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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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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
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.
"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.