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Munich Has Saved €4M So Far After Switch To Linux
New submitter Mojo66 writes "Mayor Ude reported today that the city of Munich has saved €4 million so far (Google translation of German original) by switching its IT infrastructure from Windows NT and Office to Linux and OpenOffice. At the same time, the number of trouble tickets decreased from 70 to 46 per month. Savings were €2.8M from software licensing and €1.2M from hardware because demands are lower for Linux compared to Windows 7."
"Also in the bill were included training costs and costs of migration" FTFA
It says it does take that into account. No numbers are actually displayed, nor time displayed (is he calculating into the future, how far into the past, etc), and there is a 2.8 mil not taken into account for optimization and testing.
Still, a savings of 1.2 mil is a pretty good start.
Don't be silly - they're talking desktop users switching from Windows+Office to Linux+OpenOffice - 14,000 PCs and laptops. Since when does anyone run OpenOffice on a server?
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
I do. OpenOffice runs headless as part of a document conversion service, main use is to convert the various MS Office documents to pdf.
explorer.exe can be changed as the default windows manager.
Say, do you always throw out the baby with the bathwater? Last I heard it's very easy to replace various components on PCs without having to replace the whole thing.
How does your OS reduce the speed of your hardware?
By using an inefficient graphics driver (nouveau) with an eye-candy laden window manager (compiz).
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
From the translation:
"The city of Munich with her ââsavings Limux project about a third of their spending in the IT sector, particularly in license costs."
As always the most important benefits of open source software is not highlighted. It is not always about the money saved. The more important issues are: Peruvian Congressman's Open Letter to Microsoft
It can't be the norm that government's IT infrastructure is depending on a foreign firm, with is subject to foreign laws. Especially with laws like the Patriot Act in place and laws like the SOPA and PIPA in discussions.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
I've deployed hundreds of older, off-lease systems in a corporaate environment, and have not seen anything like you've described. Failure-rate is slightly higher than brand-new systems, but still very low. They are also cheap enough there are ready spares, clones from the same base image, that the lowliest tech is empowered to use/swap at-will.
HDD failure rates follow a bathtub curve, so I'd actually rather have an old HDD that passes SMART tests, than a brand-new one.
And NICs? They've ALL been 100Mbit since the mid 90s, which is plenty fast enough for all but the heaviest file-transfer uses. And it's only been a little under 10 years ago that GigE showed-up in PCs, so you might get lucky.
You need to go read-up... WPA was a drop-in replacement for WEP, and cards much more than a decade only will only need a firmware upgrade. Besides, nothing says you have to depend on either... My company requires laptops to VPN in, even one the company's Wifi APs. It's only slightly inconvenient.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
They're using a LiMux, a customised version of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS with KDE3.5. On any modern hardware, it'll be very responsive.
Read Florian Maier's presentation. Warning, PDF: https://www.desktopsummit.org/sites/www.desktopsummit.org/files/DS2011_LiMux_Desktop_Retrospective_2011-08-08.pdf
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Or what if you let the employees work on any machine they want as long as the workflow is the same? I was impressed by the effort taken to allow users to bring iPads to work and use them if thats what they want. The trick is you dont let them choose their workflow or applications, you deliver those.
Every time I read Dave Richards blog I am at first astounded at how much they get done with so little money, and then ashamed that I call myself an IT professional. http://davelargo.blogspot.com/
What people in business, and government are beginning to realize is that software is not a scarce commodity.You cant use it up, but you can add to it.Once they realize that their business is not IT, its, well, doing business, contributing code doesn't make their competition any better, but just improves everyone equally.Additionally, with open software, all the dialogs and desktop items can be customized to suit your particular workflow. Linux + Open Applications + open standards are an awesome combination.
I agree completely. That being said, on the AMD side of things, it's exactly the opposite: The Radeon OSS driver, when it works(had to run a Debian Experimental xorg for good support) is *much* faster than it's closed source counterpart for desktop use: With KDE, by default it wouldn't even enable direct rendering on the Catalyst driver(meaning one cpu core used for compositing; horrible performance), and forcing it resulted in a low framerate and glitches.
Radeon driver on the other hand... I'm getting a good 60fps most of the time, low cpu load, and gorgeous transparency and effects... at the cost of slower OpenGL game performance.
Games... the last great reason to have Windows machines. My kids originally both had Ubuntu, but the whining about games was too much for me to withstand, and I installed Windows for both of them. Now I seem to install Windows fairly often, as they get freaking computer viruses like other children get the flu.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
They migrated from NT. They compare the costs with w7. Limux project (the transition of Munich municipal computers to linux) has been going for a decade and received enough press - i suggest you google before trying to comment.
...change explorer.exe to what exactly?
KDE? Sure
Gnome? Why Not?
XFCE? Not yet. But for lightweight you have LDE(x)
[Rent This Space]