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The Woes of Munich's Linux Migration
mikrorechner writes "The H Online has a writeup of the problems encountered by LiMux (Wikipedia entry), one of the most prominent Linux migration projects in the world, trying to introduce free software into the highly heterogenous IT infrastructure of the City of Munich. Quoting: 'Florian Schiessl, deputy head of Munich's LiMux project for migrating the city's public administration to Linux, has, for the first time, explained why migrating the city's computing landscape to open source software has taken longer than originally planned.'" Here is Shiessl's blog, in which he details some of the transition problems.
Then their IT infrastructure will be homogenous.
Everyone always underestimates how long anything non-trivial is going to take. In this case it seems like not only were they trying to migrate to a new platform, but also trying to undo every past mistake, oversight and quickly implemented solutions that appeared on the surface to work just fine. That's going to take just a little while to get done.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Or you know.. buy an open system....
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Converting all computers to the Open Document Format (ODF) standard has overcome dependency on a single office software suite.
Does ODF now define formulas for spreadsheets? because my understanding was that this was still ambiguous in the spec, and it is a pretty big problem if it is.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
1. Move them all into CLOUD computing 2. ??? 3. Profit!
I recommend to read the blog as it's more informative and it's also rather optimistic. Not just woes as the title would lead you to believe. Of course making the switch to free software takes work, but it's a great opportunity for constant improvement and as Mr. Shiessl points out, there is much digital waste to be cleaned up on exit from the proprietary.
How about LinuxEh?
The advantage with FOSS is that Germany can hire German programmers to modify the software used by Munich's government (which is also German).
If they stuck with proprietary products, who would they be paying to improve it?
They're installing Debian, which takes approximately 18 - 19 years for a full install.
.iso images, burning and installing each disc on to every computer.
This task involves downloading 142909
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.
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?
You can't convert a bureaucracy like this anymore than you can build a political/military empire by invading a dozen good size countries and trying to integrate them all at once. Rome wasn't built in a day. They should have gone in first with the intention of standardizing things, straightening out all of the kinks and quirks each little fief had. All of the file servers here where possible, all OpenOffice there...
Well, they tried a horizontal migration strategy, moving from location to location and department to department. That meant the problems never stopped.
A better approach might have been to do a vertical top-down migration: Servers: first roll out a directory server infrastructure, then a CIFS strategy etc.; Clients: migrate away from MSIE / Active X, then to CUPS, then away from MS Office etc.. And then, finally, to change the desktop OS out from underneath.
A suggested strategy for those planning something similar: 1: migrate the server services (and create a shiny new unified and consistent infrastructure); 2: migrate the desktop apps to FOSS alternatives (chose apps which will work under your target desktop OS); 3: switch out the desktop OS for linux (the users retain the apps they have become used to).
Just my 0,02
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security - Ben Franklin
More to the point: Moving away from a vendor-locked-in infrastructure is hard.
Any time you build on top of quirks and such that deviate from standardized protocols, upgrading will be hard.
Regional government of the autonomous community of Valencia (Spain) also switched to free software, last year they released a detailed report (english) of the problems they found and how they fixed it. It took a lot of time to complete it (4 years) and they still depend on propietary software for some systems. These migrations need a lot of work...
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.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
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?
"DRM is like the Ford Pinto: it's a smooth ride, right up the point at which it explodes and ruins your day."-C.Doctorow
Poor IT chef.
But on that note, what an awesome IT department. They had a CHEF on staff? Fuck yeah!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
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.]
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...
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Why is the Linux migration project in Munich so prominent, as mentioned in TFS? I know of much larger migrations, both in terms of the number of computers and the geographic area covered. The Brazilian government has been migrating to Free Software in mass. The Bank of Brazil, for example, has over 100,000 computers running Firefox and BrOffice. As of last June, the estimate was right at 100,000, with 65,000 of those machines running Linux and 35,000 running other operating systems. The Bank of Brazil has branches and offices all over Brazil, which is a very large country. The mass migration happened in 2006, before the migration really began in Munich. The number of machines involved (counting the Linux boxes only) is about 5 times as large as the number of machines to be involved in Munich, and instead of being located in a single city, they are spread out all over a country that's larger than the US would be if it didn't have Alaska, but smaller than the US with Alaska (i.e., larger in area than the "lower 48" plus DC plus Hawaii). In the year 2006 alone, the Bank of Brazil estimated that it saved R$20MM by using Free Software.
FWIW, I've also seen Linux desktops at the ITI (Brazil's IT Institute). Even totally non-nerdy ITI employees seemed perfectly at home on Linux desktops when I was there as long ago as early-to-mid 2005. The Bank of Brazil branch where my company has its account has all Linux desktops. The managers who take care of my account think it's funny when I crane my neck to look at their monitors and geek out on the software their 'puters are running. They are total non-nerds and not only appear to be happy with the Linux desktops, but told me they are. It took them a minute to figure out what I was asking - they didn't think of using Linux desktops as anything all that unusual.
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
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.
Hell yeah. Those haven't been bound to the /. Card for years.
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.
la la la la la la la ...I can't hear you ...la la la la la la la la
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
How does this compare to the problems experienced by people migrating 15,000 clients running various Windows releases to Windows 7? Is migrating to Linux more or less costly than migrating to the latest release out of Redmond?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
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.
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).
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.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
>>>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 disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I would have went with Schlitz, Natural Light, or Milwaukee's Best for Windows but then I'm just a dick sometimes.
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
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.
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".
Pabst Blue Screen.
> 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.
aren't you missing something, in between closed source and custom ? like .. open source ? which is what TFA is about ?
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
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.