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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."
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.
Because the press has blamed Linux for everything (including things which clearly are not Linux's fault), and they couldn't withstand the public pressure any more. Note that 80% of the users were satisfied with the new desktop, and a further 10% just complained about transient problems.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.