Slashdot Mirror
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."
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
From the article:
Delays in the implementation, immature software, eaten employees...
It's no wonder Linux never got off the ground, if employees have to fear being eaten, then there's something seriously bad about the implementation.
Although I'm hoping this is just a Google Translation error, but seeing how many billions of dollars Google has to refine its programs, I'm doubtful that this is anything but a perfect translation.
My condolences to the employees who were eaten by Linux.
Yeah, it clearly shows that OSS cannot compensate stupidity from the planners, and that it is very easy to put the blame on Linux instead.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
"Yeah, this story is pretty self-explaining... good work FOSS!"
Yes, this story is pretty self-explaining... but I question what does indeed explains.
It's almost a meme around here that "joe sixpack" simply doesn't pay attention to computers but here it seems there has been a strong campaign in press against the migration from the very begining as if it were a sensible issue for general public.
And then, this project has been cancelled when internal polls show that only around 10% of users -and it seems "end users" are implyied, not sysadmins, were dissatisfied and 80% were satisfied with the new environment (I'd bet that's and expectable turnaround for *any* environment change).
One should ask himself if there might be some kind of pressure from "other vendors with deep pockets".
It's obvious too that has been some managerial mistakes that, as such, could be an expected source of problems no matter what the migration path were as, per instance, towards Windows 7 instead of Linux. There has been problems that tough counted on the negative side of the migration seem indeed to be more on the side of the lackings from the preceding environment (like a closed database that ends up being difficult to transition -heck, that's why you are migrating: to avoid things like that to happen... from then on).
All in all it's an enlighting example... mainly about how carefully the "soft side" of a migration towards open source should be managed. As in "be prepared to withstand attacks from the older stablishment trying to regain its lost power -and licenses" or "people will take the problems with a Windows to Windows upgrade as a non issue -it might be because the name doesn't change, even if most of the environment so does, while in a Windows to Linux migration everything and the kitchen sink will be Linux' fault no matter what so you'd better choose very carefully your stakeholders and make sure they feel involved as a driving force".
By the way, any new news about Munich?
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.
Replacing windows with Linux using centralised authentication isn't that easy. We tried it recently where I work where we run both Linux and WIndows 7. This meant it had to be AD.
Using ldap for web services was easy enough as was getting win 7 desktops joined up. The hard part was getting Ubuntu machines on the domain...
The first thing I tried was likewise-open which I had a number of problems with. We eventually settled on winbind which worked incredibly well for a samba file server joined to the domain, but for desktops it wasn't ideal. If the domain controller became inaccessible for whatever reason, the whole machine would freeze up even with cached credentials turned on. The other caveat was user's inability to change their domain passwords from Linux. Well.. it was possible but whenever they changed their password, both the new and old passwords would still work. (see http://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Samba_&_Active_Directory#password_changes) It was also impossible to force a user to change their password, it would fail constantly.
If I weren't so determined I would have likely just gone with Windows 7 for ease of use despite the extra cost. There is one more commercial product I need to try and that's centrify. Fingers crossed.