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

What is my asshole?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is my asshole? What is the nature of my cock sucking asshole? I'll reveal its dark secret to you: My asshole is a tadpole sucker!

Re:What is my asshole?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is the nature of my cock sucking asshole?

To steer this discussion back on topic, I'm gonna respond "proprietary software".

Re:What is my asshole?

[chilvence]

You obviously think you are really funny, but I want to give you some honest constructive feedback by telling you that you didn't make me laugh.

Re:What is my asshole?

[Anonymous Coward]

I do not think I am funny. I believe myself to be a messenger of The Truth. Your cock got sucked right into my asshole before you could even post that silly comment, so why not just enjoy the slurping?

Re:What is my asshole?

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously think you are really funny

You obviously think you're really clever, but now someone has to waste 3 more mod points modding you down to -1 (not to mention me, and the troll's reply) so that no-one browsing at a sensible level sees the OP or any replies to it.

This is what moderation is for. Don't feed the trolls.

(posting AC for obvious reasons)

good for them!

[lyapunov]

This is a pleasant surprise.

Hopefully the near 12 million pound savings can be expanded upon and cause others to follow suit.

Re:good for them!

[Cordus Mortain]

+1

Re:good for them!

[BoRegardless]

This is "off topic" but illustrates why Warren Buffett once said he would not invest in Microsoft as he couldn't see a Loooong term profit stream from software.

Time will tell whether MS makes a successful switch to integrated devices.

Re:good for them!

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Hopefully the near 12 million pound savings can be expanded upon and cause others to follow suit.

The savings will surely help fund their joining the United Kingdom...

Re:good for them!

[Anonymous Coward]

Warren Buffett once said he would not invest in Microsoft

whhhhhauuut? You do realize who one of the *first* investors of MS was right?

Re:good for them!

[tqk]

It's an interesting metric to go by as well. Going proprietary means a large investment in cash and related tangibles, but not many consider how much time it wastes to get away from it. I know junkies who've been on methadone that long.

Re:good for them!

[alexander_686]

I would like to see a cite for that.

I have seen him say that he would not invest in technology companies because he couldn’t understand how they would make a profit – as in lack of knowledge verse a conclusion that it could not make money.

If you look at his investment philosophy, it is about investing in long established boring business where he can understand the cash flow. He has stated that he does not have the technical chops to wade into the tech market sector.

Re:good for them!

[mcrbids]

Didn't this take over 10 years? I seem to recall hearing about their decision to switch sometime around the year 2000....

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:good for them!

[thaylin]

Um, it is in the summery.. Are we too lazy to even read the summery now?

Re:good for them!

[tqk]

Didn't this take over 10 years?

From TFS: "Ten years after the decision to switch, the LiMux project will now go into regular operation, the Munich City council said."" So, yes, it took 'em about a decade to dig themselves out of that hole. Sad, but true.

Re:good for them!

[Loki_666]

10 years in a governmental organization is bloody fast! Not to mention they would have had a ton of apps and systems dependent on proprietary stuff that would either need migrating or testing under WINE.

But mainly, it would be the fact that a majority of departments I can imagine would have been fighting the change tooth and nail, not to mention pressure from MS sales reps who would have been doing the rounds convincing everyone they could that a change would be the end of the world!

Re:good for them!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, he said it's because Gates is an anti-Christ.

This is the place we're just making s*** up, right?

Re: good for them!

[Anonymous Coward]

More important is to get reefom from MS-diktatorship. We should all work to open IT to competition. Open standards, interfaces, files and code are te way to working markets.

Re:good for them!

[Anonymous Coward]

They tried that once, back in 1939. Didn't work for them...

Re:good for them!

[Anonymous Coward]

Strange, because it didn't take them 10 years to get into the Windoze swamp.

Re:good for them!

[compro01]

Warren won't buy Microsoft stock because the entire world would be throwing insider trading accusations at him.

I—well, Microsoft is a special case because Microsoft is off bounds to us because of my friendship with Bill and if we spent seven months buying Microsoft stock and during that period they announced a repurchase or increase of the dividend or an acquisition, people would say you've been getting inside information from Bill. So I have told Todd and Ted and I apply it myself that we do not ever buy a share of Microsoft. I think Microsoft is attractive but that—but we will never buy Microsoft. It—people would just assume I knew something and I don't, but they would assume it and they would assume Bill talked to me and he wouldn't have. But there's no sense putting yourself in that position.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/45290263

Re:good for them!

[kenh]

But mainly, it would be the fact that a majority of departments I can imagine would have been fighting the change tooth and nail, not to mention pressure from MS sales reps who would have been doing the rounds convincing everyone they could that a change would be the end of the world!

They really, REALLY wanted to stay on Windows NT?

I doubt it.

Re:good for them!

[maxwell demon]

Well, that was due to a misunderstanding. They delivered pounds dynamite instead of pounds sterling.

Re:good for them!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ballmer himself went to Munich to try and prevent Linux from "winning" this. He failed, because Microsoft was unable to sell the city a solution which gave them as much control and autonomy as they wanted (that is to say, complete).
The Munich administration were thinking about what is best in the long-term, and not just about the next year or two's budgets.

Re:good for them!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Ten years after the decision to switch, the LiMux project will now go into regular operation, the Munich City council said."

I admit it's surprising, but there's still nothing pleasant about a 10 year migration period. In the private sector, even for something as large-scale as a city, 10 months would be a wait.

Re:good for them!

[Just Some Guy]

Note to Wall Street investor types: the best guy in the business is scrupulous to the point of rigorously avoiding even the appearance of impropriety. Warren Buffett became a gazillionaire without bending the rules and throwing ethics aside.

If you feel you have to cheat to get ahead, then openly admit that you're not very good at your job. Go ahead: look in the mirror and say "I suck too much to play it honestly". If you can't do that, then maybe you need to evaluate your decision making.

Re:good for them!

[Anonymous Coward]

MS sales rep? I distinctly remember news reports that Ballmer payed Munichs mayor Ude a personal visit offering extreme discounts. Keeping the city administration on Windows was a big deal for MS. But they failed.

Re:good for them!

[chilvence]

Hello, I'm the google suggestion bot. Did you mean 'shit' ?

Re:good for them!

[Immerman]

You're right - it took much longer. The trip into the swamp has been progressing gradually for decades as offices become increasingly computerized. And for most of that time "computer" pretty much equaled "DOS / Windows PC" in most organizations. They didn't just suddenly wake up one day with decades worth of platform-dependent software and scripts that would have to be migrated.

Re:good for them!

[Anonymous Coward]

Not just MS Reps. Steve Ballmer took a totally unscheduled skiing holiday in Bavaria and just happened to be around to meet with the Munich city council.

Re:good for them!

[Anonymous Coward]

10 years in a governmental organization is bloody fast!

It's rather useless to apply American gov't stereotypes to German gov't.

It took 10 years *because* gov't was efficient, the German way: nothing was broken, people could work as usual, gov't didn't stop for a day due to a glitch, etc.

It was phased roll-out. Lots of desks - those with low requirements - were switched to Linux and Web apps long time ago. But finishing the remaining few, without any major interruptions, was the challenge.

The whole transition was un-American in many ways. Instead of: out-sourcing it to private company, watching the budget bleed huge management bonuses, watching the big highly-paid tech celebrities going on TV and telling tax-payers that the project is in great shape and in good hands, finally watching the project flop because of lack of budget and then complain "gov't can't do shit" (despite the fact that gov't didn't do anything! it was private sector screw up!), Bavarian gov't took the active role at forming and shaping local IT industry to serve their needs. Even the project's goal was un-American: it wasn't to save money per-se, it was to gain at least some level of independence from the (private) software vendors and to gain choices when purchasing the software.

It's almost communism over here, if you ask me.

Re:good for them!

[Optali]

Hopefully the near 12 million pound savings can be expanded upon and cause others to follow suit.

This will be difficult as Germans use Euros. And being them Bavarians they will surely waste the money in beer and bratwurst.

Re:good for them!

[crutchy]

Warren Buffett once said he would not invest in Microsoft

Warren Buffett is really Jesus in a velvet suit who said he wants to be taxed more so that he can help the poor because he is really a good guy, so why would he want to invest in an evil corporation that might make returns for his own benefit?... after all, only 'rich' people do that!

Now already?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow that was fast! I remember like yesterday when I read the first piece of news about this decision, I think it was the days when Reagan was president and Dallas was best the tv had to offer.

Re:Now already?

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

I think it was the days when Reagan was president and Dallas was best the tv had to offer.

And you think that was bad? At that time, Derrick was on tv too, and that's the image most people had - and often still have - of Munich around the world. They *had* to do something to change their image!

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

[alexander_686]

Do we know that they saved money overall? I poked around the article but I couldn’t find anything.

  From what I have read in the past, conversions like this did not save money. The reduced front end costs were offset by higher backend costs. Linux admins have higher salaries then windows admins. Front end staff needs to be retrained and have to spend more time with outside vendors who are on Microsoft Office. Etc.

I really hope that the conversion does save money and I think the open data formats add value. I just want to know how they measured the cost savings.

Re:Other Motives

[Sique]

There is much dispute about this, and while the City of Munich claims strong savings, Microsoft published a study which claimed Linux would cost more.

I tend to believe Munich more on this, because they can actually point to real numbers from the real world, while Microsoft's claims are based on speculation and estimates.

Re:Other Motives

[jez9999]

No tablet interface shoehorned onto your desktop because Steve Ballmer says so...

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

[Zak3056]

Do we know that they saved money overall? I poked around the article but I couldn’t find anything.

That's also my question. I'm having difficulty wrapping my head around a decade long engineering effort, plus the ongoing costs of maintaining their own distro(!!) is going to lead to a net cost savings. Best of luck to them, and I do hope they succeeded here, but I too would love to see specifics (and not marketing drivel provided by MS, Gartner, etc).

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

[Anonymous Coward]

I see Linux admin salaries at ~10% more than for Windows but perhaps they can get by with fewer.

No "perhaps" about it. I've been an admin in a lot of different mixed shops and the ratio of servers to admins is always better for *nix than for Windows, true for both servers and desktops. Gotta love ubiquitous scripting tools and absence of Patch Tuesday.

Re:Other Motives

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft's claims are based on speculation and estimates and blatant self-interest.

FTFY.

Re:Other Motives

[jazman_777]

Ah, the holy grail: a clean, no-frills distro. If you really want clean and no-frills, go OpenBSD.

Re:Other Motives

[i kan reed]

No, a table interface shoehorned onto your desktop because the Ubuntu devs say so. It's so much better in Linux land.

Re:Other Motives

[jones_supa]

Probably so, but let's be careful about stating that as a fact. The amount of commits per day for Linux increases all the time and so does the probability that someone manages to sneak something nasty there. All I'm saying is that we should still keep our eyes open.

Re:Other Motives

[jedidiah]

Yes it is.

We have alternatives. Those alternatives won't mix with the base system like oil+water because our system is modular.

Re:Other Motives

[slashbart]

kde, gnome 2, gnome 3, xfce, ...

Re:Other Motives

[Anonymous Coward]

It's no more difficult to maintain a custom distro than a custom Windows installation. In fact, many organizations have their own "Windows distro" that comes with preconfigured and preinstalled software and properties.

I'm guessing you, and many others for that matter, think that since they have their own distro, they must be coding themselves almost everything they use. This is simply not true. Simplified version is they just select what software they want to use and install it off the official Ubuntu repositories.

Re:Other Motives

[whoever57]

Do we know that they saved money overall? I poked around the article but I couldnâ(TM)t find anything.

You write as though this point is the end of possible cost savings. In the future, there will be no more Windows licenses, no more CALs to buy. No more Office licenses.

More importantly, no (or perhaps fewer) vendor(s) with a lock-in that prevents effective price negotiations and, for those that do have lock-in, a very credible threat that they will be replaced if they refuse to play ball.

Re:Other Motives

[Anonymous Coward]

No tablet interface shoehorned onto your desktop because Steve Ballmer says so...

What are you talking about? Microsoft has told us repeatedly that your training budget is $0 with Windows. So clearly that shoehorned botch of a UI must be incredibly intuitive. How else can Microsoft claim that paying for Windows has cheaper TCO than using Linux and controlling your own destiny?

Re:Other Motives

[symbolset]

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

Re:Other Motives

[vux984]

No, a table interface shoehorned onto your desktop because the Ubuntu devs say so. It's so much better in Linux land.

What a mess of conflicting things...

On the one hand, the "Modern UI" in Windows 8.1 isn't nearly the issue a lot of people think it is. On the other hand it IS true that users are forced to stay on the Microsoft feature treadmill whether its headed in a direction they like or not.

While the Ubuntu comparison is humorous and somewhat apt, it also fails. Firstly, one can switch distros relatively easily, and one can switch desktop environments on the same distro relatively easily.

Finally one can also simply fork it and do what one wants -- and this is often considered the 'nuclear' option, an option which technically exists, but which is considered too impractical to do... which in this case is exactly what they did.

They are running LiMux which is literally their very own City of Munich distro.

Re:Other Motives

[symbolset]

And server. Don't forget Metro on the Server. Because... we don't know why. Just because.

Re:Other Motives

[unixisc]

Of which KDE, GNOME2 & XFCE are not tablet i/f's, while GNOME3 is. What's your point?

Re:Other Motives

[tlhIngan]

Also no backdoors. This alone would justify switching.

Depends on what backdoors. NSA hidden backdoors? Maybe not. Security issues? There may be plenty.

I know that many Linux systems end up quickly outdated (practically all of mine have mile-long lists of security updates waiting), mostly because you don't really want to hose your machine during development, and you end up with odd requirements like needing Ubuntu 10.04 still installed (despite it being out of LTS support in a few months).

So the big question is - how are all the updates handled? After all, after a few months you might end up with every machine still running the original version as users either fail to notice the update dialog or ignore it. (It's part of the reason why Windows defaults to installing automatically and simply forcing a reboot).

Re:Other Motives

[RabidReindeer]

No tablet interface shoehorned onto your desktop because Steve Ballmer says so...

Having experienced the Gnome Desktop, I'm presuming that this was meant to be sarcastic.

Re:Other Motives

[RabidReindeer]

Do we know that they saved money overall? I poked around the article but I couldnâ(TM)t find anything.

You write as though this point is the end of possible cost savings. In the future, there will be no more Windows licenses, no more CALs to buy. No more Office licenses.

More importantly, no (or perhaps fewer) vendor(s) with a lock-in that prevents effective price negotiations and, for those that do have lock-in, a very credible threat that they will be replaced if they refuse to play ball.

Also no tying up tech staff with juggling licenses in fear of the Spanish Inquisition, er software license audits.

Re:Other Motives

[Anonymous Coward]

This may be completely irrelevant, but one thing that has effectively kept OSS out of the server room are certifications like FIPS and Common Criteria. Some operating systems (OS X, RedHat, SuSE) have passed these tests, but oftentimes, most have not, and auditors wanting to know why something doesn't have these pretty pieces of paper are about as bad as dealing with software license audits.

Re:Other Motives

[jader3rd]

But a City has its own different motivation - it needs to Get Stuff Done with people mostly properly trained

LOL

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

[exomondo]

You write as though this point is the end of possible cost savings. In the future, there will be no more Windows licenses, no more CALs to buy. No more Office licenses.

In the future there will be maintenance costs, that's how the free software model works. It is their own distribution so either they will contract software development out to another company or employ a development team to manage themselves, either way it is a significant cost.

Re:Other Motives

[slashbart]

Of which KDE, GNOME2 & XFCE are not tablet i/f's, while GNOME3 is. What's your point?

Simple, no one is forcing any Linux user to use a table interface shoehorned into a desktop interface, there's choice aplenty. I shouldn't have included Gnome 3.

Re:Other Motives

[exomondo]

We have alternatives.

There's alternatives on Windows too, litestep, classic shell, pokki, etc...

Re:Other Motives

[kenh]

How else can Microsoft claim that paying for Windows has cheaper TCO than using Linux and controlling your own destiny?

That presents me with exactly two choices - either you have figured out something that has eluded every major IT organization around the world for the last 20 years OR you are wrong.

I suspect the latter to be the case.

I work in K-12 education, and we pay MS about $35/desk for all their latest software per year. With that, along with all the server software we use (it's factored into the above per desktop cost), we get Active Directory, System Center, etc. to help us manage our environment.

Please price out an alternative deployment for 1,000 desktops and laptops that provides a level of desktop management equal to the one provided with the MS solution... I'll wait. When we made a cursory look into management suites for Large Linux deployments we found their cost to be a multiple of what we were paying MS ($100/desk per year for management suite v. $34/desk per year for the MS solution suite)...

Re:Other Motives

[Zak3056]

I'm guessing you, and many others for that matter, think that since they have their own distro, they must be coding themselves almost everything they use. This is simply not true. Simplified version is they just select what software they want to use and install it off the official Ubuntu repositories.

No, I don't think this at all, but I would expect the level of effort to be similar to something like CentOS. Probably more so, since if I understand correctly, one of their goals was to not be tied too tightly to their upstream distro, so they'll be faced with having to replace libblahblah.so.4 and all of its dependencies when they want to update packages foo, bar,and blee that upstream decided can't change for stability purposes.

I will say that your point about the work involved with maintaining a golden Windows image is a good one, though given that DLL hell is mostly a thing of the past (I won't comment on the shitty way that MS dealt with that, but it is more or less fixed) it's probably a lot less work than the above. Still, it is a point I hadn't considered.

Their claimed cost savings is something like $20M, so that pays for a LOT of overhead. But does it pay for enough?

Re:Other Motives

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah really.
Who does Microsoft think they are?
Ubuntu?

Re:Other Motives

[Sarten-X]

My day job puts me working with Server 2012 pretty much constantly.

Yeah, the Modern thing sucks as an OS interface. The Modern UI is designed for something like a phone or tablet, where you're doing exactly one thing at a time. Run an app, then when you're done with it, you go back to the main screen and pick a new thing to do. It's horrible for multitasking, but who's really going to multitask much on a phone, anyway?

It turns out I don't multitask much on a server, either. Generally, I connect via RDP, hit the super key, type the name of what I want (either the real name or enough of an abbreviation that it works), and do whatever I need to do. When I'm done, I'll usually just leave the program open because I'll come back to it later, but I'm rarely actually switching between programs. When I do need something, I'd rather just type to get it, rather than go through a menu. Windows 7/Server 2008 allowed that, but the "grab everything from the Start Menu" approach didn't seem to really give useful results for an abbreviation.

I've only really gotten annoyed at the start screen on a server with a few too many roles with a bit too much third-party software on it. That just got messy. On the whole, though, Modern makes more sense on a server than a desktop. Of course I'd still prefer bash, but that's beside the point. No, Powershell is not a suitable substitute.

Re: Other Motives

[Anonymous Coward]

if you werent crap windoze admins, a bit of ssh scripting would do all ad does and much more

Re:Other Motives

[Anonymous Coward]

It's so much better in Linux land.

I agree. I run Ubuntu but don't have to use Unity, so I don't. And a lot of Linux users don't even run Ubuntu, so the question of Unity never comes up. In Windows land, though, everyone who runs Windows, runs Windows. There is one entity who micromanages an entire chunk of software from the kernel, all the way up to the UI. (Mac users arguably have a situation that is even worse, though Apple tends to be far more competent than Microsoft so it strangely doesn't hurt as badly. (Though many people who have upgraded from Mac OS 10.4 have started to disagree about it not hurting as much.)) But one thing everyone knows by now, is no one entity will (or can) ever really do a great job on all those scopes at once. Free software to the rescue. Kernel by Linus Torvalds. Desktop by Olivier Fourdan (or someone else, of your choosing).

That way, Munich can have something decent. Whether they achieve it or not is debatable, but with Microsoft, they'd never even have the chance to have something decent.

Re:Other Motives

[exomondo]

Simple, no one is forcing any Linux user to use a table interface shoehorned into a desktop interface, there's choice aplenty. I shouldn't have included Gnome 3.

How is that different to any other operating system? What operating system (aside from say iOS) can you not change the shell on?

Re:Other Motives

[Anonymous Coward]

Idiot.

Re:Other Motives

[exomondo]

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.

I doubt it, they aren't going to even want to get close to the bleeding edge. One of the complaints was the need to upgrade their systems every 3-4 years so you really think they are going to spend time and money pulling in, testing and rolling out new changes all the time? I'm guessing the focus is going to be on security over features, which will lead to it getting forked, which will lead to it ending up just like every other distro that loses its way.

If you want a no nonsense distro just use stock Debian or CentOS or something.

Re:Other Motives

[ozmanjusri]

Linux admins have higher salaries then windows admins.

But you need less of them

March 28, 2012: In response to a request from the CSU the City reported that it has already saved about 4 million euros in licensing costs as well as reduced the number of support calls

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux

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:Other Motives

[maxwell demon]

Idiot.

That's an alternative I've not yet encountered. Could you tell something about its features? Is it free? And where do you get it?

Re:Other Motives

[couchslug]

Let's also not forget that all commercial closed source software from US companies should be presumed to have been backdoored by the NSA with the vendors cooperation (coerced or bought).

Snowden proved the US government will stop at nothing to spy on every communication it can. Foreign governments running Microsoft operating systems hand the NSA the keys to their kingdom.

FOSS advocates should hammer this relentlessly. It is not at all fanciful in light of the US goal of total global communication surveillance.

Further, if a disgruntled "Snowden" has access and can leak data, that means others have the same ability and may use information for their own financial or other benefit. When you consent to NSA surveillance, you aren't trusting just an "agency", but everyone in that agency with access to your data. If they grab your proprietary corporate secrets and sell them to competitors they may financially ruin you.

Pleasant dreams.

Re:Other Motives

[cbiltcliffe]

Is it free? And where do you get it?

Really? Just look around. It's fucking EVERYWHERE!!!

Re:Other Motives

[Anonymous Coward]

My desktop uses enlightenment and i can run ubuntu's libc for some game client using LD_LIBRARY_PATH. In other words, you don't know what GNU/Linux is.

Re:Other Motives

[Rennt]

Ubuntu has always been a commerical distro, and yeah - nobody is surprised that they make a "product" that puts Cannonical's bottom line above needs of the user.

But we've always had to clean distros without the commercial cruft. We call them "community" rather than "city" distros, but it amounts to the same thing. Debian, Arch, Slack, Gentoo... the list goes on and on.

Re: Other Motives

[jd2112]

Think of as an incentive to switch to server core and do all your administration via PowerShell.

Re:Other Motives

[Anonymous Coward]

yes you are right, he should have appended that on the end. the fact that his post didnt end with a derisive remark makes it very unslashdot.

Re:Other Motives

[nullchar]

Most large/corporate installs of Windows manage updates via server-determined policies, not by individual users.

One would assume LiMux is managed the same way: an IT team is constantly pushing out updates to their 14,800 desktops. If they made their own distribution, they probably manage their own auto-updates.

Re:Other Motives

[Anonymous Coward]

> Of which KDE, GNOME2 & XFCE are not tablet i/f's, while GNOME3 is.

Plasma Active.

http://plasma-active.org/

> Plasma Active is intended for all types of tablets, smartphones and touch computing devices such as settop boxes, smart TVs, home automation or in-vehicle infotainment. Plasma Active is a joint project by the KDE community, basysKom and open-slx.

Re:Other Motives

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you an idiot?

They have a mildly customized version of Ubuntu LTS. It takes less effort to maintain than a typical corporate Windows image.

Re:Other Motives

[chilvence]

I'm on Idiot 11.12-curmudgeon, and I think it is the best. Fuck all of what y'all are yousing, are you some kind of fag-whores?

Re:Other Motives

[Jack Griffin]

And Munich has no self-interest in fudging numbers?

Re:Other Motives

[Jack Griffin]

It's no more difficult to maintain a custom distro than a custom Windows installation. In fact, many organizations have their own "Windows distro" that comes with preconfigured and preinstalled software and properties.

Crap. The one benefit of using a closed product is the under the hood is identical across the board, so patching and upgrading is a *lot* more predictable. Customised Linux may offer benefits in some areas but a predictable upgrade/patch path isn't one of them. .

Re:Other Motives

[Jack Griffin]

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.

You've clearly hidden a lot costs since $100k wouldn't even cover the 14 salaries, let alone hardware, software, and comms costs. I wonder if Munich are using the same accounting methods...

Re:Other Motives

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu isn't especially bloated. It runs at least as good as WindowsXP out of the box, as far as performance is concerned.

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".

Then your layman's eyes are suffering from selection bias (a common problem). There are several distros that have been running solid for a very long time. Such distros are Ubuntu's own granddaddy, Fedora, Gentoo, Arch, and more recently SUSE.

Re: Other Motives

[Anonymous Coward]

only true mbaers can make windows into window. their destructive efficiency is truly remarkable.

Re:Other Motives

[slashbart]

Do you have a GUI alternative for OS-X? I can install KDE, but I'm not sure the average Mac user can.

Re:Other Motives

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

You've clearly hidden a lot costs since $100k wouldn't even cover the 14 salaries, let alone hardware, software, and comms costs. I wonder if Munich are using the same accounting methods...

You aren't seriously trying to claim that to run a Microsoft software stack serving 14,000 students spread across ~10 towns, in 50-odd buildings would require no IT staff? Don't you need 14 IT staff just to administer the software licenses? I wonder if Microsoft-sponsored TCO studies are using the same accounting methods...

Actually, I needn't wonder ... there is absolutely no doubt that Microsoft-sponsored TCO studies are utterly bogus.

Re:Other Motives

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, all of those alternatives are FOSS, so they look like they were put together by a crack baby. Not to mention they all depend on X.org. Keep trying.

Re:Other Motives

[Anonymous Coward]

The ratraining would have to happen anyway. If it wasn't done as Windows XP->LiMux + Windows 2003->OpenOffice.org 3.x, it'd have to be done as Windows XP->Windows 7 + MS Office 2003->MS Office 2010. The typical office worker needs about the same total amount of retraining in both cases. While WXP->LiMux retraining is harder than WXP->W7, MSO2003->OOo 3.x retraining is easier than MSO2003->MSO2010.

Re:Other Motives

[rioki]

Exactly that. My servers are all kept up to date with a simple cron script that does apt-get update && apt-get upgrade. It is not so hard to implement a similar policy on a desktop system.

Re:Other Motives

[rioki]

No really. The raw numbers are public knowledge. They know what they paid in Windows XP era and how much they are paying now. The last article I read about it, a few years ago, they claimed that the operation of LiMux was cheaper than Windows XP, excluding the license costs for eventual Vista upgrades. (Yes, that was before W7.)

Re:Other Motives

[rioki]

Well that is the beauty of German public workers. They are heavily unionized and have a simple labor contract that has pay grade (based on task/education) and work experience. There is no varitable element, so an admin working for any government position will exactly the same pay as any other admin. That is also part of the reason why LiMux is not more expensive to operate.

Re:Other Motives

[KingMotley]

Yes, they are. They suggested they would have paid 2.8m for their 10k in desktops. That's $280/desktop. As the GP suggested, it is actually closer to $35/desktop for licenses, nearly 1/8th the cost Munich put forth.

Re:Other Motives

[bingoUV]

Two points :
1. Ubuntu, any, is not the right choice for such deployments because 5 years is not enough support period. You need rolling release, or CENTOS like support -minimum 7 years, frequently stretching to 10.

2. Linux, with at least 2 snapshotting filesystems, is much better placed than windows in recovering from bad updates. The rollback, being at a filesystem level, is much cleaner.

Re:Other Motives

[rotovator]

I would like to add and summarize my experiences here. We're a large high school here where there is a computer programming and administration vocational traingin branch. There are also a couple of other vocational training families together with normal highschool courses in the same building and under the same staff.

We have a division between teachers who use and advocat for the use of linux and others who prefer to stick with Windows. We linux users are passively winning this race. Public administrations are tightening control over computer, installed software and so on to prevent piracy. That affects windows-office world. AS the pressure over the other group of theachers rose, the school decided to go for a "Microsoft program for schools software or whatever its name was". The idea was to pay some euros and have full access for every computer and student to install a large set of Microsoft applications and operative systems.

At first, we belived it would be like: "Hey! WE've paid, we can install Everything".

Nope!!!! We have access to a web that once the form is filled in, leaves you download and install a copy of the software for a single user or computer, which gets registered at that microsoft site. Lab multiple installation is possible, but neither easier. In the end THERE IS NO WAY TO MATCH THE FREEDOM OF FREE SOFTWARE, I have to tell or ask noone when and where and which computer or user I install Linux, FreeOffice or Qt developing tools.

Re:Other Motives

[mcgrew]

I know that many Linux systems end up quickly outdated (practically all of mine have mile-long lists of security updates waiting), mostly because you don't really want to hose your machine during development, and you end up with odd requirements like needing Ubuntu 10.04 still installed (despite it being out of LTS support in a few months).

I've never seen that in kubuntu. All I see is a "you have updates" and if I click it, it updates the computer.

(It's part of the reason why Windows defaults to installing automatically and simply forcing a reboot

I've never had to reboot my kubuntu computer to upgrade anything, unless I was upgrading the kernel. On my Windows notebook I have to reboot the fucking thing every goddamned month.

Re:Other Motives

[mcgrew]

Linux admins have higher salaries then [sic] windows admins.

You may not always get what you pay for but you usually pay for what you get. Linux admins understand computers, Windows admins understand Windows.

Front end staff needs to be retrained and have to spend more time with outside vendors who are on Microsoft Office.

Utter bullshit. Staff need to be retrained when they upgrade from Office '03 to Office 10, and when going from W7 to W8. Your secretary, who needs little computing power, could get by with an old box that isn't capable of running either W7 or W8 but will run Linux fine. Nobody of average intelligence will need any training at all to transition from pre-W8 Windows to a KDE desktop, and nobody will need training to transition from MS Office to Open Office.

and have to spend more time with outside vendors who are on Microsoft Office.

Oo reads and writes MS Office files (except Access and PowerPoint) just fine, and I doubt you're sharing powerpoints and databases with anyone outside your organization.

You say "from what I've read", well, what you've read is Microsoft propaganda, most of it complete and utter bullshit.

All those shops on XP? They have to buy all new hardware next year. How cheap is that? And that happens every time a version of Windows EOLs, and note that 1/3 of computers on the internet are running XP. MS EOLing it is really, really irresponsible and should give anyone pause about using their software.

Re:Other Motives

[jchoyt]

/me points to kubuntu and xubuntu. I have a choice, even within the "*ubuntu" family. Users of Windows 8 do not.

Re:Other Motives

[couchslug]

I see a Microshill modded me down without contesting any statement.

To be expected. The world has certainly benefitted from Windows, but that in no way means it is obliged to run MSFT products in perpetuity.

Stuxnet and friends prove that the same closed software monoculture can be instantly turned from a helper to a weapon against the user.

Re:Other Motives

[Anonymous Coward]

Also no backdoors. This alone would justify switching.

No backdoors *that we know of* is the correct way to phrase that.

Also, even if the software is fully secure (it's not, it never is) that doesn't even begin to cover the hardware. Modern chips have BILLIONS of gates and until somebody manages to map and verify every single one of them (good luck with that..I'm sure Intel and AMD will both bend over backwards for all who want an intimate look at their proprietary hardware) we can't be 100% sure there's nothing exploitable.

We all like to think we're slick. We ain't slick. The surveillance state is ten steps ahead of us at every turn. The "I am lunix user so I = unhackable" notion is nothing more than that: a nice notion.

Re:Other Motives

[alexander_686]

Look, I have seen arguments from both sides. It is all based on assertions – like your post. Repeating old arguments is going to do it for me. Microsoft is going to slant one way, the city is going to crow on how much money it saved while burying the skeletons However, we now have a real live case study. We can see how theory lines up with facts which is why I am interested in getting the numbers. I am interested in how they get the numbers. As Friday said, “Just the fact please.”

As to your points....

1: You are right in that you get what you pay for, but if the metric is dollars then you can't buy a Cadillac even if it is better then a Chev. You have got to justify it, which I think is a reasonable request and probably doable.

2. Training is not a bullshit reason. The leap from Office 97 to 2003 is less of a jump then from Office 97 to OO. I know this first hand supporting a lot of smart but not techie accountants. Heck, I even know of one shop that moved from Linux to Windows for that very reason – but they were a special case. It is a non-profit festival operation where the staff jumps from 5 to 60 for 1 month every year. It always saddens me to see arts major struggle with computers. They are, after all, college material.

3. Yes, OO is 95% compatible with Excel formats, It is the last 5% that causes me grief. If you know a good way for OO to run VBA macros I would love to hear it. And then there is always the power user who pushes the limits with weird and stupid functions. And I have had formatting issues when switching formats - but I have not done any serious conversions in the past 5 years. Have things changed?

4. I have rarely shared databases but power point presentations get e-mailed frequently - usually after each meeting as notes.

Re:Other Motives

[bhiestand]

Do they seriously consider linux sysadmin to be the same task as Windows admin? Do they at least differentiate other admins, like storage and network?

Re:Other Motives

[mcgrew]

1. Er, what?

2. The leap from Office 97 to 2003 is less of a jump then from Office 97 to OO.

Again, er what? The point was that you always have training costs with Windows. Damn but I'm glad I retire soon and won't have to put up with that god damned ribbon. Excuse me. Linux apps usually don't have that "reinvent everything even if it already works."

3. Convert your stupid Visual Basic bullshit to something that isn't tied to a single platform.

4. There are alternatives.

Re:Other Motives

[davester666]

All software is free. The main download site is thepiratebay.org.

Re:Other Motives

[Anonymous Coward]

They probably did not train them on Windows, so why would they train them on Linux. In my 20 some years of working, I have never been at a company that sent me or any employee to Windows or MS Office training. Any custom app was in house by the admin.

Re:Other Motives

[exomondo]

Do you have a GUI alternative for OS-X? I can install KDE, but I'm not sure the average Mac user can.

I was going to say KDE, you're right that it's not a simple and straightforward process but there's nothing stopping anybody from creating an easy installer if demand for such a thing existed.

Re:Other Motives

[macpacheco]

As I understand it, Munich didn't just migrated to Linux.
They did a lot of mapping and standardization of hardware in the process.
As well as avoided some hefty Hardware upgrades.
Linux desktop interface and apps can be snappy even with the hardware Munich had when they started the process. Without giving up on upgrading the kernel, the system libraries, even the GUI desktop (for instance choosing anything but KDE or GNOME even a brand new Linux will be much lighter than Windows Vista or anything that came after that).
Try doing that with Windows 9 !
Windows pretty much force you to install and use .NET virtual machines for all sorts of mandatory things. Just that sucks up a lot of RAM and CPU time.
Also anything that the Linux base software they selected didn't do they could actually hire a contract developer to fix/enhance and submit the change upstream, try that with Windows / Office ! Even if they spent one million euro to customize Linux / OpenOffice, it's still cheap divided by 15000 desktops, since there are no licensing costs. Just the hardware upgrade economies probably paid for those customizations (and will keep saving more and more on the long run).
And Microsoft estimates stated they would have to hire almost a thousand people to get the whole thing done, while they actually did it with just their normal IT staff, except for the Linux / OpenOffice customizations. As I understand it, the internal IT staff is 28 people !
I read the article about two weeks ago, so pardon any mistakes.

Re:Other Motives

[macpacheco]

Except they aren't really interested in maintaining any source code customization as proprietary. As I understand it, every single change to packages common to distros (specially OpenOffice) were submitted upstream. And who in their right mind in the Linux ecosystem wouldn't work really hard to accommodate Munich's changes to Linux to get them off Windows !

Once they get their hands on a newer distro with all their source level customization rolled in, it shouldn't be hard to reapply their high level customizations (install scripts, mandatory packages, Munich specific apps) to the older release of the same distro they started with.

Re:Other Motives

[macpacheco]

Only if you give freedom for users to use something different.
Linux can be locked up even more tightly than Windows if the sysadmins want to.
And with Linux you only need to reboot to replace the kernel, everything else can be fully replaced without a reboot !
Linux easily lives with multiple versions of the same shared library (Linux equivalent of a DLL) since forever, while in Windows this was know as DLL hell. I don't use Windows as anything but a casual user since 2002, so I don't even study on this anymore, but it used to be really hell. If two apps needed different versions of the same DLL, you were screwed !

Re:Other Motives

[macpacheco]

The real metric is total cost of ownership over 20 years or something like that.
Once you factor all savings that will come for sure after the migration is done (while with Windows you'd be forced to keep upgrading at Microsoft's schedule), just that will result in huge savings. They will make major upgrades to their Linux environment when there's a solid technical reason to do so, not just because you're running ancient Windows version Microsoft won't patch anymore. Not to mention the hardware upgrades. A Linux system with 4GB of RAM, a modern CPU, a basic gigabit ethernet card, a single modern SATA HD can be a desktop, a workgroup server, and still be underused greatly.
If they made the migration even at an equivalent cost of migration to the next windows version, they it was a GREAT benefit for them.
I give 3rd level support for Linux, and every single customer that migrated users from Windows to Linux confirm that after that's done, they can focus on more important things than Windows troubles. Linux simply works in comparison, if you're still believing that Windows can be better, then you're just not interested in doing your homework.
I have migrated databases from Windows Server to Linux (with the exact same hardware) that resulted in 500% performance gains. Windows is just that inefficient.

Re:Other Motives

[macpacheco]

The key is learning the non Windows way of thinking.
Windows sys admins are way too command line adverse.
Linux has everything you need, but you need to first unlearn a lot of bad habits you got from being a Windows sys admin.
It's hard.
I was lucky I learned UNIX before Windows 3.1 came out, and kept my skills on both sides until I finally gave up working with Windows about 12 yrs ago. I just about had it with all that crap that Microsoft kept doing again and again.
Most tools you find absolutely essential with Windows you just don't need with Linux, because compared to Windows, Linux just works.

> Please price out an alternative deployment for 1,000 desktops and laptops that provides a level of desktop management equal to the one provided with the MS solution... I'll wait. When we made a cursory look into management suites for Large Linux deployments we found their cost to be a multiple of what we were paying MS ($100/desk per year for management suite v. $34/desk per year for the MS solution suite)...

The Linux solution is free, the real cost is retraining the SysAdmins (see the beginning of my post).

Re:Other Motives

[phoenix_rizzen]

The IT budget is strictly for hardware and software costs (capital expenditures, licensing, etc), not salaries.

Salaries come out of the HR budget(s).

Re:Other Motives

[rioki]

Yea... Either you have a PhD (13), MA (12), BS (11) or a technical apprenticeship (10). Here a page where you can look up the current pay grade: http://oeffentlicher-dienst.info/tvoed/v/ So no matter what the task, you get the same pay.

Re:Other Motives

[Anonymous Coward]

Munich had the advantage of starting from Windows XP. KDE3 is close enough to XP to be pretty easy to switch to and can be configured to be even more similar. They got to skip over the whole Vista UI shift and have even more savings to look forward to as Win8 starts pushing its way into the office environment.

Re:Other Motives

[Jack Griffin]

The difference is for someone supporting Linux in multiple organisations, you have multiple possible configurations to try and understand. Windows is the same everywhere. Net result easier to support, easir to get support A reboot is a minor inconvenience, certainly a lot less hassle than changing your entire IT infrastructure to a product with next to no market share just to get around not having to reboot once in a while. DLL hell (not really an issue since Win2000) is nothing compared to dependency hell in Linux.

Re:Other Motives

[Jack Griffin]

So it's not a valid comparison then. It may be possible to run a standard COTS solution, and pay more on licensing but less in salaries. You'll never know since your IT budget doesn't include the total cost of running an IT operation. This seems to be fairly typical whenever we hear these Linux-saved-us-heaps arguments.

Re:Other Motives

[macpacheco]

For an experienced Linux support guy, you have far less hell to go through supporting half a dozen Linux distros simultaneously than one windows version.
Of course, that's just my not so humble opinion, you're entitled to yours.
BTW, I support openSuSE/CentOS/debian/ubuntu/mysql/postgresql/Progress RDBMS/apache/php/python (and I'm probably forgetting to list a couple more things).
The main factor is Linux is a sane environment.

Re:Other Motives

[bhiestand]

Wow... thank you for sharing that! Can't believe how low it is :|

ODF

[jones_supa]

The decision to prefer ODF as the document format is my favorite part here. Office and its DOCX format is pretty much the last big thing holding people to the Microsoft monoculture. More ODF files should be put into circulation in the business world.

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 )

Re:ODF

[Anonymous Coward]

It's already happening, it helps that Microsft Office 2010 can open ODF files correctly. (Office 2007 can open them.. but loses things like comments..)

ODT
1,340,000 results
https://www.google.com/#q=filetype:odt+-facebook

Docx
15,800,000
https://www.google.com/#q=filetype:docx++-facebook

Re:ODF

[Anonymous Coward]

The only downside of ODF is that here in the US, unlike Europe where there is a large installed base on the governmental level of non-MS office suites, sending a CV or a resume in that format usually gets it roundfiled. The adage still holds strong here, of "nobody has gotten fired for buying Microsoft", and no matter what the job is, Word and PDF is the lowest common denominator. If I want a job, I sent in Word. If I want to be told that I need to stay in my mom's basement since I'm not using "big boy" tools like the pros use, I'll use .odf.

Re:ODF

[jon3k]

Someone should write a worm that just changes the default Office document "Save As" filetypes to the Open Office formats. That's it. No harm, no damage. 90% of people wouldn't even notice.

Re:ODF

[symbolset]

You send resumes in pdf format. You don't want people editing your resume before forwarding it.

Re:ODF

[flyingfsck]

It is easy to edit a PDF - OK, except on Windows of course.

Re:ODF

[Anonymous Coward]

The Germens have a better trade balance then the US!

Re:ODF

[exomondo]

Office and its DOCX format is pretty much the last big thing holding people to the Microsoft monoculture.

I still really find it hard to believe that the only reason people use Microsoft products is because of DOCX, LibreOffice can open DOCX (even if it does have some minor formatting bugs every now and then) and there are addins to Office to output to ODF if you have problems with their default ODF writer or of course you could use PDF if you aren't worrying about the users editing it. There are also a lot of legal templates for LaTeX which is another good option.

Then there's the ease of transition, non-gov/corp users can open Office documents in Skydrive and ODF documents in Google Docs where gov/corp can use subscriptions to Office365 and GoogleApps during the transition phase. If there is benefit to the change then there's really nothing holding back transition.

Re:ODF

[Anonymous Coward]

mv xyz.docx xyz.zip
unzip xyz.zip

your welcome

Re:ODF

[Anonymous Coward]

You just set the needed permissions on the pdf.. Sure it can be removed, but not by a mere mortal user.

Re:ODF

[maxwell demon]

ODF, like DOC/DOCX is a format for editable documents. I consider neither appropriate for finished documents. Use PDF (ideally, PDF/A) for that.

Re:ODF

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't always have a choice. If a document is required and specified to be uploaded in a Microsoft format (and generally this is the case because only geeks believe there's still a fight regarding which format to use, even though the world's decided on doc/docx years ago and fucking MOVED ON), you have to submit in said format.

At some point people have to understand that the world doesn't revolve around them. Sometimes they need to just use what other people use to promote maximum communication. It doesn't matter what the ideal is - it matters what the practicality is. Otherwise you're just manufacturing stress and effort when there doesn't need to be any.

Re:ODF

[maxwell demon]

Yes, sometimes documents are required in DOC format only. But fortunately in my experience that's rare (YMMV, of course). Quite often PDF is accepted as well.

It was more frequent in the past. That it no longer is probably is to a good part due to those people who just can't stop educating others about the problems of demanding (or passing around) DOC files.

Otherwise you're just manufacturing stress and effort when there doesn't need to be any.

Those people who demand DOC for no good reason are those who create unnecessary stress and effort where there does not need to be any. It's only fair if they get some of that back.

It's not as if reading PDFs would require installation of any non-widespread or expensive software, or would take a lot of effort in any other way.

Re:ODF

[Just Some Guy]

Yeah, a previous employer was acting as an intermediary between two large organizations. They were both having problems opening the other's large, complex documents. On a conference call, one of their techs finally, sheepishly, admitted that they were using OpenOffice and running everything through an import filter. The other broke out laughing and admitted that they were, too. When they decided to start swapping ODFs directly, their problems immediately disappeared.

Re:ODF

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you embed the ODF file within the PDF as you can do with libreoffice and openoffice.

Re:ODF

[pfleming]

You don't always have a choice. If a document is required and specified to be uploaded in a Microsoft format (and generally this is the case because only geeks believe there's still a fight regarding which format to use, even though the world's decided on doc/docx years ago and fucking MOVED ON), you have to submit in said format.

At some point people have to understand that the world doesn't revolve around them. Sometimes they need to just use what other people use to promote maximum communication. It doesn't matter what the ideal is - it matters what the practicality is. Otherwise you're just manufacturing stress and effort when there doesn't need to be any.

The world decided that IE was the only browser that mattered years ago, too. Times change.

Why did it take so long?

[Kardos]

10 years is a long time to switch, I can see that being an impediment to other cities following suit. Are they sharing details of the changeover experience? It would be quite valuable to have a list of the major problems that made this take a decade rather than a year.

Re:Why did it take so long?

[Sique]

Yes, they regularly publish reports of their switch, they are giving presentations at diverse conferences, and you can get the LiMux distribution including all the changelogs.

Re:Why did it take so long?

[davydagger]

I could imagine a large amount of infrastructure, and the need for custom applications to be re-written.

I hope the massive development they did is open sourced, and makes it easier for other cities and governments to switch, and the code and effort can be reused to make it easier for other cities

Re:Why did it take so long?

[Anonymous Coward]

and you can get the LiMux distribution including all the changelogs.

I didn't really take the time to think about it until I read this but having a custom distribution (no matter how minor the changes, if any, were from wherever it started) would add a considerable amount of time to the process. Open source software development + governing bureaucracy (regular style, not american purposefully delaying things style) = a whooooole lot of time spent to do the smallest of things.

Overall, I congratulate their achievement. This also provides a solid precedent for other cities/countries/organizations to follow suit!

Re:Why did it take so long?

[Anonymous Coward]

For one thing, Microsoft spends billions on making sure their customers have the most difficult time imaginable trying to end the business relationship. They are heavily invested in both technical and legal strategies for this.

Re:Why did it take so long?

[Sique]

In each large organisation (and Munich's administration has 15000 seats), you don't roll out the software as it comes from the vendor, you always customize and put your own addons while removing parts you don't need or consider dangerous. So I would expect the work you have to do to tweak a Microsoft install for your organisation to be on par with modifying a Linux distribution to fit your needs.

Re:Why did it take so long?

[Anonymous Coward]

i have no evidence to support what you have said, but strangely, I have no problems believing it!!

Probably the most positive thing to come from this experiment is that other cities just need to download it and try it themselves. Probably easy in Germany but once an English speaking country gets it (yes, I would hope the UK but they are too corrupt for this), it may well spread to the USA....

Re:Why did it take so long?

[firewrought]

10 years is a long time to switch

Seems quick to me... where I work, I saw it take ~8 years for a modestly complex VisualBasic application to be replaced with a .NET one. These sort of transitions take place in an environment with a lot of moving parts and ongoing demands for change and many competing priorities. Heck, we're just now to the point of completing the Windows XP --> Windows 7 transition. Big organizations move slowly... sometimes for reasons that are dumb, but frequently because that's the only way to do it.

Re:Why did it take so long?

[GreatDrok]

"completing the Windows XP --> Windows 7 transition. Big organizations move slowly... "

There it is in a nutshell. Munich was on NT4 when they started this and while XP was out, they decided they didn't want to go that route because they could see that they would just become more and more tied to Microsoft.

Fast forward ten years and they're on their own Linux distro with upgrades in their own time. No being forced to move from a platform that is well understood and works well (XP) to a different platform that has compatibility problems with software developed for earlier versions (7) just because the vendor (MS) doesn't want to support XP any more.

This is a bit of a watershed. Many thought Munich was mad doing this and MS clearly hated it and wanted them to fail but they haven't failed and more to the point they've taken control of their environment in a way that MS only shops would never be able to. I've got to wonder how many sites are going to be going through a world of pain getting off XP while staying in the MS fold when they could move away entirely and save themselves the trouble in future?

Re:Why did it take so long?

[tibit]

There is no download. Seriously.

Re:Why did it take so long?

[Streetlight]

I think Munich could sell this experience and maybe make a little cash on the side. The city is large enough to have covered every contingency that any city might need so a city needing to upgrade from XP, Vista or Win 7 could just adopt Munich's distro along with all the formatted paperwork templates they've created. The general Linux terms of service may prevent Munich from charging for the software but they could sell the labor to other cities and maybe the document templates. Every city probably has a dog catcher report form and it may be different from town to town, but it wouldn't take much training to use Munich's new form. Munich has obviously developed training manuals and presentations which might be a profit center. This would save other towns the expense of a 10 year changeover.

Re:Why did it take so long?

[Anonymous Coward]

Totally - their document management system:
http://www.wollmux.net/wiki/Hauptseite

Re:Why did it take so long?

[Jack Griffin]

I'd be interested to see if the included 10 years of salaries in their migration costs? It'd also be good to see an analysis on the lost benefit of simply paying the MS tax and using those 10 years to so something more productive. Since the costs are not fully disclosed it would be safe to assume there is some dodgy accounting going to.

Re:Why did it take so long?

[Jack Griffin]

I'd wait another ten years before announcing any sort of success. The real issues for Munich will be keeping up with the curve. As Windows and Linux evolve, they'll be stuck on their 2013 distro (or more likely their 2001 distro or whenever they started the project) which will be a lot more difficult to upgrade than any COTS solution.

Re:Why did it take so long?

[Anonymous Coward]

i have no evidence to support what you have said, but strangely, I have no problems believing it!!

If you want evidence, google for "Halloween documents". They're old (1998-ish) but Microsoft probably still follows the strategy described there.

Re:Why did it take so long?

[GNious]

10 years is a long time to switch, I can see that being an impediment to other cities following suit. Are they sharing details of the changeover experience? It would be quite valuable to have a list of the major problems that made this take a decade rather than a year.

10yrs for a government body to get most anything IT done is *fast*.
Even if a local government, 10yrs ain't slow.

Re:Why did it take so long?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd wait another ten years before announcing any sort of success.

You do not need to wait. LuMix was and is already for many years in production.

The news here is that the last of the Windows PCs were finally migrated.

Or you think they have migrated thousands desktops overnight?

As Windows and Linux evolve, they'll be stuck on their 2013 distro which will be a lot more difficult to upgrade than any COTS solution.

The project had very pragmatical goals thus lots of things went not reported. The transition to Linux in Munich has started in server room/partially on desktops: they have started migrating the old corpoware Windows applications to the Web/intranet.

Out of the critical applications AFAIK, they have only two: OO.o and web browser. And those two you can run on pretty much anything. Also, upgrading slimmed-down Debian is not really that much of a trouble.

IIRC the biggest ever problem the project reported (outside the lacking local IT industry) was the unavailability of some printer drivers for Linux. If they have solved the problem, then I do not see much problems going forward. Especially, as other European cities started looking into the LuMix.

Whatever Happened...

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever happened to the City of Largo Florida?

Re:Whatever Happened...

[Coeurderoy]

http://www.largo.com/egov/apps/document/center.egov?view=item;id=1793

Re:Whatever Happened...

[jdmuskrat]

it has been under heavy right wing control for a long time. that says it all.

Re:Whatever Happened...

[tqk]

FYI, that's from 2001.

Re:Whatever Happened...

[Coeurderoy]

Fair enough

2007 : http://archive09.linux.com/feature/119109
2013 : http://davelargo.blogspot.fr/

Re:Whatever Happened...

[tqk]

LibreOffice 4.1 , Handling Rollbacks This isn't unique to LibreOffice 4.1, because it's happened going back all the way back to OpenOffice 1.1. Whenever you get a patch or even more so, whenever you get a major release there are always issues where documents don't work correctly. I keep all of the old versions on the server and can always test and find the regression. Standard procedure then is to rollback a user until we get a patch and then upgrade them again to the latest release. This was done by me, with hard coded scripts. I put this into the support portal and now anyone in IT can either roll their own account back or rollback another user to solve these types of problems.

Slick!

Congratulations!

[BringsApples]

One step toward an open-source world. What an exciting idea! Imagine computers out there computing, with no license fees that seem to propagate.

Re:Congratulations!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah...the idea that companies make money off of software is absurd. Who cares that a company like Valve spends millions on developing games...they should be free.

You're such a genius!!!

Re:Congratulations!

[unixisc]

He's talking about the expense. The city of Munich ain't in the business of writing software. The main issue here is that the city should have a platform that they control, and don't get put into upgrade cycles by companies such as Microsoft. Since they own this distro, and have put together the effort in making it work for all their employees, they now control their destiny in terms of if they need to upgrade, and when.

Re:Congratulations!

[ausekilis]

Yeah...the idea that companies make money off of software is absurd. Who cares that a company like Valve spends millions on developing games...they should be free.

You're such a genius!!!

Open source and making money are not mutually exclusive. Here's some proof. BringsApples is commenting on the successful transition away from proprietary file formats and vendor lock-in. MS is a cut-throat competitor and want as many people to buy into their ecosystem as possible, and they do their damnedest to keep them in that ecosystem... by releasing new "latest and greatest, you must have this for security blah blah". Then they limit what is available for that OS, "you can't have Office 2000 anymore!!! Buy 2010 for that Windows 8 machine!". Those prices keep going up. Munich decided enough was enough, and is now a success story in conversion to an open system.

If you want to support your local government spending money on unnecessary HW/SW upgrades, vote "yes" next to every tax increase. I'm sure they'll find a way to spend those dollars.

Re:Congratulations!

[kenh]

And it only took Munich ten years to upgrade - at that rate Linux will bury Microsoft in just a few years...

This is an interesting "glass is half-empty or half-full" issue:

Linux "advocates" will focus on the "switch completed" part of the story, MS advocates will focus on the TEN YEARS and their "need" to create their own distribution.

No CIO in any organization of any serious size will look at this ten year effort as anything other than justification for their decision to remain on MS software.

This is declaring our dependence on gasoline is almost upon us because one fellow in town just converted his diesel VW Rabbit to run on used cooking oil.

Linux is 20 years old and has less than half the market share of Microsoft Vista... (3.57% v. 1.56%)

Re:Congratulations!

[exomondo]

He's talking about the expense.

Which, for free software, comes in the cost of support and maintenance instead of license fees.

The city of Munich ain't in the business of writing software.

Actually they are, they have an operating system distribution to support and maintain. Free software is libre, not gratis.

Re:Congratulations!

[exomondo]

One step toward an open-source world. What an exciting idea! Imagine computers out there computing, with no license fees that seem to propagate.

Yeah, one step. But with corporates, education and governments shoehorning iPads into every sector the free software movement may have taken ten years to take one step forward but Apple is swamping industries with devices to tie not only their software but also their hardware to one vendor. DOCX may be replaced as the defacto standard but the way Apple is going it's much more likely to be replaced by .PAGES files than an open document format.

Re: Congratulations!

[Anonymous Coward]

android kills off everything at the moment. and its kernel is linux. eat that.

Re:Congratulations!

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you trolling or deliberately obfuscating the issue? As many have noted above, ten years is a fairly normal amount of time to switch a large and complex organisation to an alternative system.

There's this prime example: http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4549737&cid=45673477

Stop being a pro-MS troll. Don't be a dick about it.

Re:Congratulations!

[BringsApples]

No CIO in any organization of any serious size will look at this ten year effort as anything other than justification for their decision to remain on MS software.

That's not fair to say. What this really means is that it took a company 10 years to do the switch over. However now that one has done it, they can help others do the same, in a more direct way, with less problems. I know that each company will have it's own needs and each switch-over will have it's own needs. But man, now that it's been done on this scale, surely they can offer advice to others. 10 years ago, starting was cumbersome, but now not so. I'd think that any CIO with any sort of wisdom (and a good IT staff ~cough cough~) would be willing to look into this more now that it's been done.

Re:Congratulations!

[BringsApples]

You're right, and with good reason. There are still hurdles to overcome, but this really sets the stage for the possibility, which is a huge barrier to cross.
I'll give you a story:

My son was 3 years old, my nephew was 10. I taught my kids to swim really early because of horrible dreams that I was having at the time. And so my son could dive into a pool and swim down to 10 feet and touch the bottom of the pool with his hands - at age 3. My nephew had come over to swim a few times, but couldn't touch the bottom, not even with his feet. But once he saw a 3-yo do it, he was like, "What tha... He can touch the bottom??!!" In less than 2 minutes my nephew could swim down and touch with his hands.

Sometimes it just takes nerve (I dare not say bravery) to do something, and when others show that it can be done, that nerve is gained.

Re:Congratulations!

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget training and hardware costs. Hardware costs can be reduced from day one (you don't have to throw out all the existing desktop hardware when you upgrade to the next major version of your Linux distro) and training requires one big investment up front but you can choose user environment with conservative development plan which will reduce training costs later.

Re:Congratulations!

[kjhambrick]

Let's not forget this: had they stayed with Microsoft Products, they would never be 'done' because of the planned obsolescence of the MS Product Line ( think: WinXP and April, 2014 ).

Now that the migration is complete, Munich will be free to plan their own future.

-- kjh

Re:Congratulations!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like your local administration should still be running on Digital Vax, since pretty much any update since was "unnecessary".

You are conveniently ingoring the fact that running outdated hardware/software stacks becmes more expensive than keeping up with the times, quickly. And just like MSFT does not support a 10-yer old OS any more, neither does the Linux community -- check out RHEL 2.1 and Fedora Core 2.0 -- seen many updates for them recently?

A successful migration 10 years in the making. I think at that rate, they will even have healthcare.gov running.

Live long and prosper in your double standards.

Re:Congratulations!

[phoenix_rizzen]

And ... how long would it take to upgrade from NT4 to XP to 7 to 8, and all the associated software, and hardware, and, and, and. And to complete all the training, and change all the workflows, and, and, and.

It'll cost them more in the long run

[Anonymous Coward]

Doing this sort of thing to spite Microsoft is silly.

Whatever they save on licensing fees will end up being spent on support, and then some. Playing computer politics with the taxpayer's money is irresponsible. There's a good reason why Microsoft is the standard for business computing and that's because their products are almost always better than open source.

Re:It'll cost them more in the long run

[Anonymous Coward]

Doing this sort of thing to spite Microsoft is silly.

Whatever they save on licensing fees will end up being spent on support, and then some. Playing computer politics with the taxpayer's money is irresponsible. There's a good reason why Microsoft is the standard for business computing and that's because their products are almost always better than open source.

There is, indeed, a very good reason. It only has a little to do with the free market and their actual products. It has more to do with unethical behaviour, ruthless exploitation, luck, and adequate products.

Re:It'll cost them more in the long run

[Anonymous Coward]

Munich Open Source Switch 'Completed Successfully'

Excellent, now the Microsoft shills and lobbyists can really get started with their...

Doing this sort of thing to spite Microsoft is silly.

Oh, I see. Already in progress. Wow, Microsoft really IS becoming a leaner, faster company!

Re:It'll cost them more in the long run

[haruchai]

Troll of the day. Well done, AC

Re:It'll cost them more in the long run

[Razalhague]

There's a good reason why Microsoft is the standard for business computing and that's because their products are almost always better than open source.

No, it's because Microsoft is better at running legacy software (or at least that's how businesses see it). And business computing is all about legacy software.

Re:It'll cost them more in the long run

[Sarten-X]

<voice class="TV gameshow host" style="decade: 1980">

It's time to play Spot The FUD! With your host, Sarten-X!

Doing this sort of thing to spite Microsoft is silly.

Our game opens, and THERE'S SOME RIGHT THERE! Wow, right outta the gate! When we're talking about a large-scale integration project, "spite" isn't likely a significant factor, unless Microsoft has somehow managed to personally offend every politician in Munich. Note the literary device, though... by saying the decision was spiteful, the people who decided against Microsoft are cast as being evil... Who'd want to agree with someone so mean?

Whatever they save on licensing fees will end up being spent on support, and then some.

Ah, now there's the biggest bit of FUD we've seen in a long time here on Spot The FUD! Now, this might look like a restatement of a zero-sum philosophy, but it's really FUD! Not only hasn't it been established how much they'll actually save on licensing, but there's no real indication that support costs would change at all, or which direction they would go.

Playing computer politics with the taxpayer's money is irresponsible.

Wow! We're three for three here, folks! Just like the last one, this is FUD disguised as common sense. Also like last time, a little analysis shows the problem. Sure, tax money should be spent responsibly, but there's still no reason to think that "computer politics" was behind this decision. It'd be equally irresponsible to choose to be locked in to a single vendor, especially with a vendor that's made such an effort to be incompatible with alternatives.

There's a good reason why Microsoft is the standard for business computing...

This must mean it's time for...

<voice class="crowd">

THE BOOK OF HISTORY!

</voice>

That's right, folks: The Book Of History! Let me just crack it open and... here we go! Throughout the '80s and '90s, Microsoft made exclusive deals with developers and hardware manufacturers to ensure that Windows was the operating system with the widest support, regardless of its actual merit as a platform. Once Microsoft had money to spare, competitors were purchased just to be shut down, or occasionally to have their product bundled into Windows, ensuring that there would be little viable competition in that market.

Ah, I just love history... but we're not done yet! We'll be right back after these commercial messages!

<voice class="pushy salesman">

Do you suffer from shills? Do you wish you had more rational discourse? Are you irritated by ignorance? Order FUD-B-GONE today! Apply directly to shills' sinus cavities! It might look like a set of brass knuckles, but FUD-B-GONE is really a precision-engineered shill ELIMINATOR! Only $19.99! Send check or money order to the address on your screen! Ordervoidwhereprohibitedbylawmustbeeighteenoroldersorrynoc.o.d.

</voice>

and that's because their products are almost always better than open source.

Well, we're almost out of time, but here's our last bit of FUD for today! It's a pretty easy one, too... Of course, there's no definition of "better" to go along with this unqualified statement, so this shill expects you to accept it at face value, but we know that "better" depends on a wide variety of criteria!

And that's all the time we have for today! Thanks for joining us! Be sure to tune in next time when we hear a concerned parent tell us about the hidden dangers of vaccination, even though her "research" is based on urban legends that predate vaccines!

</voice>

<audio><source src="endtheme.ogg" type="audio/ogg"></audio>

Re:It'll cost them more in the long run

[kenh]

And being able to easily hire low-cost admins to run the environment...

Re:It'll cost them more in the long run

[unixisc]

Whatever they save on licensing fees will end up being spent on support, and then some. Playing computer politics with the taxpayer's money is irresponsible. There's a good reason why Microsoft is the standard for business computing and that's because their products are almost always better than open source.

In this case, they have to insource the support, whereas in the Windows case, the support has to be outsourced either to Microsoft, or to a Microsoft partner. So that turns out to be a wash in either case. Nowhere did they do it to spite anybody. They needed a platform where they get to control the upgrade cycles - they can't leave it to Microsoft to retire one version next year, the next in 2020 and so on. It needs to run as long as they want, and what better than to roll your own distro? They don't have to perform kernel updates or stuff like that unless they want to, and until they've tested it. They have a platform on which they have standardized, and are using it across the board.

Re:It'll cost them more in the long run

[RabidReindeer]

"spite" isn't likely a significant factor, unless Microsoft has somehow managed to personally offend every politician in Munich.

Clippy: It looks like you're attempting to write a campaign speech. Need some help?

Re:It'll cost them more in the long run

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope I'm not the only one that was glad your tags matched up at the end.

Re:It'll cost them more in the long run

[HeckRuler]

That was brilliant and beautiful.
Why don't we include style tags with our posts more?

Re: It'll cost them more in the long run

[Anonymous Coward]

no. commercial software excels in the bribery aspect. open soource will never be able to match that.

Re:It'll cost them more in the long run

[Xarvh]

My hat to you sir. This was epic.

Re:It'll cost them more in the long run

[couchslug]

Doing it to avoid NSA backdoors, however, is healthy and makes good sense long term.

What the NSA sees, its employees themselves may decide to exploit. It doesn't matter how "good" MSFT products are as they hail from a nation whose government is committed to global espionage on friend and foe and every one of its own citizens.

Re:It'll cost them more in the long run

[tibit]

I acted it out in my mind as I've read it, and it's been wonderful. Thank you!

Re:It'll cost them more in the long run

[Sarten-X]

Because HTML entities disrupt the train of thought with every &, interrupting creativity. That's why I didn't properly terminate and reopen the initial tag every time I changed voices. I figured I was inventing a tag anyway; I may as well let it nest.

Re:It'll cost them more in the long run

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's play spot the faggot! There he is! Ding, Ding, Ding! It's Sarten-X. Congratulations! You win a free blow job from Richard Stallman. Enjoy the FREEDOM(tm).

How much?

[Anonymous Coward]

Freedom has its price. How much you value that freedom is the key.

Re:How much?

[rjstanford]

US$1.05 seems to be the going rate.

Why roll your own distro?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why waste time and money creating your own distro when there are many good ones available?

As long as you stay away from crusty old debian and its bastard children, there are some great options.

Re:Why roll your own distro?

[Gavagai80]

Because creating a linux distro based on a popular distro is easy -- individuals do it in their spare time -- and a city is bound to want a different set of packages installed than any particular distro will have by default. It presumably saves them a lot of time [and thus money] not having to separately install programs on each computer, by including them in the distro.

Re:Why roll your own distro?

[LDAPMAN]

If all your doing is defining a specific set of existing packages then you really aren't creating your own distro. All the major players let you define a configuration to install.

Re:Why roll your own distro?

[firewrought]

Why waste time and money creating your own distro when there are many good ones available?

It may not have a custom-compiled kernel, but companies do the same thing with Windows. They take the stock OS, tweak all the settings, add custom scripts, install various software packages (database drivers, antivirus, remote management tools, etc.), put their own branding on it (with wallpapers and other gimmicks), and then burn a disk image. Same thing with PC manufactures, if you've ever had the pleasant experience of scraping away their bloatware.

And it makes a lot of sense for a company to roll their own: it allows a single specialized group of sysadmins to decide best policy, implement it, test it, and roll it out in a single uniform way. Front-line support can then provision a new server or workstation without having to think about it, and everything will tie into LDAP/Active Directory/asset management and the rest of the corporate network just fine.

Re: Why roll your own distro?

[SpaghettiPattern]

All of the huge financial organisations I have worked for pretty much ran their own Windows distro. Sure, standard Windows with a bucket load of special features. You'd be amazed at how much needs tweaking. An own Linux distro isn't' completely out of this world.

Re:Why roll your own distro?

[Gavagai80]

The LiMux wikipedia page mentions "platform independent (e.g. Java-based) business applications." So these java-based business applications wouldn't be in the ubuntu repositories.

Re:Why roll your own distro?

[Gavagai80]

Sorry my quote didn't provide the full context: "The decision in 2003 had two components, on the one hand to get free software running on most of the desktops, and on the other hand to buy and develop web-based and platform independent (e.g. Java-based) business applications." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux)

Re:Why roll your own distro?

[billcarson]

What is wrong with Debian? (apart from the terrible attitude some maintainers have, which is not related to the quality of the software itself)

Re:Why roll your own distro?

[kenh]

Why waste time and money creating your own distro when there are many good ones available?

How many good ones were there TEN YEARS AGO when they started this adventure?

This project started a year before Ubuntu Linux's first public release in 2004...

Re:Why roll your own distro?

[unixisc]

It also allows them to stay w/ their own, instead of updating other parts whenever the mainline distro chooses. Like had they gone w/ Ubuntu, they'd have had issues like whether to go w/ Unity, or Xubuntu or Lubuntu, et al. Or which version of the kernel to go w/ given the wide range of computers that they'd have. By rolling their own, they have a standard that will run on all city approved computers, and which gets controlled by the city's IT department.

Re:Why roll your own distro?

[dunkelfalke]

Suse would be an obvious example.

Product cycles?

[DogDude]

If one of the goals was reducing having to switch software because of product cycles, they should've been using Windows XP. It's been supported for 12 years. I don't think there's any other OS that's been supported for anywhere near that long.

Re:Product cycles?

[Sique]

MVS was supported for 34 years, from 1966 to 2000, when it became replaced by z/OS. But z/OS still supports most code written for MVS.

Re:Product cycles?

[davydagger]

they never planned on supporting it for 12 years, they just wound up supporting it, because well, just because no one wants to give it up. Its far worse than the windows 98 hanger on ers.

Re:Product cycles?

[haruchai]

On the plus side, it's given them more time to find the remote holes, a number of which have been fixed in the last couple years.
By the time it's no longer supported, it'll be rock solid.

Re:Product cycles?

[jones_supa]

they never planned on supporting it for 12 years, they just wound up supporting it, because well, just because no one wants to give it up.

It also interestingly shows that there is a market demand for ultra-long-term-support desktop OS.

Re:Product cycles?

[bored]

MVS was supported for 34 years, from 1966 to 2000, when it became replaced by z/OS..

Its not really the same thing, MVS went through lots of revisions in that time period, and in many ways zos is just another step in that list of revisions (aka add a big feature and rename the OS). The early versions of zos could run on non 64-bit hardware and were basically identical to mvs.. Its just that support for legacy systems were dropped along the way. Even the applications have sort of moved on and now require the newer zos features.

That said, you could take a system programmer from the 1970's and put them in front of a 3270 emulator connected to a zBC12 and besides the fact its in color they wouldn't know that the machine is in a couple racks rather than taking up 40k sq/feet in the basement.

Re:Product cycles?

[symbolset]

They supported it for so long because it took them forever to get Longhorn out the door, and then it flopped around on the floor stinking up the place and they had to try again.

Re:Product cycles?

[davydagger]

this is the fallacy of the long term release. While they are many benefits of an LTR model, security is ironicly not one.

While Microsoft has had a very long time to find and fix bugs, security or otherwise, the rest of the world has, as well.

There are more people looking for security holes than fixing them. People writing exploits also have had equal amount of time to refine their exploits against known hole.

you'd be a fool to think windows, or even linux, or any other OS is capable of patching ALL the holes. In addition, as time wears on, most of the dev work, and most of the attention is going to be placed on newer versions, leaving either second tier devs, or majorily distracted first tier devs to do the back patching, and port work to old versions.

The major appeal of the LTR model is compatibility, and known performance profile. You know apps written for Win XP will run on Win XP. You know how much ram and cpu is going to take to do a given task, and exact what hardware it needs to run on.

For a large businesses, government and any IT dept that has 10-100 computers per person assigned to manage them, this is a really big deal.

Re:Product cycles?

[davydagger]

I could imagine some applications where it wouldn't be desirable to upgrade the OS at all, and the install would need to stay in place 10-20 years, such as at railroads, banks, factories, etc...

Top official in Obama birth mystery killed

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.wnd.com/2013/12/top-official-in-obama-birth-mystery-killed/

"A key Hawaii official in the dispute over Barack Obamaâ(TM)s birth certificate â" who lifted state restrictions to allow the White House to present the document to the public - has died in a plane crash.

Loretta Fuddy, the state health department director, was the only fatality among nine people aboard a Cessna Grand Caravan that went down at about 3:15 p.m. on Wednesday while heading to Honolulu.

Richard Schuman, president of Makani Kai Air, told NBC that the other eight people aboard were rescued from the site of the water crash.

KITV-TV in Honolulu reported Fuddy had been on health department business. Keith Yamamoto, the departmentâ(TM)s deputy director, also was aboard and survived.

Makani Kai officials said it was was the companyâ(TM)s first fatality.

WND has reported since before the 2008 election on the dispute over Obamaâ(TM)s birth documentation.

Fuddy took over the agency when Gov. Neil Abercrombie took office.

USA Today reported on a statement from Abercrombie.

âoeOur hearts are broken,â he said. âoeLoretta was deeply loved and respected. She was selfless, utterly dedicated and committed to her colleagues in the Department of Health and to the people of Hawaii. Her knowledge was vast; her counsel and advice always given from her heart as much as from her storehouse of experience.â

Recently she had been working on the stateâ(TM)s Obamacare website.

On the subject of Obamaâ(TM)s background, Abercrombie, who claimed to have had a relationship with Obamaâ(TM)s parents in Hawaii as a fellow student, vowed to settle the dispute once and for all but finally gave up, insisting his hands were tied.

Read all the arguments in the birth certificate controversy, in âoeWhereâ(TM)s the Birth Certificate?â and check out the special reports, banners and bumper stickers on the subject.

Abercrombie told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser regarding Obamaâ(TM)s birth documentation: âoeIt actually exists in the archives, written down.â The London Daily Mail reported, however, Abercrombie âoesuggested that a long-form, hospital-generated birth certificate for Barack Obama may not exist within the vital records maintained by the Hawaii Department of Health.â

Later, Obama asked for copies of the document, and under Fuddy, the state instantly waived a long-claimed ban on reproducing long-form birth certificates. On Fuddyâ(TM)s instructions, copies were produced and delivered to Judith Corley, a private attorney for Obama.

Fuddy had written to Obama: âoeWe hope that issuing you these copies of your original Certificate of Live Birth will end the numerous inquiries received by the Hawaii Department of Health to produce this document.â

Immediately after the delivered copy was posted on the White House website, however, numerous computer graphics and software experts declared it fraudulent.

The birth certificate dispute centers on the constitutional requirement that a president be a âoenatural-born citizen.â Some argue that even if Obama was born in Hawaii, he was does not qualify because his father was a Kenyan citizen.

Still a live issue

The one official law enforcement investigation into the issue, conducted on the orders of Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio, concluded the document posted by the White House is a forgery.

Arpaio has said the investigation is ongoing and more evidence has been discovered to bolster his teamâ(TM)s conclusion.

WND reported Mike Zullo, the lead investigator for Arpaioâ(TM)s Cold Case Posse in Arizona, has contributed evidence to a court case pending before the Alabama Supreme Court.

He has testified that the White House computer image of Obamaâ(TM)s birth certificate conta

Patents?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wondering if MS would charge them as they're doing with Android.

help

[fluffythdestroy]

Is there any other alternative to let say outlook exchange servers ? Can an email server hold more than 1000 accounts ? I know I can use openoffice but the email would be a big pain

Re:help

[LDAPMAN]

What??? There are several options for open source email servers and most of them scale really well. Exchange typically takes a lot more resources for the same number of users...not less.

Re:help

[ledow]

"Can an email server hold more than 1000 accounts?"

Hahahahahahahhahahahaaha.

Oh, you Microsoft jokers...

Re:help

[sribe]

Is there any other alternative to let say outlook exchange servers ? Can an email server hold more than 1000 accounts?

Are you fucking kidding? Seriously?

Re:help

[haruchai]

Start here - http://www.smallbusinesscomputing.com/biztools/article.php/10730_3932591_2/Top-5-Open-Source-Alternatives-to-Microsoft-Exchange.htm

A 1000+ users isn't that many nowadays. Sogo, Zarafa, Zimbra should manage that without too much trouble. I'd check for the other groupware / calendar features that your users depend on before seriously considering a switch.

And there's always hosted mail / hosted Exchange. I think some of these are really running Exchange on the backend but so long as they provide the features and fully support Outlook or whatever mail client you're using, I don't think it matters.

Here's a vid from Sogo demonstrating Outlook compatibility, narrated by a very boring robotic voice - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hcBSB4Kxww#t=292

Re:help

[Sique]

Back in 1993, when I was playing LPmuds, we had an email system for all players open to the outside. As the LPmuds I was playing had between 10,000 to 100,000 accounts, I would say: even toy email servers had no problem with 100,000 accounts 20 years ago ;)

Re:help

[Anonymous Coward]

Zentyal also has one. It is a transparent replacement for Exchange.

  http://www.zentyal.org/2013/10/zentyal-launches-the-only-native-microsoft-exchange-replacement/

You can install it and leave the clients in place while you decide what to do next.

Re:help

[kenh]

And there's always hosted mail / hosted Exchange.

"hosted Exchange" isn't an alternative TO Microsoft, it's an alternate way to STICK WITH Microsoft...

Re:help

[RabidReindeer]

Is there any other alternative to let say outlook exchange servers ? Can an email server hold more than 1000 accounts ? I know I can use openoffice but the email would be a big pain

Er, you DO realize that it took several years before Microsoft was able to run Hotmail on Microsoft software don't you?

Guess what they were using before then.

Re:help

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought he was trolling till I saw his UID.

Re:help

[mdielmann]

A lot of people have already laughed at the question you raised, but I think it would help to make it clear why. Prior to Microsoft purchasing it, and taking over 5 YEARS to convert it to MS technology (perhaps as many as 8), Hotmail was run on *NIX servers (Solaris and FreeBSD). At the time, I believe it was the biggest free email domain out there. Here is a wiki about it.

Re:Whatever Happened... It's 2013!

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.largo.com/egov/apps/document/center.egov?view=item;id=1793

The link is to a 2001 Roblimo article.

It is nearly 2014. What are they up to now? Maybe Roblimo could do a follow up, he lives less than an hour away and certainly doesn't have anything better to do.

A new meme is born

[DaveAtFraud]

RTFS - Read the f-ing summary

Cheers,
Dave

What?

[grumpyman]

Windows NT... are you serious?

Re:What?

[kenh]

The last users to be converted (upgraded?) to LiMux spent the last TEN YEARS on WinNT? Whoa!

Re:What?

[unixisc]

Seems it was either that or LiMux

Watch out for patent legal action

[erroneus]

I know this is Germany and there are no software patents but why would that stop Microsoft (or some MS funded troll) from trying?

They simply can't let the public know that whatever it is, it can be done with F/OSS and if it can't now, a project can be launched and funded to pay for it... ONCE! Not over and over and over again, by the seat, by the user, by the processor or however a software might be licensed. It's just better. But people have grown pretty fat, dumb and lazy and are willing to just let the product vendors tell us all how to work and what is good and what is safe.

Also, the dairy counsel says we need more milk in our daily intake, Monsanto says their stuff is perfectly healthy and that HFCS doesn't cause any problems either.

How on earth can a properly skeptical person ever believe that letting the people who profit the most from a thing tell us what's best?

Re:Watch out for patent legal action

[kenh]

Munich proved it took TEN YEARS to migrate off Microsoft to Linux, and in the process they had to roll-their-own distribution.

This won't convince major corporate installations to cutover to Linux, it will scare them off! I mean seriously, a ten year process?

How on earth can a properly skeptical person ever believe that letting the people who profit the most from a thing tell us what's best?

So wait, Steve Jobs was wrong? He said Apple stuff was the best, but he also profited off it greatly...

And what about all those politicians telling the kids they "have to go to college"? Last year the Federal Government made over $40 Billion in PROFITS off the Student Loan program - slightly less profit than (good) Apple and (evil) ExxonMobil...

Re:Watch out for patent legal action

[Anonymous Coward]

I know this is Germany and there are no software patents

Just recently there was an article about a curt case over Microsoft FAT Patents in Germany ending (Microsoft lost for it being too obvious). Germany has software patents only the courts and patent office should follow stricter rules as to what kind of software inventions can be patented. Sadly someone found out that the legislation contains what wikipedia classifies as a "weasel word" and deceided that a broad interpretation of the law makes software patents completely legal. The "weasel word" is there because our politicians think at least some software having to interface directly with hardware should be patentable since it has to work around hardware restrictions and does not consist of pure mathematical concepts - the broad interpretation correctly says that software that runs on a computing device has to interact with hardware and has to deal with hardware restrictions (no unlimited memory, limited cpu speed) as such all software is patentable.

Also, the dairy counsel says we need more milk in our daily intake

Those guys are rather silent in Germany, after all they get paid by Europe to throw the overproduction out - otherwise the price would drop until it becomes unprofitable to sell milk, or so they tell us.

Re:Watch out for patent legal action

[tibit]

A "hand rolled" distribution is about the same amount of work as any large, customized deployment of Windows images. The "hand rolling" is what actually makes it useful, and it applies equally to any operating system, whether Windows, Linux or OS X. Just that for Windows people don't ordinarily call it a "hand rolled distro". The amount of effort is the same. If the "major corporate" players have IT departments so clueless that they won't see it for what it is, then there's truly no help for them.

Re:Watch out for patent legal action

[tibit]

In the process of migration they've also consolidated a dozen IT departments, each one doing their own thing. They've done a lot more than simply moving a well-ran Windows shop over to Linux. They've done that but also had to create a well-ran shop in parallel with the migration.

Re:Whatever Happened... It's 2013!

[foobsr]

There was an update 2007!

http://www.largo.com/egov/documents/122089377228.htm

CC.

too big to fail

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean it's great they got off MS, mind that NT!, but rolling their own Linux distro just says:
a. they maintain the entire distro from years on end vs. leveraging the community help out (duplicating work)
b. it's their own distro, so 25 yrs from now the IT staff will still need to maintain this (job security).

And that the gov't is the only group that can maintain this distro... sort of secures the gov't in that it can't be replaced (or the distro will not be supported, aka system goes down). Just look at unsupported distros... they are (or usually end up) dead. So in essence the gov't just made itself too big to fail.

Re:too big to fail

[unixisc]

Government as in its IT department - in other words, bureaucrats, who are always unelected & secure. And it's fine if city employees have a permanent job maintaining the platforms. They can leverage some 'community' help if they want, but they're better off owning their solutions.

Re:too big to fail

[tibit]

You're a raving lunatic. Of course they need a custom distro, what the heck did you think? A custom distro is like a custom hard drive image: once you're past a dozen or two PCs, you'll be way more productive having the customizations official, in effect creating a custom distro. It takes someone totally clueless, or a useless busybody who want to click endlessly on people's machines "configuring them" not to see that.

Mod Up Parent

[bityz]

Mod Up Parent +Informative

Re:Mod Up Parent

[haruchai]

Thank you. I think that's the quickest any comment I've ever made on /. has gotten to +5.

It only took...

[kenh]

"In one of the premier open source software deployments in Europe, the city migrated from Windows NT to LiMux, its own Linux distribution ... Ten years after the decision to switch, the LiMux project will now go into regular operation, the Munich City council said."

It only took ten years and the development of their own distribution of Linux to migrate from WinNT to LiMux (their own Linux distro) - wow.

I guess if Munich can do it, anyone can!

Question - were the last few users to convert (upgrade?) to LiMux still running WinNT for the last ten years or did they upgrade from WinNT to one of Microsoft's other interim offerings before finally landing on LiMux?

As I remember, one thing a leader of this effort pointed out was that this was not about "saving money," and if that was your primary goal you should reconsider any plans to migrate to a Linux distribution - there are many valid reason for the cutover to Linux, but cost savings alone won't justify the change.

Re:It only took...

[unixisc]

One more reason. I don't know whether this was the case, but let's say they bought Siemens Nixdorf boxes (MIPS) running NT. That support would have ended from Microsoft, and nowhere to go. By this move, they could have ported LiMux to those boxes and made them even more useful than they were w/ NT.

Re:It only took...

[Anonymous Coward]

or did they upgrade from WinNT to one of Microsoft's other interim offerings before finally landing on LiMux?

What other offerings?
Hint: Win8.1 is NT 6.3

Re:It only took...

[maxwell demon]

What other offerings?

Windows Phone, and the Xbox operating system. ;-)

Re:It only took...

[Anonymous Coward]

It only took ten years and the development of their own distribution of Linux to migrate from WinNT to LiMux (their own Linux distro) - wow

Cleaning up your software products takes a long time - we're still running 16bit DOS and Windows apps, and we've have a 32bit managed OS in place for 15 years. Still not entirely sure how they will continue working when we move to a 64bit Windows environment next year....

Government works slowly, primarily because decisions need to be justified and documented.

Re:It only took...

[Anonymous Coward]

You talk about making your own distro as if it were harder than setting up any other repository, or harder than maintaining a Windows patch server. In many senses it is quite the same process.

yes, they saved money overall.

[erapert]

http://www.pcworld.com/article/252921/munich_mayor_says_switch_to_linux_saved_money_reduced_complaints.html

Proof

[folderol]

Done, in spite of all the FUD and backstabbing. Nobody can now say (with any credibility) that it can't be done for a 'large' oganisation. I especially like that Munich never tried to cover up difficulties they had during the process, but instead calmly adjusted and compensated.

Really really impressed with this project, and now Munich truly owns their data unlike any other government.

Re:Proof

[cboslin]

Right on the point of the matter. The FUD, backstabbing, lack of crdibility, etc... Yes you can save an S-load of money by switching from Windows to Linux.

When attending SCALE SCALE12x in Los Angeles iover the years, I have talked to multiple Systems Admins that have successfully scaled Linux well above 10,000 desktops with no problem that could not be worked around and overcome. I did not have to go to SCALE to learn that Linux would scale, but it was nice to hear all the same.

While larger companies (and government agencies) can save millions even small companies can save significant dollars. In one of the many positive posts about this that have been rated down to zero or negative 1, one poster stated their small company/site (56 employee office) will realize over $22,000 per year in savings. My guess is they would save even more if they looked at everything and not just licensing. So many other factors figure in to the total cost of ownership for the company.

I just finished a year long contract at a worldwide company where we were supporting multiple Java Apps + Linux in the Cloud. One of the individuals that was responsible for updating 2,000 ~ 4,000 of their windows PCs (that was at only one site in one city in one state, there were 14 sites in that state, no I will not tell you the company's name, so don't ask as I have no wish to embarrass them) lost his job as the company said it was no longer cost effective to update all the Windows PCs at the site. (I started in the DP / IT field in 1979 and when the auto update crap started, many of us said that this would eventually happen.) If this has happened at other companies, I would not be surprised.

And as other posters have pointed out, it is much easier to secure Linux than Windows. Those that do not believe it, have not done it.

My biggest pet peeve with Windows 8 is the proprietary chips provided by the manufacturers, on Microsoft's instructions, that force one to obtain a valid MS Windows License even to install Linux on that proprietary hardware. I like donating old hardware to the various school programs when I am through with them. They almost always need to install Linux and are not interested in extra expense of a Windows license just to install Linux. Of course we can avoid these proprietary chipsets by only buying hardware from Linux vendors like ZaReason, System76 or others. As a copy of Windows can be purchased for those wanting to run Windows and when that version of Windows is no longer supported, that hardware can be re-purposed utilizing one of the many distros of Linux, instead of being thrown in the city dump. Just seems smart to me.

I am sure there are multiple websites / blog posts documenting many positive results from switching from Microsoft Windows to Linux. Please share them if you read this as I am most certainly interested in seeing them. I am sure Munich is not the only proof out there!

Note / Full Disclosure: I have a Windows 7 box for testing purposes and used a MacBook Pro in my last position, its a great laptop, that I did not want to like, but did, however my preference will always be Linux. Since I do not utilize touch on my desktop, servers, laptops or netbooks, I have moved away from Ubuntu's unity toward other distros of Linux, primarily Debian or CentOS, however have an interest in Arch and a few other low memory footprint Linux distros. I understand how Nokia blew it by moving away from the N800 and N900 Linux handhelds. Nor am I frightened by Android.

I started with DOS 2.0 before Windows was an app and my bias against windows is well earned, based solely on first hand experience. With over 30 years of various problems caused by that operating system and that company. While I almost got fired because of the General

Munich, where is the fucking download

[tibit]

As far as I'm concerned, it's not very kosher. You can't download their customized distribution anywhere. The fuck? Couldn't they at least upload it to source forge or some such if they don't want to host it themselves???

Re:Munich, where is the fucking download

[redmid17]

Yeah that's pretty much the only issue I have with it. I'd love to test drive it, sans proprietary apps that likely cost money and I wouldn't use, and see and it works.

Re:Munich, where is the fucking download

[Anonymous Coward]

They are starting to distribute cd's with the distro in the Munchen public libraries. It might become available for public download also.
Source: http://www.it-muenchen-blog.de/2013/09/verteilung-kostenloser-linux-cds-gestartet/

Re:Munich, where is the fucking download

[vandamme]

The other 300 distros aren't enough for you to try??

Re:Munich, where is the fucking download

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you could get ahold of a copy in a local library ;)
http://www.it-muenchen-blog.de/2013/09/verteilung-kostenloser-linux-cds-gestartet/

Send them a hybrid PDF

[Qubit]

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.

One option is to send them a hybrid PDF -- a format that allows you to embed the source LibreOffice document inside the PDF. Here's how to do it.

Many people don't know it, but MS-Office has pretty good ODF support in recent versions, so people should feel more comfortable sending ODF documents to people who are using it.

Props on promoting ODF to your potential employers. Surely but slowly we will win this format war :-)

From Windows NT?

[Anonymous Coward]

If they really were still using Windows NT then there is some serious negligence at the city department. Hardly makes me confident they have the slightest idea what they're doing or what the real costs going forward will be.

Dropping Mac OS Classic Support ?

[perpenso]

... Though many people who have upgraded from Mac OS 10.4 have started to disagree about it not hurting as much ...

Was there something other than Mac OS X 10.5's (2007) dropping of support for legacy Mac OS Classic (the 1984 - 2001 API) that was hurting them?

buy-ch

[Anonymous Coward]

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KDE's choices

[unixisc]

KDE has different desktops for laptops & tablets. Plasma Active is their choice for phones, tablets & touch computing devices, like it says in the link you provided, but nowhere do they suggest it for laptops or all-in-ones. For that, they have Plasma Desktop, which is as different from Plasma Active as a butterfly from a moth. (They also have a Plasma Netbook, but looking @ it, it's not obvious how it's more suited to a Netbook than is Plasma Desktop itself)

KDE did this the right way - they offer Plasma Desktop for laptops and desktops and optimize the UI for that, while for tablets, they optimize Plasma Active. That's the right way to do it - no need to pretend that one is the other. Windows 8, Unity and GNOME3, OTOH, try & shoehorn everything into one interface, which is why you have users screaming about all 3.

Anyway, my original point, which the parent conceded - he shouldn't have used GNOME3 as an example of a non-tablet interface and bunching it w/ XFCE, GNOME2 or KDE.

Famous last words "successfully completed"

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what all big consultancies say...until you find something isn't working according to the original specs or that you forgot to explicitly specify some requirement. Years of lock-in to the lucky vendor who's now saddled the city with a behemoth.

And...ten fucking years? Are they kidding?

Moved our office to linux

[Anonymous Coward]

We moved our entire 58 employee office to Linux. It has been a great success. I'm the only admin and it has been quite easy. We now save approximately $22,000 per year.

How I switched my office to Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1enfh7/i_changed_58_workstations_to_linux_mint/

Their own distro? hm

[apexwm]

I'm surprised they developed their own distro. They obviously had the resources to do this, but I would think handling future updates would be more costly to do this in house rather than use an already published distro. Regardless, it's a move in the positive direction for open source and GNU/Linux, we can only hope that other companies and organizations will learn, and follow suit. If not, they will continue to try and stick with Microsoft and will end up purchasing new hardware just to run that software, not to mention overpaying in licensing fees and extra personnel to administer those licenses.

Year of Linux on the desktop ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Technically from now, in Munich's public administration, every year will be the year on Linux on the desktop ? Until they change their workstations to iPads and their servers to Mac Pros ?