Slashdot Mirror
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."
A new set of verses is needed: In München steht ein Linuxhaus
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
The question is, how they managed to do this despite of Microsoft Economical Power. How they avoided bribery of the involved politicians?
-- --
The desire to save money is, however, subjective. Freedom is not "vague," however. If you use proprietary software, you're not the one in control.
I think you are thinking about the Exchange server filesystem api. for exchange server 2003 and performance reasons exchange would replace the file system io with a special customized for exchange version. A few competitors complained that this was unfair, i think the final verdict was if they wanted "fair" they where free to write their own drop in replacement for the filesystem i/o
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
@zlives ... No, for freedom, is how I read it. They had older machines that worked fine with Win2K but would not work well with XP or newer, so they decided to migrate to Linux for the freedom from having to do as their Computer Operating System Company demanded. This way, they could upgrade the hardware as they saw fit to upgrade.
Umm, the licensing costs are perpetual in many forms. So at no point ever can training costs go above the licensing, it's just a matter of how long to recoup. In addition, the benefits from always having the most up to date version of the software adds additional things in favor of not using MS products.
Long term licensing is never a viable solution, it's just a lot of people don't like to look at long term economic impacts.
The project leader talks about why the shift was primarily about freedom, ... 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.
I think that is the core difficulty in advancing the use of F/LOSS (in the US at least). We are so culturally indoctrinated to see money, and the single-minded pursuit of it, as the measure of success that it is institutionally difficult to grasp sacrificing money in the short run for freedom; regardless of the impact on our bottom line, society, or the larger economy in the long run. The American mindset believes freedom is good in theory, but fails to see that economic success is coupled to choosing freedom -- in a broader sense than the freedom to screw your putative customers -- over short-run revenue.
Wow, those are some seriously run-on sentences. Bite me, ... ummm, Sklansky and Malmuth? ... Case and Shiller? ... Black and Scholes? ... Ah, yes, I remember! Strunk and White! That's it. What was I talking about?
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Actually this is a good point. My wife works for an insurance company. People there are just expected to know how to use a computer and MS Office by extension. They never receive training and the results are half can barely turn their machines on, the other half spend all day running around doing everyone else's work. We seem to expect people need training with FLOSS products, but expect them to just know what they're doing with MS products.
It's shameful really, I've spent many an afternoon banging my head on my desk while trying to talk someone through the ribbon interface because they were just expected to know what to do when Office 2007 first came out.
Many years ago - maybe in 1995 or 1996 - I worked on a team that wrote a load balancing software. We did some in-depth performance measurements of a few web servers, which also included web servers running on Windows NT. We finally also wrote our own little test server. We concluded in our tests that the listen-queue length on NT could only be set to a certain maximum amount (maybe 5, or so) by anyone using the official socket API that was available. However, magically, Microsoft's own web server (IIS) was able to utilize a longer listen queue.
Clearly, Microsoft is not beyond using secret APIs to ensure a competitive advantage for their own software.
That's because you live in America, rather than an advanced, industrialized country with a well-run government.
FLOSS changes the costs. You spend more in training, but save on material. If your organization already has significant training procedures to accommodate big processes (like, say, a government would have), you'll probably come out ahead on the deal. If you have an office of 50 people who were all hired already knowing Microsoft's products, you can expect significant retraining costs that might exceed what you'll save on licensing.
From what I've seen, small businesses won't have training infrastructure in place. Software needs to be able to be configured and used by people with little or inadequate training on the software or related technology. Large businesses do have dedicated training, but this is industry-specific. For example, insurance companies will have extensive training on policies and procedures so adding software/IT training is straight-forward. This is because the business lends itself to having a lot of people doing the same job, at the same location. But it won't work as well for, say, a retail chain. That's because while they have a lot of people doing the same job, there's only a few at each location.
What I've found to be by far the biggest cost in IT is support though, not training. I worked a contract out of a hospital that was switching over to a new electronic records system. Despite each employee receiving close to 60 hours of training each, on-site resources at each hospital given an additional 40 hours of training on top of that for more in-depth training, the whole thing detonated on the launch pad. The reason for the failure was that, although plenty of training had been given on the user interface and what-not, hospitals are highly specialized in how they process things; every department had its own unique process. And it resulted in a support nightmare that caused their entire organization's IT to seize like an engine without oil. Everybody, at every level of IT, was manning the phones for close to a month. There were no patches. There were no deployments. There was no new equipment being installed or upgraded. Everyone basically got kicked to tech support and pulled long, long hours, with queue depths that would summon images of the Krakken when viewing them.
While this was a proprietary solution sold with the promise of higher automation, lower operating costs, and compliance with all applicable laws... when the tires met the pavement, those savings were dwarfed by the support costs, which continued to be high for the next six months post-launch. They anticipate replacing it in 7-10 years. But in those six months, all the potential savings for the rest of its expected service live, vaporized under the heat of support costs.
This is not an atypical situation; most IT projects fail in this fashion. Open source doesn't change this. Zero cost software would still only reduce the total cost of ownership by perhaps 7-10% in a best-case scenario. If you want to save costs in IT, worry less about the software and more about the strength of your project managers. Ultimately, your organizations ability to rapidly respond to changing user needs and have a broad IT skillset across your department's labor force, will do more to help your bottom line than any technology or software you will ever purchase.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
In my town we had a Linux "advocate" that insisted we should ditch MS and Apple for Linux to save "millions per year" in our local school district (our entire IT budget was less than $3M/year) - he felt that by proving Linux ran on 10 year old hardware in his basement, that meant we could use 10 year old hardware in the classroom...
His argument found no traction with anyone, he felt (among other things) that there was no need for central management of 1,500 desktops & laptops, that our robust networking infrastructure could be replaced by unmanaged switches, and our seven campus WiFi network could be served with an infinite number of $40 routers flashed with WRT, etc.
Ken
Yes, I very much remember that argument. A few years ago we were evaluating Office 2007, my boss at the time thought we should switch us over to Open Office, but was shotdown with the "training is too expensive, it'll be easier to stay wtih office" argument. Not six months later we had an Office 2007 upgrade crammed down our throats and all hell broke loose, but it wasn't all bad. It was funny the managers that advocated staing with MS Office and wouldn't even entertain the idea of using something else were the ones that had the hardest time adjusting. It was pretty sweet to watch them sweat when they had to ask for help from the people they right out refused to hear out because the adjustment would have been too hard to make. We're on office 2010 now, but some of the same mangers *still* haven't figured out the ribbion interface. Karma is awesome.