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Munich's Move To Linux Exceeds Target
jrepin writes "In May 2003, Munich's city council resolved to migrate municipal workstations from Windows to Linux and open source. Munich's LiMux project has announced that it has exceeded its annual target for migrating the city's PCs to its LiMux client. To date in 2011, the project has migrated 9,000 systems; it had originally planned to migrate 8,500 of the 12,000-15,000 PC workstations used by city officials in Munich."
The article says, "Last year, Florian Schießl, a LiMux project director, stated that he and his team had been naïve and had underestimated the extent of minor problems."
"naïve" links to another article on the same site, h-online.com, from March 2010,
* LiMux project management, "We were naïve", http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/LiMux-project-management-We-were-naive-958824.html
This one states: On his blog, the IT expert admits that "We were naïve," and confesses to a "miscalculation".
This links to
* http://www.floschi.info/2010/03/quality-over-time-in-munich/
but floschi.info just says "It works". The Internet Archive records only cover up to Feb 2010 (http://wayback.archive.org/web/20100501000000*/http://www.floschi.info)
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
http://www.muenchen.de/Rathaus/dir/limux/english/index.html
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
We find that a large part of the employees at our company has the new version at home long before they are migrated at work, so due to enterprises being slow adopters of new versions, the problem sort of solves itself.
As a Munich user, I can tell you that:
The Finance Databases are always available (they previously had significant down-time).
Log-in takes seconds (not the tens of minutes that previously happened with the Windows systems) - the accumulated savings in work time are huge for log-in alone!
Applications load and run faster - again saving workers significant time.
E-mail always works (the Windows mail servers were frequently unavailable).
Security is enhanced, and there are no panicked messages sent around about this week's virus!
It's just MUCH better and lets us all get our work done more easily. The savings in time, user frustration and in software licences is massive. The staff requirements to maintain the system are fewer, better able people. We've just demonstrated our system to a numer of other cities, and many more are going to adopt it...
Just info for younger people on /.
In terms of large agencies that tried moving to Linux there were 3 main groups of companies
1) Companies that never had developed a Windows culture. Generally they were Unix shops (Sun, Sco primarily) and they were able to move to Linux easily.
2) Companies that were highly motivated tech companies: IBM, Oracle, Sun that all had a Windows culture. They had embarrassing failures in moving to Windows.
3) Companies that were not particularly technological and wanted to save money. The bag was mixed here but in general the costs got out of control and they threw in the towel.
Munich represents the one place where despite going way over time and budget they have kept plowing away. Demonstrating what it is actually going to take to move a large enterprise with a Windows culture over to Linux.
So 9000 copies of Windows not bought. Let's say that save you $50 per machine (perhaps less) at OEM pricing. tha'ts $450,000. Now how many linux techs did they hire to maintain this? Id assume at least 1 for every 100 machines and what is their annual salary? Compared to windows techs, linux techs get more money.
It is true that Linux admins cost more money but you need fewer Linux admins for the same number of workstations so there is an overall savings.
Here you go: http://www.rfgonline.com/subsforum/LinuxTCO.pdf