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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."
Linux is better, faster, and more stable. Just the savings on support calls alone would be enormous.
Get rid of that office shit and replace with Vim and Emacs. :) :)
"Also in the bill were included training costs and costs of migration" FTFA
The transition from Windows XP and Office 2003 to Windows 7 and Office 2010 has enormous training costs associated with it. I would not be surprised if the training for the Linux setup was less, if the kept the basic look and feel. And a wash if the didn't bother.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
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.
You would be really surprised how much of this can be mitigated if your sysadmins and support staff already have a Linux backround of some sort. One person with 5 or so years of experience customizing a specific Linux distribution can virtually eliminate amost all of the cost of training for the transition for the rest of the staff simply by creating and deploying some common desktop software and related customizations to make it "more like Windows."
Training? Ahahahaha, ohohohoho, eehehehehee.
Purely from an office drone's perspective (all software proselytizing aside), training is the bogeyman. The vendors bring it out to scare the customer, but it doesn't exist. It "costs" eleventy billion dollars! Nobody will know how to do anything if you don't buy training!
But big offices make big changes all the time, and they don't *really* do squat for training. They might gather the group around a conference table and click through some slides, and tell everybody that Joe has used the program before and they should ask him if they're having trouble.
Hooray, you wasted a day watching powerpoint and you got a photocopied certificate that you get to scrawl your own name on!
How many offices have gone from something, to Lotus, to Exchange, to Google... etc.? And it's not just email infrastructure. Your billing system as a consultant might change every few years; your code management system as a programmer might change. Your document control system might change. The way your network space is apportioned, the way you print; any number of things can change depending on the way the wind blows in management.
And then, you top it off with planned obsolescence: remember going from Office 97 to Office XP? And then to the new craziness of Office 2010? A little old lady secretary wouldn't be any more confused by moving to Open Office... and she's not getting any training when MS Office 2014 comes out and scraps everything she knows for touch-screen inspired insanity!
Even universities, where you would expect old systems to soldier on for far too long, seem to do that kind of thing in less than 10 year intervals. And the employees who you would expect to get some "training" (office staff, geezer professors) don't--they complain, they suffer, and then they figure it out ;-)
Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR
Why? Competition is good. Even if you think microsoft makes decent products this gives you a sense of how much the competition compares and if it's cheaper, well MS needs to come out with cheaper.
The question with all of these things is whether or not employees are just working on personal laptops instead of linux machines (I've seen that happen a few times, and that's a very serious problem), and whether or not they have any productivity changes. They might, they might not. Depends what they're doing. Saving money on licencing isn't the same as saving money. If you have 10 000 computers (as per the article) but you reduce productivity by even 1% you're worse off with linux than windows since to make up 1% is 100 people, which runs about 10 million euros.
TCO is a hard thing to calculate. It's pretty obvious that you can save money on licencing using linux, and probably training as well (no microsoft certifications). The hard part is measuring employee compliance, the cost of non compliance (this is a big issue where I am, where the IT guys are very pro linux, so about half our staff just do all their work on personal equipment, since it's a university department that's not a huge problem, but for a corporation or a city that could be problematic), and productivity gain/loss. You'd think that in this day and age, when everything is on the web and a web service that most of this wouldn't matter too much productivity wise, if not a productivity increase by not being able to waste as much time with crap that isn't work related since you can lock down linux more easily.
ok, you can start by not posting as AC
Then we can start discussing your hatred of monkeys.
It doesn't even include a study of productivity. The report seems to be done from a pure IT angle, as if IT weren't a tool to achieve goals.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
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
> But how much have they lost?
- Lock-in to a single-source supplier
- Worries about not being able to read their own archived documents saved in legacy formats (OpenOffice supports over 100 office file formats)
- All trace of malware
- The need for a license compliance officer
- Any threat of being audited, or having a disgruntled employee dob them in to the BSA
- The upgrade treadmill
- Long delays during Windows updates
Where is Florian Mueller?
Oh Florian, do you remember this?
"Linux violates 283 U.S. software patents," said Florian Mueller, software developer and adviser to the chief executive of Swedish open source firm MySQL,
Such bold words back in 2004. Such brave effort in trying to get Munich to abandon the plan.
It's 8 years later. Where is the "death by a thousand lawyers," Florian?
--
BMO
You're right; I was being a little hyperbolic, for humor's sake. Heck, I taught a pretty mean Outlook class to a bunch of little old ladies. I wanted to talk about sorting and mailboxes; they just wanted to know how to put background colors in their emails =)
But not all corporate computer training is good, either, and my experience has definitely been defined by the bad. I've got a whole folder full of those baloney certificates, and don't get me started on "mandatory online training." You know, the kind where you click through a powerpoint, guess "C" for all of the answers on the multiple choice test, and then get to go back and do it again once you know the right answers.
Most of the things that I hear about the potential cost of retraining a workforce to use (insert Linux, Google, etc here) seem like they were estimated using the same math that the local news uses to give a half-smoked joint a street value of thousands of dollars.
Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR
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.
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.
It has been a desperate struggle for all in the computer business to come up with the least usable software ever! Apple had a good long run with their 1 mouse button because options just give users options. MS for a long time stayed with its tried and tested "crash more often then the stockmarket" while Unix just had to rely on making even the manual an arcane command line.
But then stupid users tried to improve. Apple was forced to accept that with the PC, users could always just buy a multi-buttoned mouse! Can't have that Jobs said and have the word iOS, to get rid of not just right-click but double click in one go.
Aha! MS said, we can beat that, behold, the RIBBON, a beautifull piece of AI that ensures whatever command you want, you won't be able to find it.
Oops, said Linux, we started to lag. Quickly, upgrade the desktops so that whatever one you pick, you get the worsed ideas ever combined in a buddy alpha package!
But unbeknown to all, queitly working away were the OpenOffice people, show casing just how utterly evil you can get with opensource code... TADA! The text editor with NO USER INTERFACE AT ALL! MWAHAHAHAHAA!
Even Nintendo who gave us the handheld you got to move to control the game but hold still to be able to see can't top that.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
...change explorer.exe to what exactly?
KDE? Sure
Gnome? Why Not?
XFCE? Not yet. But for lightweight you have LDE(x)
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