government is elected to govern in the best interests of its electors and those under their protection (minors, the mentally disabled, and so on). To bring this back on topic, the important question is whether spending $36M on the FOSS solution is better FOR THE PEOPLE OF MUNICH than spending $23M on the MS solution.

Re:The lie of free trade

[gd2shoe]

It's called self sustainability. Foreign goods and services can be a good source of variety and ideas in the market place (driving innovation, keeping prices reasonable). Yet every nation should be able to supply the essential goods and services to sustain its own population. That includes the functioning of their government.

When you're discussing government contracts, there's always the issue of loyalty, sabotage, and espionage. I don't envy any government that weighs contracts towards those less likely to turn around and bite them. How many undercover CIA agents have infiltrated Microsoft? It could be zero. How does Munich know? I don't. I doubt Microsoft does.

As far as "imaginary borders" goes, well, you're just flat wrong. Borders are indeed artificial. That's indisputable. The effects are certainly not imaginary. Borders are a way of saying: Fine - do whatever you like - just do it over there - You have your space, I have mine. Unfortunately, our governments are still like 5 year olds in the back of any car. "Mom! He's touching me again!" Until the "developed" nations grow up, we can't even begin to discuss how silly and imaginary those lines seem. As long as there are homicidal tyrants, locales with rampant disease, and unreasonable, unmitigated arbitrage between national laws, borders will have a positive role on the international stage.

Yup, that very *old* saying

[kramulous]

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.

Re:Yup, that very *old* saying

[drsmithy]

What does Windows cost? $300?

Nothing. It comes free with your computer just like OS X does with a Mac.

Re:Yup, that very *old* saying

[deragon]

If you are a large corporation and purchase say a 1000 computers or more, and are not interested in Windows but would like to install Linux, you could force vendors to sell their computers without Windows at a lower price.

And in many parts of the world, you can ask for a reimbursement of Windows if you are not using it. IIRC, it can be done in France.

Re:It's like the old saying...

[DesScorp]

"Being given a sack of barley, a dizzying array of hops, some yeast, and water. Derision from self-taught master brewers comes at no extra charge."

Free BSD:
No longer available, as the liquor store confirms that Free BSD is dead.

How come noone mentions GOsa?

[Pav]

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.

Re:How come noone mentions GOsa?

[Pav]

I lie... : Landeshauptstadt München

Re:It's like the old saying...

[fritsd]

This is Bavaria we're talking about. They've got beer breweries that are almost 1000 year old. Sheesh..
That being said, I liked the analogy.
Hmm... Hefeweizen...

Re:We thought about doing this in Canada

[fritsd]

LinEX !
Dunno.. The Extremadureans seem to use it for agribusiness.

Wollmux

[fritsd]

Their "Eierlegende Wollmux" also sounds useful. (translation: "including the kitchensink"??)