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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."
And if the CEO of RedHat didn't travel to Munich to convince the city to convert to RedHat, he's an idiot.
Je ne parle pas francais.
I'm more interested in if the users are satisfied. Or works faster? Or works slower? Or users rate the overall experience as positive? Negative?
A sheer number of workstations migrated is about as useful as a McDonald's "X Billions of Billions Served!" number. Don't tell me how many you served . . . where they eaten . . . ? . . . and how did they taste . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
The licenses do not tend to be much of a saving but once you have fired the 200+ college drop outs that are looking after the Windows computers and hired 40 people that actually know what they are doing you can save a lot on salaries and the reliability of the system causes a massive saving indirectly. I saw this in reverse several times when places that I dealt with replaced their Sun systems with Windows and had to take on loads of teenagers with a piece of college paper and no idea of how DHCP should be set up. Down times jumped from less than an hour a year to days per year.
But at least the staff could see the acne ridden youths working, they never believed that the old guys with beards and tank tops did anything as the system just worked...
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
If they used, say Ubuntu, they would have to retrain the personnel every time GNOME or Ubuntu folks decide it's a good idea to rethink the whole UI design and human-machine interaction mechanisms. Regardless of whether the new design is or is not better than the old one, it still needs retraining. Retraining = cost. So no, I think that sticking with their own flavor was an excellent idea.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
As opposed to retraining when Windows completely changes?
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
So the fact that they were not able to provide a demonstration did not ring a few bells? LOUDLY?
I guess the company got what they deserved, then.
If they can't be bothered to check the "Web Interface" by qualified IT personnel (who would have found out about the Silverlight thing), then the situation you describe appears to be primarily the fault of your employer.
Unfortunately you are not alone with this, I have seen lots of instances of companies buying $hitty software after having been nicely talked to by a seasoned salesman. "Leadership" personnel is quite often extremely sloppy when it comes to software purchasing decisions and they certainly don't even ask for expert advise. They leave it to their experts to attempt a fix of the mess they bought.
Clearly you don't measure the implications of switching from one architecture to another in any organization. There are a lot (I meal a LOT) of specialiazed applications (from accountancy to library management to any professional branch) that just can't magically go or be replaced, and although I don't work in Munich, I guess there's a lot of Wine running there... In fact, speaking of the software tools everyone in the offices uses (and I mean, non-tech staff), and aside OpenOffice, I don't really see what could easily and conveniently replace Windows-based tools automagically.
The amount of computers I can personally maintain could be as high as thousands or as low as one. All depends on what your requirements are.
For example suppose my job is to do nothing but maintain the systems in working order. I don't help users with problems at all, I just make sure the computers and software works properly. I'm allowed total control, all systems are one make and model and are under warranty at all times, they are replaced when they fall out. They all run a single, unified, set of software, none of it custom. Users have no admin access, all data is stored on a highly reliable, supported, central server.
Well hell in that situation, I can maintain a virtually unlimited number of systems myself. Only real limit is in terms of how often hardware fails and I have to diagnose it and call in warranty support (who will do the actual repairs). Highly reliable central equipment that is supported by the company combined with management software like Ghost mean that I'll do things once and replicate it everywhere.
Now on the other end of the scale, suppose I am expected to provide extremely hands on support. Each and every computer is custom built to the user's wishes, both hardware and software. They get it setup however they want. They also have full and complete admin access. Plus, I am expected to handle any questions or training they have. In that case, I'm not going to be able to handle many systems. 15 might well be too many. I'm going to have to spend a lot of time per system helping people, fixing their fuckups, and so on. I'll hit my limit at a low number of systems.
So it is all in what you want. The more service you want, the more staff you need. We go through that with the Dean at work all the time. He wants us to make faculty happy, which means lots of handholding and support for special research projects, but he doesn't want to spend a lot and hire a lot of staff. We have to keep explaining that you can't have it both ways.
Now they may well have had some inefficiency as well, but part of it can just be a very extensive amount of support. If your support team has a lot of jobs, they need a lot of people.