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How Munich Abandoned Microsoft for Open Source
An anonymous reader writes "TechRepublic has the story behind Munich City Council's decision to ditch Microsoft Windows and Office in favor of open source software. The project leader talks about why the shift was primarily about freedom, in this case freeing itself from being tied into Microsoft's infrastructure and having control over the software it uses. He talks about how the council managed to keep such a large project on track, despite affecting 15,000 people and spanning nine years. He also warns against organizations justifying the shift to open source software on the grounds that it will save money, arguing this approach is always likely to fail."
already has significant training procedures to accommodate big processes (like, say, a government would have),
HAHAHA! Thanks for the laugh.
I speak from experience when I tell you you're dreaming if you think government has training procedures. We have a training group and my area (the IT side) does more to train end users than they do. We keep wondering why we're paying these people when everyone comes to us with training questions.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I suspect that everyone (except MS) are extremely happy to break the chains of monitoring licenses and making sure that their accounts are paid up etc.
If I were the CFO of a company I would love to answer the call from some MSDN "certified" bunch of losers call wondering where their renewal check is and I could then tell them that they can go to hell.
But now in these post Snowden times I would be extremely wary of any corporate data where a Microsoft OS has access to my data. How much state sponsored corporate espionage has been taking place with the cooperation of MS? None, Some, Tonnes?
Any foreign company competing with politically connected US corporations on billion dollar deals should take a long hard look at any US based OS and think, "Might the US government be grabbing my data in their National Interest?"
In some countries Cisco has been seeing huge drops in sales. I suspect that there is much more of this to come as it can be hard for a huge company to just throw their network gear out the window and replace it at the drop of a hat. But I also suspect that directives have been issued that all US gear is to be gone ASAP.
They're German, they didn't vote for Obama, and they've had a universal healthcare system for decades longer than Obama has been alive.
The comments here are about the difficulty, the expense, the problems with user acceptance, etc. All of those imply that this sort of change is somehow and optional thing that they can choose to do...or not. In actuality, however, this change is both mandatory and inevitable...and only a matter of time. Maybe next year, maybe in 5 years, or maybe in 10 years but every single enterprise will eventually be forced to make this switch as Microsoft evolves and changes ('implodes' is the word that comes to mind) as it tries to maintain growth and earnings while trying to continue selling the same thing to the same places that already have purchased more than they will ever need.
"He also warns against organizations justifying the shift to open source software on the grounds that it will save money, arguing this approach is always likely to fail."
Note that he doesn't say migrating to FOSS doesn't save money in the end. What he says is that if your migration project gets accepted only on money saving grounds, since cost estimations are very subjective, at one point some Microsoft-friendly bureaucrat with sufficient political weight is going to come up with an Excel spreadsheet "proving" the FOSS migration doesn't save money, and then kill your project.
so just to say FU MS?
That's one way to put it. But then it was MS who told them "FU dear customer" first, as in "NT and Office 2000 are dead so now you must buy XP and 2003 and if you need new PCs to run them too bad for you. By the way if you want authentication to really work well you must buy AD servers to replace your current directory system". It's about you being the one who decides on your IT strategy instead of having your monopolistic software supplier telling you what to do. It looks like a reasonable reason to migrate. It was the primary reason they gave and it saved their project from being killed by bogus cost studies.
Seems that in Germany bribery is outlawed instead of renamed to "lobbying" as in other countries.