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Swiss Canton Abandons Linux Migration
An anonymous reader writes "The Swiss canton Solothurn has put a stop to their ongoing migration to Linux. [Original, in German.] The project started in 2001, and has been under harsh public criticism ever since. The responsible CIO resigned this summer. Solothurn plans to convert all desktop computers to Windows 7 in 2011."
but it seems like this migration was rather ill prepared...
Hehe. "angefressen" is colloquial and could be translated as "pissed". Obviously lost in translation, because "fressen" = (roughly) "to gorge".
For those who prefer a quick human translation over a state-of-the-art Google Translate result, here is what I gleaned from the article. German is not my first language; corrections and other improvements welcome.
Short summary:
- The project wasn't going well from the beginning
- The project definitely failed, but you can't entirely blame that on Linux
- Lack of organizational talent definitely played a role in the failure
- In a survey, about 80% of employees stated they were satisfied with the new environment, 10% complained about issues they thought would be resolved over time, and only 10% were really dissatisfied
- The media played a large role in the perception of the project by eagerly latching on to every bit of bad news about the project
Partial translation, paragraph by paragraph:
Nine years after the decision to migrate the computers of the Solothurn kanton to Linux, a radical reversal has come today: all desktops will be converted to Windows 7. Did Linux fail?
The project wasn't a great success from the beginning; those who followed the media must have gotten the impression that it was a sequence of failures and bad luck.
Problems during the migration, software than wasn't ready yet, angry employees who set up a homepage to vent their frustrations and who couldn't get any work done because of Linux - all of this suggests that tax money was being spent on a project doomed to fail. And it has failed now. But to blame it all on Linux would be short-sighted. When you look further, you will see that many factors were responsible for the failure.
The decision to convert to Linux came in 2001. The goal was to have completed the conversion by 2007. However, that goal was unattainable, because some invitations to bid were only sent out in 2006. The choice for the Scalix web interface wasn't a good one: even in June, the webmail interface lacked a task list and some of the comforts of native e-mail clients.
Many special applications could not easily be replaced by Linux solutions. This was compounded by problems with the Konsul database employed by the kanton of Solothurn for editing council decisions: the data file of this Windows software was not so easy to migrate. Project Ambassador was meant to allow interoperability with OpenOffice.org et al, but was postponed until end 2010 because of performance problems. As a result, none of the council members worked with Linux systems.
An internal inquiry among employees showed that about 80% of them were satisfied with the new environment. Ten percent complained about "childhood diseases" of the software, and only 10% were really unsatisfied. But that is still 100 employees, and they were a very vocal minority.
The Swiss media seized every opportunity to bring news of even the most insignificant frustrations in the kanton: a temporary printer problem that was solved quickly became "lasting printing problems". Quotes from employees who claimed to work more productively at home than at the office were gladly printed.
If there wasn't any bad news, the media simply manufactured some. When the state attorney's office held a conference for attorneys in 2009, they neglected to prepare a Windows system for displaying the PowerPoint presentations. The kanton police, who, according to the Berner Zeitung had "successfully defended itself against Linux" helped out and saved the attorney's office from embarrassment. Of course, there are many things you can blame on Linux, but lack of organizational talent of the conference organizer isn't one of those.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
The windows data base they were speaking about was a product named "Konsul" (a proprietary data base developed by a swiss company). No, I didn't hear about that data base before either (I had to google it to find out it was a swiss product, although I suspected it due to the name), and of course it got lost in the Google translation.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Hi MR AC! While FOSSies like to brag about the "free as in beer" part, in actually the cost of windows desktop licenses is so tiny as to not show up in most budgets in even the top twenty. so no selling point there. Two, MSCEs are a dime a dozen, competent ones not much more expensive, whereas good Linux gurus are damned high, if you can even find one. Third, say what you want, but AD makes administering windows desktops so easy i could teach my 16 year old to do it via AD in less than a couple of weeks. I have yet to see anything on Linux that makes multiple desktop policy management that damned easy. Oh and nearly all mobile devices have Exchange support, which is one less headache.
I honestly think the problem with FOSS and Linux is they are going about things ass backwards. They keep talking about how its a "drop in replacement for Windows" when in reality Linux is MUCH more like a Mac than it'll ever be like Windows. here is why, just as you can't grab any old piece of hardware and make a Hackentosh, so too can you not just grab any old parts off a shelf and make a Linux box that is reasonably decent. There is just too much common hardware that is seriously iffy in Linux. So you end up needing to buy specific hardware designed for Linux, which in the desktop, again like a Mac, will cost you more for less power than a windows machine. So in the end if you are gonna buy new hardware anyway, why not just buy a Mac and have better vendor support and less headaches?
In the end after trying Linux on more pieces of hardware than I care to count I've found that Linux really works best in certain niches, like say education where you've got old hardware that won't run any newer windows and which has long been reverse engineered by Linux developers and is thus quite stable even across upgrades. But on new hardware, which this being a government I assume they are on the standard corporate 3 year upgrade cycle, there is simply too many pieces of common hardware where support is dicey if you can get it to work at all. And of course none of the big OEMs are gonna offer you Linux except on their more expensive workstations, again adding to the cost.
Certain places Linux works well, like servers where vendors actually provide decent drivers for all the hardware, or embedded where you simply build only for that hardware and are done with it. But trying to deal with it as a corporate desktop with the whole 3 year upgrade cycle? Unless you are willing to shell out for workstation class hardware for the entire place every 3 years the headaches probably wouldn't be worth it, and it is certainly cheaper just to buy the dell El Cheapo desktops with windows included, than to go through all that. That is why if a SMB asks me about Linux I recommend a "try before you buy" period, where they migrate to the Windows version of FOSS apps like Open Office and Thunderbird, to see what kind of headaches they'll be looking at first. It sounds like they went for it without a plan and got seriously bit in the butt.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Seriously, the Swiss screwed up. It happens. Get over it, learn the lessons there are to be learned, and move on.
Lesson 1: Don't announce you're going to move everyone, and it's going to happen by X date. Not everyone is going to switch, and X is a variable, not a const.
Lesson 2: Some things take longer to "work with" than scrapping. The town council database app is obviously one of those.
Lesson 3: Stop with the stupidity of using a web interface for almost everything. It doesn't work. It p*sses people off (or as the article says, get them half-eaten). Get devs who can also code with qt or wxwidgets or java or tcl/tk or whatever.
Lesson 4: Sell to your users. Make it a privilege to be part of the transition. You want people b*tching and moaning about not being "upgraded" to the new linux desktop, not the other way around. Marketing 101.
Lesson 5: Provide effective feedback channels, so that people don't feel they need to set up a web site just to complain because you aren't listening.
But if you had read the article, it didn't mention a single such application which was a problem. The main problems were:
* An extremely bad choice of the free email system (it explicitly said that other systems existed which would have provided the missing functionality).
* A proprietary data base (and unfortunately they didn't even choose one of the major ones). There are definitely good free databases; moreover there are also closed source databases running on Linux.
* Mistakes which were completely unrelated to the migration being blamed on the migration.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
We are a Windows/Solaris/Linux shop and central authentication and management is a big problem. Using an AD as the backend would probably have been easier, but our UNIX guy would not accept any situation where Windows was the core of the system. So we use LDAP. However OpenLDAP was not at all suitable for the purposes, Sun Directory Server, which is free but the servers it runs on are pricey. It is also no longer available from Oracle so we are going to have to consider what to do. That then required the use of IDsync, which wasn't free, as well as a good deal of custom programming. The current solutions works, and has an LDAP server and AD that are sync'd to each other, but are running separate and one can continue if the other fails.
It also means that management of the two kinds of systems is totally separate. Other than logins, which are of course global (the whole point of the system) and automounting storage, nothing else is shared management wise. Windows is managed through the AD, Linux through Puppet, at least when Puppet works (it is rather problematic). Solaris is more or less all central, no apps on individual systems, only central apps because of management problems. Windows is per system, of course. We have different support people who deal with different domains of the system.
At any rate it works, but it was not easy to make work. Also none of this deals with migration, this is side-by-side support. I wouldn't even want to think what it would take to try and support some of the things done on Windows on Linux instead. It would NOT just be "Oh use OpenOffice instead of MS Office," never mind that even that would be problematic (OO doesn't do everything MS Office does).