Munich Open Source Switch 'Completed Successfully'

Qedward writes "Munich's switch to open source software has been successfully completed, with the vast majority of the public administration's users now running its own version of Linux, city officials said today. In one of the premier open source software deployments in Europe, the city migrated from Windows NT to LiMux, its own Linux distribution. LiMux incorporates a fully open source desktop infrastructure. The city also decided to use the Open Document Format (ODF) as a standard, instead of proprietary options. Ten years after the decision to switch, the LiMux project will now go into regular operation, the Munich City council said."

Comments

Other Motives

[mx b]

While the financial savings is great, let's also not forget that it is partially about freedom -- no forced upgrades from vendors, no special expensive proprietary software to read what should be public record, etc. I am more excited about the latter -- an openly accessible government and public records is important no matter how much it costs, but it's especially nice that we can have that AND save some cash.

Re:Other Motives

[Kardos]

Also no backdoors. This alone would justify switching.

Re:Other Motives

[TaoPhoenix]

What about motives for us?

To me this is a new wrinkle in the Linux discussion. We've been seeing uBuntu's "slide towards the Dark Side". A city running its own distro built at least partially from scratch (with German Engineers! Ha! Take that!) can potentially have a super clean codebase with none of the bloated and/or dangerous commercial cruft.

To my layman's eyes, Linux has been suffering from a bit of "X distro is/once was good and is slowly dying from lack of funds or internal politics". But a City has its own different motivation - it needs to Get Stuff Done with people mostly properly trained, vs the whole End User struggle for commercial distros.

So what if we can tap into their work and use it ourselves? Could they provide us with a distro with the full power of a city distro with (hopefully!) no hidden agendas, backed by their level of tech support they use themselves? That could be a new go-stone in the OS Wars.

Since the Germans are probably as upset as anyone else at the NSA, isn't that sorta "pitting them in a cage match vs the NSA spy-hackers"? If you had to put a bet on the NSA attacker vs the German Defender, which way would you go?

 

Re:Other Motives

[haruchai]

The end user retraining is probably the biggest expense but that might be offset by greater productivity / fewer desktop issues - it's hard to say.
I see Linux admin salaries at ~10% more than for Windows but perhaps they can get by with fewer.

Re:Other Motives

[Anonymous Coward]

This is part of the messaging that FOSS advocates get wrong. Do not, ever, try to sell businesses, governments, NGOs, etc. on FOSS based on "freedom". That sounds like hippie logic and it simply doesn't compute with those audiences.

Instead, flip it around and say: Convert to Linux and all FOSS apps and you gain a huge amount of control over your environment. You're in charge and can do whatever you want, without having to deal with Microsoft's (or any other vendor's) latest psychosis that forces you to deal with a uselessly different UI or development model. The more examples you can give people of specific examples -- the Windows 8 flaming, toxic train wreck simply leaps to mind -- the better.

Re:Other Motives

[symbolset]

Also, their study omitted the cost of software licensing for some reason.

Re:Other Motives

[citizenr]

Even if it cost more (and it didnt) all the money would go directly into local economy (IT staff wages) instead of offshore M$ Tax heaven.

Re:Other Motives

[phoenix_rizzen]

We're living proof that it's possible. Local school district, using diskless Linux in every school, roughly 95% of all PCs in the district are running Linux. IT budget is just barely over $100,000/year and that includes hardware and software. 14,000 students in the district, spread across ~10 towns, in 50-odd buildings. Only 14 IT staff, looking after it all.

We pay $0 for the OS and 90-odd% of our apps (we pay for a CAD program, a typing program, and some VC stuff).

Computers are diskless appliances, booting off the network, mounting filesystems off the local server, and running all applications locally. Thus, we get all the centralised management of a thin-client setup, but with all the power of a local computer (apps run on the local CPU, using the local 3D graphics card, pumping audio through the local soundcard, etc). Each one is under $200 CDN, with a quad-core Athlon-II CPU, 2 GB of RAM, and either nVidia or ATi graphics onboard.

They are treated as "disposable" appliances -- if one fails, sent it to maint, grab a spare, plug it in, carry on with your day. Replacement time for a hardware failure is under 15 minutes.

4 service desk staff look after 90% of the software side of things from a central office. 5 school techs look after the other 10% of the software onsite, and hardware issues. Then there's a video conferencing tech, a hardware tech, an electrician, some programmers and managers.

We're using Debian on the servers, FreeBSD on the firewalls and backups servers, and Xubuntu on the desktops. $0/desk.

Oh, did I mention we also have NX installed to allow any student/staff member remote access to their full Linux desktop from anywhere? Try that without licensing fees on Windows. :)

We went from paying several hundred thousand dollars per year in software licensing (Novell Netware, Windows, Office, anti-virus, Ghost, etc, etc, etc) to virtually nothing per year. It's been over 10 years now since we started the transition to Linux (2001), and the savings are HUGE!

Re:good for them!

[thaylin]

He said he would not invest in MS because of his friendship with Gates, not because of of long term profit from software.

Re:ODF

[Poingggg]

More ODF files should be put into circulation in the business world.

I fullhartedly agree! When I have to send a company a file (most of the time my CV, alas :-( ), I always ask if I can send it as an .odt file. Many times I am asked what that is, and then I explain, but offer to send the file as .pdf. I do this, just to make clear that there ARE other things around than MS-Office. However, I find that, slowly, .odt files get accepted more, and companies that do accept them have a plus for me.
Problem is that most people, even when they use Libre Office or any other non-MS suite, will by default send everyone everything in the MS-Office formats, thus establishing the status quo. Non-MS users should use Open Document Format files, especially when sending documents to regulatory organs like city councils etc.
In Europe (where I live), governments and government organs are mandated (hope that is the right word) to be able to handle ODF's, but if they never recieve those, most of them won't even know about their existence, let alone know how to handle them.

(For those who want to tell me I am a pretentious prick: I know. :p )