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."

Comments

Re:Does that include cost of training and transiti

[Anonymous Coward]

"Also in the bill were included training costs and costs of migration" FTFA

Re:Not Surprised

[Barbara, not Barbie]

"trendy" modern distros...actually run slower under Linux

They're talking about servers.

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?

Re:Not Surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

I do. OpenOffice runs headless as part of a document conversion service, main use is to convert the various MS Office documents to pdf.

Re:Not Surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

explorer.exe can be changed as the default windows manager.

Re:Not Surprised

[Gaygirlie]

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.

Re:Not Surprised

[Nutria]

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).

Re:Total?

[godrik]

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."

The most important benefit is not the money saved

[devent]

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

• Free access to public information by the citizen.
• Permanence of public data.
• Security of the State and citizens.

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.

Re:Not Surprised

[evilviper]

That "saving" would be more than offset by the lower capabilities and higher failure rates of 10-year-old hardware.

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.

Do you really want to trust your work, even temporarily, to a 10-year-old PC hard drive. Or use a 10mbps network card on a gigabit network if you're sharing files on a server?

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.

Or laptops (the project included converting lots of laptops) with only wireless b and crappy encryption?

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.

Re:Not Surprised

[ozmanjusri]

But that's not what Munich is doing.

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

Re:Not Surprised

[WaywardGeek]

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.