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."

Comments

Long-term costs

[Sarten-X]

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.

Meh... maybe.

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.

Of course, managers who are focused solely on the cost will decline any training investment, figuring that it's similar enough to older Microsoft offerings that there should be no problem. Then when the users complain that they don't know the software, they blame the software for the failure.

Re:Long-term costs

[smooth wombat]

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.

Re:Long-term costs

[Vanderhoth]

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.

Re:Long-term costs

[Grishnakh]

That's because you live in America, rather than an advanced, industrialized country with a well-run government.

Re:Long-term costs

[UnknowingFool]

One of the costs that MS always puts into their calculation is the cost of retraining for open source but puts $0 into retraining costs for Windows and Office migrations even though newer versions do require some retraining. As was noted in the report, there was actually less retraining for OpenOffice as it was closer to MS Office 2000 GUI than the newer ribbonized versions of Office that they would have deployed. Don't get me started on much Win 8 retraining will cost.

Re:Long-term costs

[X0563511]

1) You don't think this happens with propreitary software? The end-users still have to learn the software, whether you train them or you require them to come "pre-trained."

2) This is bullshit. I don't think you realize how much FOSS is written/maintained with no expectation or want of compensation. These people do it because they like doing it - and generally they feed themselves doing something else.

Re:Long-term costs

[girlintraining]

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.

Re:Long-term costs

[Vanderhoth]

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.

Re:Long-term costs

[Hognoxious]

Don't get me started on much Win 8 retraining will cost.

I can't imagine. Does the interface work by doing Tai-Chi moves?

How many times do I have to tell you, it's "flower growing through snow" to open a file; you had your left hand the wrong way up - that's "badger with two dicks fucking a pigeon".

Huh? Oh, it deletes your entire HD and kills your cat.

Re:Long-term costs

[Grishnakh]

The point is that in advanced, well-run countries like Germany, the government (at different levels, this is about a city government) actually does this in an effective and sensible manner, which is why Munich was able to successfully switch to open-source software and save a lot of money. In crappy, corrupt countries like the USA, we get expensive debacles like the current Healthcare.gov disaster where big projects are given to political cronies and provided vastly inflated budgets, and disaster ensues.

Incredible information about the logistics

[GodfatherofSoul]

The thing that blew me away is they had a much more advanced set of issues to deal with than a typical bureaucratic office would. The custom macros and apps isn't something that a normal company would be hung up on. That would imply to me that so long as your office can find equivalents of their core applications (whether it be accounting or graphics software), the rest shouldn't be so difficult to overcome. I've always rolled my eyes at the idea of a real-world migration for company of significant size.

Here's an interesting tidbit from the article about how Microsoft inflated the costs of their migration to put a negative spin on the project:

A team of just 25 people at Munich develop, roll out and provide final support for the Ubuntu-based LiMux client. A larger number of people look after the everyday administration of the city's PCs but far fewer than the 1,000 people cited in the Microsoft/HP report as implementing the LiMux project.

Another hidden benefit is even if your project doesn't look like it'll pan out, if you make it high-profile enough you know you can use it to leverage a better contract with Microsoft if you decide to stick with Windows.

Re:Let me guess

[livingboy]

For that reason I used to send my course work as pdfs. I used Libre Office or Google Docs for editing and converted final documents to pdf format.

So MS Word couldn't change layout when document was opened by the teacher.

Breaking the chains

[EmperorOfCanada]

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.

Re:Breaking the chains

[Vitriol Angst]

I knew the Snowden impact was going to be huge -- not because suddenly politicians would be activated because people "woke up" -- but because medium-sized companies will suspect either rightly or wrongly that "hey, maybe some of that spying affected us in a trade negotiation or lost technology?" The politicians care now, because the MONEY cares.

And then you will see US corporations care about security like the auto company cares about Gas Mileage; they have no choice. Either show you are secure and you stand up to NSA or you don't get the sale.

NOW it matters. Some fat cat might lose a chunk out of their wallet -- and there will be outrage!

The damage won't be to US security -- but the economic damage will be in the tens of billions of dollars of lost sales.

Re:Breaking the chains

[blackiner]

You are entirely missing the point. You do not have the Windows source (sure, SOME people can get this, most cannot), and even if you did have it you wouldn't be able to build or distribute it. You are entirely at Microsoft's whim, and they are legally bound to comply with the US government. You seem to think a complex black box built by people at the governments whims, without any ability to fix the internals if something is wrong is somehow more secure than a complex transparent box that allows you to fix the internals.

Re:Breaking the chains

[Lonewolf666]

Good point, but I think for US corporations demonstrating good IT security is no longer sufficient. Now that it is common knowledge that the NSA can, and sometimes will, show up with a "national security letter" and demand customer data, nothing short of a change in US law will repair the lost trust.

Because laws under which US companies can legally refuse to cooperate with US intelligence services will be needed to exclude the scenario that said intelligence services simply compel delivery of the data.

I guess the combined industry lobby will eventually be able to get those changes, but in the meantime the economic damage will be unavoidable even for US corporations that are otherwise good at security.

Re:Let me guess

[RabidReindeer]

They will shit their pants when they see the open office suite completely messing the layout of the documents.

If it takes nearly a decade, they must be pretty constipated.

Re:Obamacare Death Panels

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Let me guess

[Amouth]

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

Re:reasons...

[SargentDU]

@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.

Re:reasons...

[unixisc]

I agree w/ him. It's important to do the right things for the right reasons, not the wrong ones.

If one just talks money here, the costs involved in training people on FOSS alternatives would get incurred, and invariably be higher short term. The real selling point ought to be the shift of control from software vendors to consumers. In this case, since it's a government, it's somewhat easier, but the whole idea behind it is that companies - be it Microsoft, Apple or anyone else can't dictate version changes or upgrades. If it is FOSS, then the consumer becomes a de-facto owner and gets to decide when, if at all, they upgrade, what they upgrade, any training schedules thereby incurred and so on. In other words, they get to plan when to budget for changes in computing environments.

Ultimately, the savings there are quantifiable at any point in time, but over time, the savings may not be there since one has to sometimes upgrade computing environments, whether it's on the schedule of an ISV or a consumer. That's why arguing about saving money is not a good approach. A better one is about shifting the control on any software transitions, and thereby budgeting schedules, from ISVs to consumers, thereby enabling them to plan better for it.

Re:Let me guess

[Shakrai]

There were patches scattered throughout the Windows 2000 source code leak, all with comments along the lines of "Putting this in for the Office team". That was one of the big discussions around here back in the day when that story broke.

The GP is probably taking it to far saying they were doing it for deliberate competitive advantage -- all of the comments that I read sounded like standard bug-fixes -- but it's hard to dispute that Microsoft obviously has an advantage over Libre Office when trying to track down bugs in the O/S that cause problems with the office suite.

Re:bribery

[RightSaidFred99]

Lol, only on Slashdot. Modded to +4 for paranoid ramblings about bribery...

Money v. Freedom

[Bob9113]

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?

Re:"always likely to fail"

[Fwipp]

Or, instead of attempting grammar pedantry, we can realize that he's saying there is no case in which this approach has a probable outcome of success. That is, all cases are likely to fail - this approach always likely to fail, no matter the situation.

Whether you agree with this assessment is another issue.

Re:Let me guess

[wumbler]

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.

Re:bribery

[Grishnakh]

Germany apparently isn't completely rife with corruption, unlike the United States. That's how.

People act as if this is optional

[dtjohnson]

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.

Re:Let me guess

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

Kerio Connect is pretty good.
The webmail interface is far Superior to Exchange web.

Re:Let me guess

[MightyMartian]

Exchange may, to the end user, do what it does well, but i can tell you right now the Exchange 2010 server I just installed is likely to be the last one. What a fucking nightmare. I'm so tired of installing groupware that is nothing more than a badly stitched together bunch of spare parts where every solution to a problem seems to involve uninstalling and reinstalling IIS, and praying to the Web Server Gods that your partially malfunctioning mail server doesn't completely crap out. Everything about Exchange is fucking awful, and if there are any Redmond engineers or programmers reading this, all I can say to you is that I hope you die of awful awful diseases.

It's fucking ludicrous how bad Exchange is, how resource hungry it can be, and how simple fucking things like setting up a fucking mailing list or putting in some decent anti-spam tech (which doesn't amount to a rolled up version of SpamAssassin with some proprietary web pages and costs a bazillion dollars a seat) turns into a fucking nightmare. Fuck I hate Exchange. Hate it... hate it... hate it... hate it.

Re:bribery

[Anonymous Coward]

Bribery is illegal

Many forms of bribery are legal, Gerhard Schröder (former Chancellor of Germany) retired to a managing position at Gazprom after ensuring it would be the main provider of gas for Europe for the near future and the whole FDP received millions in donations for supporting tax reductions favouring the hotel and gastronomic industries. Both lost a lot of political trust and nothing else, Gerhard Schröder pulled it before retiring so he does not care, the FDP already thin on substance got voted out of parliament on the last election, which means they got to stay in power for years after pulling that stunt and only barely missed the 5% requirement for participation. No punishments where handed out by the government and what could it have punished with everything being "legal"? Politicians write the laws and the laws regarding politicians tend to favour them and their alternative money sources, you are not a career politician in Germany unless you have at least one lucrative non descriptive position in the industry.

Re:reasons...

[powerpopolon]

"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.

Re:bribery

[gmuslera]

Seems that in Germany bribery is outlawed instead of renamed to "lobbying" as in other countries.

Re:bribery

[bfandreas]

Simple: The conservative party who were the only ones to vote against this were in the minority. The centre-left party, the green party and the GLBT folks voted for the Linux transition. It was a vote for long-term indipendence against short-term planning and a matter of principle.

I had dealings with the LHM back then and I do fully believe they haven't saved a single cent on the transition. There were hordes of IBM and SuSE consultants stampeding through the halls and they hired a bunch of permanent employees for this. In fact MS made them a couple of offers which as it turned out they could refuse. They hadn't planned on saving money so special deals by MS were not that juicy.

The frustration of the MS sales reps(there were even rumors monkey boy himself traveled to Munich) must have been immense. Munich back then was still running NT and a lot of their servers were Suns. In short it must have been the big cahuna back then.

Don't hold back

[DaveAtFraud]

Tell us how you REALLY feel about Exchange. We can take it.

Cheers,
Dave

Re:Let me guess

[RabidReindeer]

For that reason I used to send my course work as pdfs. I used Libre Office or Google Docs for editing and converted final documents to pdf format.

So MS Word couldn't change layout when document was opened by the teacher.

This whole "Nothing else formats like Genuine Microsoft" thing is pure garbage.

I have never depended on a word processor to maintain constant pixel-by-pixel formatting. That's not what they're for. The only reason that Word documents don't routinely re-arrange themselves (the way they used to) every time you transport a document to a machine with a different printer/set of fonts is because virtually all word processing today is done with a standard set of scalable fonts. Word itself, like many other GUI apps that handle formatted text delegates a lot of the raw typesetting to the video card and the selected printer driver. When most fonts were hardware fonts, that meant some serious re-arranging was commonplace.

If you want precise placement of text, don't use a word processor, use a page layout program. And create a PDF.

And if you want basic formatting to be preserved but pixel-precise isn't important, don't use a word processor like it's a typewriter and jam in manual spaces and carriage returns by dumb brute force, use styles. No, it won't be as immutable as PDF, but at least what re-arranging does happen won't look like crap.