The Man Behind Munich's Migration of 15,000 PCs From Windows To Linux

An anonymous reader writes "It's one of the biggest migrations in the history of Linux, and it made Steve Ballmer very angry: Munich, in southwest Germany, has completed its transition of 15,000 PCs from Windows to Linux. It has saved money, fueled the local economy, and improved security. Linux Voice talked to the man behind the migration: 'One of the biggest aims of LiMux was to make the city more independent. Germany’s major center-left political party is the SPD, and its local Munich politicians backed the idea of the city council switching to Linux. They wanted to promote small and medium-sized companies in the area, giving them funding to improve the city’s IT infrastructure, instead of sending the money overseas to a large American corporation. The SPD argued that moving to Linux would foster the local IT market, as the city would pay localcompanies to do the work.' (Linux Voice is making the PDF article free [CC-BY-SA] so that everyone can send it to their local councilors and encourage them to investigate Linux)."

Comments

Cheaper beer

[Anonymous Coward]

With all this money saved, I hope they will build more hotel to welcome more people at Oktoberfest!

Re:Cheaper beer

[kenh]

What saved money? They went with Linux despite it costing more than the MS alternative - it was buried in the fourth paragraph of the linked-to article.

Rather than send fewer dollars to the US, they spent more dollars and hired local Munich companies to handle the migration.

Re:Cheaper beer

[Racemaniac]

And you took that out of context. That was on the initial 5 year plan, where moving to linux was a big migration, while moving to windows XP from windows 2000 would have had far less impact.
So of course in the first years such a massive migration and education of your users costs more. But now 10+ years later they estimate they saved money (and that was also mentioned in the part where they mentioned that linux was more expensive. For the 5 year plan microsoft was cheaper, but strategically they were pretty sure linux would be cheaper after that).

Re:Cheaper beer

[Anonymous Coward]

And that was the reason to do it this way.
Same money to local people, not to corps that move profits thru double Irish with a side of Denmark , so they don't pay any local taxes.
Now you understand ?

Re:Cheaper beer

[Agares]

Even if it did cost more it would be better to spend the money in your own country rather than send it all over seas.

Re:Cheaper beer

[dmbasso]

So of course in the first years such a massive migration and education of your users costs more.

Yep, higher cost, but the money stayed in the local economy. IMHO, that's the most important aspect of all, even if it had cost more after 5 years.

Re:Cheaper beer

[Anonymous Coward]

Try reading to the end.

Re:Cheaper beer

[sosume]

They will deeply regret this once a weird error on a critical system pops up in a few years time, and nobody is around to give support. Or when the laptops start failing. Or when they hire an incompetent admin from one of these small local companies. Linux is fine for running servers or machines with limited functionality (appliances). But for a full fledged desktop, Linux just doesn't cut it due to many reasons. WHy do you think MacOS restricts itself to a verry narrow hardware profile? Windows is the only complete system able to run userland on so many different configurations.

Re:Cheaper beer

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Sounds like a straw man argument to me. Why would a single organization need a system able to run on many different configurations, when the goal of most organizations is to run as few configurations as possible?

Re:Cheaper beer

[higuita]

yeh, right, just because all those problems never happen in windows!!

and it is really just the reverse of what you said. Linux support better older hardware, when it gives errors, is easier to debug and if you have any problem, is a lot easier to verify the system (file checksum, OS and hardware) remotely and clone and replace the faulty desktop if needed. If it is a HD problem, you can even create a fallback network boot to keep the user working (slower, but working) until someone replaces the HD.

Re:Cheaper beer

[TheP4st]

It's not hard finding hardware with excellent linux support, even less so when you buy in the large quantities that the city of Munich do, you do realise that organisations of that size tend to have just a small set of laptop and desktop configurations they use, right? It is not like they randomly pick 10 different manufacturers and 50 models.
While there might be valid arguments against their move to Linux, your is definitely not one of them.

Re:Cheaper beer

[Hamsterdan]

Like companies should do instead of outsourcing to other countries?

Outsourcing should be illegal, it's killing nice paying jobs (and the economy, but MBAs and PHBs don't think long-term anymore)

Re:Cheaper beer

[Hamsterdan]

"Windows is the only complete system able to run userland on so many different configurations."

And it's a wonder it's not more unstable with all those possible configurations. Besides, companies tend to have identical or similar models, makes imaging easier...

Re:Cheaper beer

[kenh]

They were faced with a "massive" migration to either WinXP or Linux, on a cost-basis, MS was cheaper - functionality-wise, benefit to the community Linux was superior, and they choose Linux.

I didn't judge the decision, I simply reported what was written in the article. Personally, I think they made an excellent choice by keeping the money local, even if it was greater than the foreign (MS) option.

I discussed their decision, and when they made their decision Linux was the more expensive option and they took it.

Re:Cheaper beer

[kenh]

More money, but to local people.

Re:Cheaper beer

[kenh]

Sometimes organizational goals don't match organizational realities.

Did Munich buy 15,000 identical desktops & laptops for all users, and will perform similar massive (government-wide) forklift upgrades going forward, or will new models be brought in over time, creating an ever-changing mix of systems?

My corporate IT background tells me the latter is more likely, but hey, maybe Munich is different.

Re:Cheaper beer

[kenh]

Support of older hardware is a meaningless metric, will the city of Munich be purposefully running older hardware bought surplus/off-lease, or will they buy current hardware going forward? Systems have a certain useful life, and buying machines mid-way through their useful life, while extremely cost-effective, can result in more frequent hardware swaps/upgrades, increasing labor costs but each iteration will cost less.

Put simply, let's say a given laptop has a five-year useful life, buying a laptop that is three years old doesn't extend the useful life of the laptop out to eight years, you are instead buying the last 2-3 years of it's useful life.

Re:Cheaper beer

[Racemaniac]

Just because you keep repeating that, doesn't make it true you know...
The article at the point where it's mentioned that it's most expensive immediately states it is due to the 5 year plan, and sorry, but a migration of win2k -> winxp (where you can keep most apps you were using, and most users will still be fairly familiar, and tech support won't need to learn much new things) vs windows -> linux where just about everything changes just isn't the same order of magnitude.
They also continue to say further on in the article that by their own estimates they saved money by now (about 12 years later?).

So stop your trolling (or work on your reading comprehension, it's seriously lacking)

And i almost feel like a karmawhore/linux fanboy when responding to you (even though i'm a happy windows 8 user)

Re:Cheaper beer

[swillden]

Don't people in other countries have a right to work, too? Tribalism, faugh.

Not that it doesn't make sense for a city to consider its larger picture... it certainly does. Tax money shipped to the US is gone. If they spend the same money locally, some of it will come back to the city, particularly when you include the ripple effects from that money flowing around the local economy. So the net actual cost can be lower, even if it's higher on paper... and if the outlays are smaller and local, then the city benefits from both effects.

But refusing to pay foreign workers just because their foreign, even when it does make more sense economically, is just tribalism and we should stop it.

Re:Cheaper beer

[Anonymous Coward]

They are germans, keeping in lockstep is part of their culture.

Re:Cheaper beer

[ShanghaiBill]

Yep, higher cost ...

No, lower cost. The higher cost was only short term. In the long term they saved money. Windows is cheaper in the short run because people already know how to use it, and more importantly, already know how to use MS-Office. So you save on training costs. But that is less true today. Where I live, the schools have all switched to Google Docs, so the kids will enter the workforce with little experience with MS-Office, but plenty of experience with tools that can run on any OS with a browser. So in the future, the break even time for switching will be shorter.

Re:Cheaper beer

[yacc143]

You do realize that having stayed in the Windows camp, they would have one migration more, because they're (12 years ago) migration target Windows XP is unsupported.

Re:Cheaper beer

[Anonymous Coward]

With all this money saved, I hope they will build more hotel to welcome more people at Oktoberfest!

That would be awesome. I hope more of the world smartens up and switches to cheaper, more powerful, more secure Linux.

Re:Cheaper beer

[Anonymous Coward]

K. S. Kyosuke: You've been called out (for tossing names) & you ran "forrest" from a fair challenge http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Re:Cheaper beer

[div_2n]

It's the intention and effect that outsourcing to other countries usually has. Namely:

Intention -- searching for those who will work for the least, in countries that have more relaxed environmental regulations and to avoid taxes
Effect -- increased localized unemployment, a "race to the bottom" on wages, damage to the environment and government budget crises

If you're outsourcing things because it makes sense -- i.e. not every country can produce their own efficiently -- then that's not a problem. Doing it for the other reasons is what causes vast problems.

Oh and for extra bonus craptasticness -- it's unsustainable in the long run.

Re:Cheaper beer

[ThePhilips]

But refusing to pay foreign workers just because their foreign, even when it does make more sense economically, is just tribalism and we should stop it.

So what you are saying, if there is somebody else who can do the job, I should immediately give it to him, instead of even trying to do it myself? If somebody else knows something I do not, I shouldn't learn it?

That's just ridiculous.

Trying to do something on your own is not tribalism. Failing, and still refusing to call an outsider, is.

Re:Cheaper beer

[div_2n]

Whoops it cut out part of my statement because it thought I was trying to insert HTML code. That should read:

If you're outsourcing things because it makes sense -- i.e. not every country can produce their own (insert specific niche agricultural product here) efficiently -- then that's not a problem. Doing it for the other reasons is what causes vast problems.

Re:Cheaper beer

[Anonymous Coward]

To pay foreign workers $1 per hour or less? Tribalism? Dude .................. this is rich.

Re:Cheaper beer

[swillden]

Yes, tribalism. If you can get what you done need for $1 per hour, and get it done just as well/quickly/etc., you should do it, and invest the savings in other parts of your enterprise (whatever that may be). Choosing to pay more merely so you can pay the money to your own tribe is tribalism.

We're all humans, and no tribe is inherently more deserving than any other.

Re:Cheaper beer

[swillden]

So what you are saying, if there is somebody else who can do the job, I should immediately give it to him, instead of even trying to do it myself?

If he can do it cheaper, or better, or faster, why would you not? If considerations other than who he is drive you to do it yourself, well and good. But if you're keeping it local merely because he's "other", that's tribalism.

Re:Cheaper beer

[gbjbaanb]

Of course that was then for a XP migration. So they've saved themselves the cost of migrating all over again to Windows8.1u1 as well - in other words, 1 slightly more costly migration costs much less than having to migrate twice over to XP and then Win8 (and possibly then downgrade to win 7 :-)

Don't forget, these guys were early-adopters of commercial Linux, everyone who does that pays more in the early days. If your council did it today, they'd probably find it is cheaper thanks partly to the work the Munich guys did.

Re:Cheaper beer

[Anonymous Coward]

This looks weirdly like the kind of denialism as exercised by AGW and Evolution deniers. There's an upcoming film called 'The Principle'; I suspect it's right up your alley, mate.

Re:Cheaper beer

[Dragonslicer]

They will deeply regret this once a weird error on a critical system pops up in a few years time, and nobody is around to give support.

Yeah, Munich is such a tiny little backwoods place that there's no way they'd ever be able to find someone who knows anything about Linux.

Re:Cheaper beer

[MasterHundinco]

You mean two End-Of-Life (EOL) operating systems that even MICROSOFT won't be supporting anymore unless significant multi tens of million dollar contracts are signed are better than a platform that can be automated to be updated to the latest service patches and allowed to evolve with custom and open source frameworks that taxpayers can then use themselves providing a double return on investment?

Re:Cheaper beer

[PRMan]

Exactly. Sure, the FIRST migration cost more. But now they would have had to buy new machines and switch to Windows 8 because XP went out of support. With Linux, they have no need to do that. If the PCs still run OK, they can still use PCs from that era until they die because Linux is generally far more efficient than Windows with the same hardware. And they can still put the latest releases of Firefox or Chromium or whatever on those older PCs and only upgrade when they break or when they feel they need to.

Re:Cheaper beer

[swillden]

Intention -- searching for those who will work for the least, in countries that have more relaxed environmental regulations and to avoid taxes Effect -- increased localized unemployment, a "race to the bottom" on wages, damage to the environment and government budget crises

That's one local, short term effect.

The non-local short term effect is increasing wages in the other country. With increasing wealth comes increasing desire for a clean environment, etc., or do you think that people in other countries are inherently less interested in those things than you are? They aren't, they just don't yet have the means to pay attention to them, because they're focused on survival. As their wealth rises that will change... which if you care about the environment is a Very Good Thing, because it's not like their pollution stays where it is.

Spreading the work around increases the wealth of the human race as a whole. Sure, it may well decrease, at least temporarily, the wealth of your tribe, but from a global perspective that's actually a good thing. And one thing we've learned over the past millennia is that increasing participation in commerce eventually benefits everyone -- a rising tide lifts all boats. In the long run your tribe will be economically better off, too.

But, morally, the best way to approach the issue is to expand your tribe to include the entire human race.

Re:Cheaper beer

[swv3752]

No, we should value our neighbor more than some remote individual in another country. Besides the ethical and moral considerations, there are practical ones as well. If your neighbor has a job, he will not have to steal from you to survive. there will be networks effects where the area improves as more people have moeny and spend it. look at urban renewal efforts where as people see improvements and have stable jobs they improve their properties and it encourages their neighbors to improve their properties. The reverse happens all too often as well.

Re:Cheaper beer

[mspohr]

It does seem to me that a local government should have the welfare of the local community in mind. After all, that is really the purpose of government. If the local government can improve the quality of its services (Linux migration) and at the same time, build skills and direct resources to the local community, then it is a win-win situation.
That is the problem with corporations; they are only concerned with profit and not their workers or communities. They will sell their mother into slavery if it improves their bottom line (and their income).

Re:Cheaper beer

[luis_a_espinal]

What saved money? They went with Linux despite it costing more than the MS alternative - it was buried in the fourth paragraph of the linked-to article.

Rather than send fewer dollars to the US, they spent more dollars and hired local Munich companies to handle the migration.

Money was saved by spending more on the local economy </ECO101>

Re:Cheaper beer

[Anonymous Coward]

said the one pocketing the profit at the expense of his neighbors.

Re:Cheaper beer

[drjzzz]

Yep, higher cost, but the money stayed in the local economy. IMHO, that's the most important aspect of all, even if it had cost more after 5 years.

Companies like SAP, a giant German company that sells software to thousands of American firms, might worry about where that argument leads....

Re:Cheaper beer

[jakimfett]

I'm kinda surprised more people haven't brought this up, especially with all the conversations about XP EOL happening right now.

Re:Cheaper beer

[Barsteward]

yeah and if they migrated to MS-XP all those years ago, they'd be now be doing the migration to Windows 7 and related app upgrades (Office, antivirus etc) so its twice the cost and i'd guess they'd also be planning yet future migration to Windows 8.1 (or 9) by now.

Staying with MS is a treadmill of migration and costs which is only to MS's benefit.

Re:Cheaper beer

[Anonymous Coward]

I say go one step further and not just make outsourcing illegal, but make buying things illegal, too. So a company should start off making some tools, then building a building, carpet, desks, chairs, coffee machines, chairs, computers, printers, and writing any software that isn't open source. Think how great that would work. /sarcasm

Re:Cheaper beer

[higuita]

The old hardware is a useful metric, as no company or public entity will replace desktops each year, they must survive for several years.

in no place i said that one must buy only old hardware, just that companies have then and can use then longer than in windows.

if you want to buy recent machines, why not?
what hardware is missing linux support today? brand new 3D cards? Nvidia and AMD support then but closed drivers, Intel support then with open drivers ( AMD is in each new hardware iteration is releasing faster the open drivers, with the final objective of any latest distros version already have at least basic support for any hardware released). Those cards also don't show up in office workstation
The only things not supported i remember are "retina" displays, but those aren't also found in office workstations yet.

So in linux you can support BOTH older and new hardware. Top level, brand new hardware might not be perfect in linux... but people that want brand new high end machines right now will probably don't want linux too... is just not their style! :)

Re:Cheaper beer

[ThePhilips]

If he can do it cheaper, or better, or faster, why would you not?

Because I want to learn to do it cheaper/better/faster?

Because I want to compete against the others??

Because I want to have a job which would pay my bills???

You realize that you effectively advocate immediate closure of the US of A, and moving everything to China?

Re:Cheaper beer

[Anonymous Coward]

It's cringe inducing to think about how much of your life you waste on this obsessive behavior. And it is a waste, isn't it? It's not doing anything positive for you. Seek professional help.

Re:Cheaper beer

[budgenator]

A big piece of the increased cost was due to training expense, when migrating from windows to kubuntu all of the users had to be trained. When migrating from W2K to WinXP the users don't need retraining because they already know it. Now my real world experience is most windows users a very superficial knowlege of windows and any applications they don't use daily, so getting everyone trained to a common level of competency doesn't seem like an expense exclusive to a linux conversion.

Re:Cheaper beer

[budgenator]

We're on Win8 at work, when I'm trying to figure out something that used to be easy in WinXP, Windows knowledgebase tells me how to do it in Windows7, and Windows8.1 but that doesn't help in windows 8! I saw that there is a free upgrade to 8.1 but that just plain does not work so it's not just XP thats been EOLed

Re:Cheaper beer

[KingOfBLASH]

Actually the MBAs take a very long term view of things. At some point, all the outsourced jobs should lift the developing world up into the developed world. It'll mean a much better quality of life for many people, which will create jobs, globally. Ultimately, if jobs become truly frictionless, someone in India should make exactly what someone in the US makes for the same job at the same qualifications. Leading to a better world.

Of course that's VERY long term. Short term, sucks to be outsourced.

Re:Cheaper beer

[Dutch Gun]

For a time people feared all IT work would be outsourced to other countries. It's certainly not happening in my industry (videogame development) to any significant extent. It turns out it's hard to do any sort of creative problem-solving or collaborative type work outsourced. A number of companies I know who've tried it have either given up or scaled way back on that because of quality issues. I'd be interested to hear if others have seen the same thing in other industries.

You'd think that more game companies would be outsourcing cheap programmers from other countries. Likewise, there are fine artists all over the world, right? Couldn't that be outsourced for much cheaper? I've seen/heard-of companies try to outsource game programming and art, and in every example I heard about, the savings in cost and time were largely offset by the disastrous quality of what was produced, forcing the in-house employees to either significantly touch-up or even completely re-do the work from scratch.

The simple fact remains that it's extremely difficult to guarantee high-quality work when you're trying to find cheap labor, and you end up spending an enormous amount of time in a feedback / QA loop, which tends to be worsened by differences in time-zones, so iteration can take days or even weeks. Additionally, there may be communication barriers, with English being a second language for the contract workers, or perhaps even translated by a third-party. Sometimes an interactive face-to-face meeting is the best way to hammer out design or technical challenges, but it's not an option.

Have you noticed how some American companies are now even advertising that their staffed helplines are staffed i

Re:Cheaper beer

[Dutch Gun]

Hmm, not sure why my post was cut off. It previewed correctly... ah well. Here's the conclusion as best I can remember: ...staffed by US workers? Companies are realizing that annoying their customers with bad customer service when they're already frustrated is bad for business as well (i.e. hard-to-understand accents, etc).

Ultimately, outsourcing is subject to the same project management triangle (fast, cheap, good - pick two) as any other endeavor.

Re:Cheaper beer

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they'll simply not replace their old, but still quite functional linux PCs....Ubuntu 12.04 LTS runs so much snappier on this PC (I think it's at least 9 years old) than the XP that came with it. When LTS expires in 2017, there's a very good chance that this same 12+ year old PC will run Ubuntu 14.04 LTS for another two years....

Re:Cheaper beer

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, China is such a bastion of a clean environment.

Re:Cheaper beer

[cornjones]

> Spreading the work around increases the wealth of the human race as a whole

This is true, the economics are pretty straightforward. And it is working very well for the 2nd and somewhat 3rd world. the problem is the disproportionate wealth accumulated in teh first world will 'leak' into the wider pool. Eventually, that pool may rise enough to bring everybody to the standards of the 1st world, but, imho, not for a long time, if ever. This isn't such a good deal for the people in the 1st world who will lose access to the standard of living that they have been enjoying.

To think of it another way, this is similar to having the 1% spread their wealth to everybody in America. Or even just the poorest half. that would, likely, jumpstart the economy , people invest in education and more people have the chance to innovate. In aggregate, everybody is wealthier. But the 1%s will be poorer and won't attain the same levels of wealth accumulation in the foreseeable future.

It is hard to sell people on such an altruistic ideal at their own expense. It is likely what will happen (worldwide, not the 1% analogy) but, imho, standard of life in the first world is going to drop considerably.

Re:Cheaper beer

[Anonymous Coward]

- a rising tide lifts all boats.

A rising tide in one location means a ebbing tide in another. There is a finite amount of water.

Re: Cheaper beer

[Anonymous Coward]

How does one use German to say, "In the long run, _uck you very much, Mr. Balmer?"

Linux über allis!

Re: Cheaper beer

[Anonymous Coward]

Not at all... the reasoning behind the investment in SAP, faulty or not, is long term savings. Multinational corporations display no allegiance to anything but the bottom line. Apple isn't a US corporation any more the Pfizer when it comes to tax strategy. Only when it's a favorable venue for adjudication of legal a dispute does a corporation have a preference for one country over another.

Re:Cheaper beer

[Darinbob]

Not necessarily tribalism, but about supporting the local community in preference to remote communities. Similarly, if you've got a family business, then hire your kids instead of outsourcing to the neighbor's kids.

Re:Cheaper beer

[Darinbob]

But most of these countries have a relatively weak citizenry compared to the government or corporate leaders.

Also the outsourcing is not creating sustainable industries in those countries, it is instead merely creating a demand for a worker pool that will come and go as other countries compete to be the cheapest. So you have 1000 workers all answering the phone to say "have you tried turning it off and back on" but that is not fundamentally changing the economy any more than if you dumped the money out from an airplane.

Re:Cheaper beer

[Darinbob]

A lot of places have cancelled their outsourcing plans because it just doesn't work for the long run. Much of the time things were driven by MBA trained people who only looked at short term profits and counted bodies but ignored the larger picture. Ie, developers are outsourced but then expenses rise because management costs suddenly soared, security became a concern, quality of the product went down, the local devs who remained left out of frustration, etc. Even for simple call centers there have been problems with outsourcing.

Essentially when you choose the lowest bidder you end up getting what you paid for.

Re:Cheaper beer

[Darinbob]

Then you end up with a CEO sitting in his mansion wondering why his home town has turned to crap and is now full of stinky homeless people and gang crime. Now if this CEO were willing to relocate to a third world country and impart his brilliant wisdom in all-hands meetings over there, things would be fairer. But if he wants to live in a first world country with first world quality of life then he needs to pay attention to his first world workers (or she as the case may be).

This is the fundamental problem I think, some of these companies want to keep the shiny building containing only upper level management with all other workers obtained from wherever labor is the cheapest. They never consider that maybe upper management could be outsourced as well.

They're also not always outsourcing to save labor costs. They are sometimes doing this to avoid local laws and regulations (and general purpose morality decisions). It would be a good improvement if US based companies were be required to abide by US laws even in their overseas activities.

Re:Cheaper beer

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, but the purpose of a local government's IT department is not to stimulate the local economy. It's to setup a functioning, reliable Infrastructure for the local government, so that THEY can stimulate the local economy.
If not, then why don't they advocate banishing all PCs, as using a locally built abacus and establishing German Mental calculators, which will certainly employ more people.

Re:Cheaper beer

[Anonymous Coward]

Paying someone only $1 per hour is exploitation. We are already seeing the effects of all this outsourcing madness here in europe. In the long term this will lead to similar situations we had in the 30s/40s in germany and it's people like you who are responsible for this.

Re:Cheaper beer

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows is the only complete system able to run userland on so many different configurations.

Not far from where I sit right now, I have Core2Duo, Alpha, SPARC, MIPS and ARM (Raspberry Pi) configurations. None of them run Windows currently, but if I decided to run a recent Windows on them, which ones could exactly? They all run Linux just fine.

Re:Cheaper beer

[fredprado]

It is horrible, but it is undeniably much better than it was before.

Re:Cheaper beer

[fredprado]

Sure this is. It is a good deal for people in the 3rd wold in the long term, as you yourself admitted, and it is an excellent deal for people in the 1st world as it is a drain of resources. Thanks to that the first world quality of life improved incredibly in the last century. You are confusing the interests of a a few unionized groups of people with the interests of the country.

Re:Cheaper beer

[macpacheco]

The went with Linux to end being a slave to Microsoft.
Roghly speaking I haven't owned a Windows install at all for over 5 years and just one Windows VM in the preceeding 5 years.
I couldn't have been happier with the choice. Goodbye virus, worms. Hello being in control.
Goodbye being force to use your computer only the way Microsoft / Apple wants you to, hello doing it anyway it better suits you.
Of course, to some people that live+work inside a little box, Linux can be dangerous !

Re:Cheaper beer

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes that's true, but I agree with kenh when (s)he stated that Linux-based OS's are normally much easier to troubleshoot, and to me that's more important that worrying about the age of the hardware. And I say this as someone who used to primarily admin Windows systems.

Re:Cheaper beer

[cornjones]

I don't follow these lines at all:
> it is an excellent deal for people in the 1st world as it is a drain of resources.
> confusing the interests of a a few unionized groups of people with the interests of the country.

That said, I think you misunderstand me. Lets make up a scale. say the average standard of living around the globe is 100. Basically everybody living in the US (w/ a few exceptions) already enjoys a standard of living far above the mean, say 150. Now, as trade becomes global and we can chose talent from a much wider pool, the flood gates are open and much of the wealth of the 1st spreads to the rest of the world, the world as a whole (should) benefit. More innovators, etc. But we end up all balancing out at 125. overall, a great deal for the world. A bitter pill for the 1st world.

Re:Cheaper beer

[TemporalBeing]

I don't follow these lines at all: > it is an excellent deal for people in the 1st world as it is a drain of resources. > confusing the interests of a a few unionized groups of people with the interests of the country.

That said, I think you misunderstand me. Lets make up a scale. say the average standard of living around the globe is 100. Basically everybody living in the US (w/ a few exceptions) already enjoys a standard of living far above the mean, say 150. Now, as trade becomes global and we can chose talent from a much wider pool, the flood gates are open and much of the wealth of the 1st spreads to the rest of the world, the world as a whole (should) benefit. More innovators, etc. But we end up all balancing out at 125. overall, a great deal for the world. A bitter pill for the 1st world.

However, the 125 is really just an inflated 100, and the 1st worlds will just figure out a way to raise the 150 to 200 at the same time.

Through...

[Old Fatty Baldman]

...obscurity.

Well, here is the problem:

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a "man behind the migration". What is a city supposed to do when it hasn't such a man?

Re:Well, here is the problem:

[Anonymous Coward]

"Linux Voice is making the PDF article free [CC-BY-SA] so that everyone can send it to their local councilors and encourage them to investigate Linux)."

Well now it's easier for people to make a case for it, since there is a live example to point to.

Re:Well, here is the problem:

[kenh]

Save money and go with MS?

Re:Well, here is the problem:

[Anonymous Coward]

They could have saved a lot of money just by threatening plausibly to switch to GNU/Linux.

Microsoft is known to be very forthcoming when people start considering alternatives. "We'll give you the Ballmers and Chains for free. You'll just pay for the thumbscrews later on. And you'll get a sweet deal for rack-mounted whatevers to boot."

Re:Well, here is the problem:

[Anonymous Coward]

MS tried that...

It didn't fly.

Re:Well, here is the problem:

[Anonymous Coward]

Guess what, MS even thought they were just threatening and sent Ballmer to Munich for negotiations. Boy must he have had a bad day, flying home empty-handed.

Re:Well, here is the problem:

[12WTF$]

ROFL quote from TFA:

“Steve Ballmer tried to convince the mayor that it would be a bad decision to switch to open source, because it’s not something an administration can rely on. ...And it just got worse for Microsoft’s boss. “The mayor was preparing for a meeting with Steve Ballmer, and because English is not his native language, he asked his interpreter: ‘What shall I say if I don’t have the right words?’ And the interpreter replied: ‘Stay calm, think and say: What else can you offer?’

Later on during the meeting, the mayor was quickly at the point where he had nothing to say to Ballmer, except for ‘What else can you offer?’ several times.
Years later, he heard that Ballmer was deeply impressed by how hard he was in negotiations!"

I wonder about man hour figures...

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the most often mentioned issues with Linux that is brought up is the man-hours it takes to get a deployment up and running. I'm curious how long it took for them to make the changeover, and what the day to day costs are.

Advocacy aside, Windows has a lot of management tools in the OS that make dealing with thousands of machines doable, be it SCOM, GPOs, or the flexibility of domain authentication.

AFIAK, Linux has no scalable tools. Chef and Puppet are nice, but don't come close to gpupdate /force and GPOs for deploying something on an enterprise level.

Re:I wonder about man hour figures...

[TWX]

Any large-scale deployment takes significant man-hours to achieve, but can be made easier through the use of imaging and common platforms. If I standardize on only a handful of models of computers then I can load-up the OS and build everything that I need for that OS on each model, then simply duplicate the drive over all of the others of that model, change the few things that need to be changed (name, network credentials, possibly some security hashes) and I'm done.

This is arguably even easier in Linux than in Windows because there are no particular licensing issues with just copying a Linux installation or with how many Linux installations are deployed. One's backend servers are now for updating and package management rather than for licensing.

And with Microsoft deciding to change their UI every few years now, coupled with competing UIs from Apple and Google, it's much easier to change people to a diffrent platform when they have to learn a new UI anyway. Had Microsoft kept variants of the Windows 95 UI going past Windows 7 then it would be harder, but with the Metro debacle it's a lot easier to make that change, and since most users won't go deeper than the UI anyway it's not so bad.

The hardest part is training the support staff if they've been Windows-centric their whole careers. Somehow just reiterating that everything-is-a-file isn't enough, and many professionals struggle to understand UNIX-style paths.

Re:I wonder about man hour figures...

[binarylarry]

If only the linux community could come up with some kind of "packaging" mechanism that would make software deployment easier.

This "package" could be comprised of compressed files that the OS could then "copy" to relevant locations on the system. I don't want to get to Star Treked out but perhaps we could then send these "packages" over the network to computers, instead of manually copying the files on our tape drives like we do right now.

If only Red Hat or one of the other distros had a system like this in place, it would make Linux so much more competitive. Perhaps Microsoft has a patent on this new technology?

Re:I wonder about man hour figures...

[Entropius]

many professionals struggle to understand UNIX-style paths

Wait, really?

There are IT professionals who have trouble with the idea that /home/entropius/widgets is a subdirectory of /home/entropius, and so on?

Re:I wonder about man hour figures...

[Anonymous Coward]

There are IT professionals who have trouble with the idea that /home/entropius/widgets is a subdirectory of /home/entropius, and so on?

Well, what drive is it on? Why is my thumb drive copied to the hard disk when I put it in? Why does Loinox use the wrong slashes?

Re:I wonder about man hour figures...

[Anonymous Coward]

??? no scalable tools???

Where do you think Microsoft got theirs?

LDAP, Kerberos, DNS...

I've worked with UNIX systems for 40 years now. And with thousands of machines is trivially doable once there is an organization standardization to do so.

Re:I wonder about man hour figures...

[Assmasher]

Perhaps Microsoft has a patent on this new technology?

Amazon has a provisional patent for this in the pipeline I hear.

Re:I wonder about man hour figures...

[Anonymous Coward]

Many IT professionals are idiots with degrees. They know what they studied in school and nothing more.

Re:I wonder about man hour figures...

[Anonymous Coward]

That happens with "click admins" that have no real understanding of what they do.

In most organizations that is referred to as "incompetence".

Re:I wonder about man hour figures...

[CronoCloud]

Well, what drive is it on?

There's no worring about C: or D: or E: in Linux. It's all one filesystem.

Why is my thumb drive copied to the hard disk when I put it in?

What makes you think it is?

Why does Loinox use the wrong slashes?

Some might say that DOS/Windows is using the wrong ones because Unix-style paths' predate the use of "\" by Windows.

Re:I wonder about man hour figures...

[Peter Simpson]

And with Microsoft deciding to change their UI every few years now...,

You've hit on what I consider to be Microsoft's biggest problem: they are no longer making basic functional improvements to their products. Instead, they are adding bells and whistles, and changing file formats to force upgrades (if your clients have ver XYZ+1, then you need it to read the default format of the files they send you).

To me, this indicates a change in attitude. No longer are they striving to put out the best software, they're churning revs to keep revenue up. It's a sign of desperation and it has been going on for several years, now.

Re:I wonder about man hour figures...

[kenh]

Canonical offers a comprehensive management suite for desktops and servers, that in may ways compares with Windows AD and associated tools. Canonical charges about $200-250/system per year (I assume volume discounts are available, but I'm not privy to them), while annual software license costs for most MS software users is well under that number (for example, schools can get client OS license, MS Office, server CALs, and misc other MS software for $35/desktop per year).

There are other options, including "roll-your-own", but when considering 15,000 desktops the task can become overwhelming and take a number of years to fully design and implement, and what to do during that transition period?

Re:I wonder about man hour figures...

[kenh]

Any large-scale deployment takes significant man-hours to achieve, but can be made easier through the use of imaging and common platforms. If I standardize on only a handful of models of computers then I can load-up the OS and build everything that I need for that OS on each model, then simply duplicate the drive over all of the others of that model, change the few things that need to be changed (name, network credentials, possibly some security hashes) and I'm done.

It's called WDS, and it's included for free with Windows. Clonzilla, Ghost, and other tools work equally well with MS and FOSS system images.

This is arguably even easier in Linux than in Windows because there are no particular licensing issues with just copying a Linux installation or with how many Linux installations are deployed. One's backend servers are now for updating and package management rather than for licensing.

How hard do you imagine MS software licensing is? You configure one server VM to serve out licenses, and when new license codes are available, the admin simply adds them to the license repository. The client OS and applications (MS Office) are pre-configured to seek out a KMS license server. Once the server is configured, there is no need to even think about licenses on client machines, it just works.

And with Microsoft deciding to change their UI every few years now, coupled with competing UIs from Apple and Google, it's much easier to change people to a diffrent platform when they have to learn a new UI anyway. Had Microsoft kept variants of the Windows 95 UI going past Windows 7 then it would be harder, but with the Metro debacle it's a lot easier to make that change, and since most users won't go deeper than the UI anyway it's not so bad.

And by "every few years" you mean every decade? As you alluded to, Windows 95, Vista, and Windows 7 have essentially the same UI, conversely, Ubuntu has changed it's desktop interface more frequently.

The hardest part is training the support staff if they've been Windows-centric their whole careers. Somehow just reiterating that everything-is-a-file isn't enough, and many professionals struggle to understand UNIX-style paths.

Yeah, because users that have learned "to the click" to work in Office 2010, 2011 (Mac) or 2013 will have virtually no learning curve under any of the free Office alternatives...

You ignorance of the Windows ecosystem makes it easy to find fault in it - you can simply say you prefer Linux and leave it at that, but your arguments against Windows are really rather trivial issues, nothing more.

Re:I wonder about man hour figures...

[Anonymous Coward]

Some might say that DOS/Windows is using the wrong ones because Unix-style paths' predate the use of "\" by Windows.

Not to mention with the exception of Windows the \ is considered almost universally to be the escape character. It just makes anything that uses windows file paths harder to program/script for.

Re:I wonder about man hour figures...

[westyvw]

You are WAY over simplifying the mystical licensing systems in Windows. It is one of the most confusing things to manage, and yes I know what I am doing.

Second, I never really understand this training with office products. The best training you can give anyone is to teach them to stop using office products becuase the last thing a company needs is a bunch of random content producers. Get your work into a content management system (and NO that is not Sharepoint), and force workers to only create content as it specifiucally relates to their job, and not via word processors and spreadsheets.

Re:I wonder about man hour figures...

[Anonymous Coward]

Is the +4 Interesting you got because the 'whoosh' sounded peculiar? The post you're replying to is an obvious dramatization of the kinds of trouble folks have with UNIX style filesystems. In other words, your reply is preaching to the choir.

And yes, people do have these problems. I work with Windows admins and while good at Windows, they don't quite grok UNIX-type filesystems and design, referring to the root partition as the 'root drive' or even 'C: drive'.

CAPTCHA: pounding: what Windows admins heads do when working with Linux.

Re:I wonder about man hour figures...

[digitalPhant0m]

No longer are they striving to put out the best software

I'm sorry, did I miss something? When were they ever trying to put out the best software? "Bottom line" has always been the bottom line with M$

Re:I wonder about man hour figures...

[Anonymous Coward]

My company is a large MS partner. And we have frequent transitory issues with licensing and the servers that support it (not hardware faults). It's a pain in the ass when outlook says you're not licensed and shuts down (then works fine a few minutes later). Whatever the exact cause, this is one thing you *do not* have to put up with on Linux.

Re:I wonder about man hour figures...

[UnknownSoldier]

> How hard do you imagine MS software licensing is?

With Linux I don't have to deal with this bullshit at all, ever.

Re:I wonder about man hour figures...

[Camel Pilot]

Somehow just reiterating that everything-is-a-file isn't enough, and many professionals struggle to understand UNIX-style paths.

What? Really? You think the windows traditional

C:\"Documents and Settings"\USERNAME

is easier and more expressive then /home/USERNAME

Then there is the stupid "My Documents" concept. I once helped a secretary find a document she stored under "My Documents" and she couldn't understand why it wasn't there. She was on a different computer but thought since the abstract thingy "My Documents" was right in front she that it was her documents.

Re:I wonder about man hour figures...

[Darkinspiration]

If chef or puppet are not friendly enought you can always invest in a third party like Novell Zenwork and manage your workstation with it. Sure it's defeat the purpuse of always using Open Source tools and not paying for licence but options do exist. Also, Gpo are not really anything special, it's a pretty interface on a couple of reg key that control the some aspect of the workstation UI. Everything it does can be done by puppet on a workstation

Re:I wonder about man hour figures...

[Entropius]

Do people really get degrees in IT fields without studying Unix?

Serious question -- I'm a scientist and everybody works with it at some time or other, and a computational physics course using C on Linux is standard fare. At the grad school I went to, there were shared Linux workstations in all the graduate student offices, just as a matter of course, and if you didn't know how to use them you figured it out.

Can you really get a whole degree in computers without touching Unix?

Re:I wonder about man hour figures...

[Entropius]

Well, what drive is it on?
Tell them: in this OS there is one filesystem, and the stuff on your drives is attached to various places on it. So you might have one drive at /, and your CD gets connected at /media/cdrom, your thumbdrive at /media/usb, and so on.

Why is my thumb drive copied to the hard disk when I put it in?
It's not -- it's attached somewhere to the filesystem.

Why does Loinox use the wrong slashes?
Because / means divide, and it's a directory divider.

Seriously, if you can't understand this after fifteen minutes of explanation you shouldn't be paid to fuck with computers.

Re:I wonder about man hour figures...

[PRMan]

You missed DOS 5, Windows 95, SQL 7, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Office 2007, Windows 7. There have been MANY times in the past when Microsoft put something out that was the best in the world at the time. And sometimes, it took people a while to realize it.

Re:I wonder about man hour figures...

[AthanasiusKircher]

And yes, people do have these problems. I work with Windows admins and while good at Windows, they don't quite grok UNIX-type filesystems and design, referring to the root partition as the 'root drive' or even 'C: drive'.

How is this possible? It doesn't make any sense, unless the people you're talking about are complete idiots who shouldn't be administering anything, including Windoes.

I guess I could sort of understand this if you were talking about DOS or Windows prior to the past 15 years or so.

But modern Windows actually acts like the various drives are "subdirectories" under "My Computer" in some ways (at least in appearance). And any actual admin would understand the idea of mapping a "network drive," which could often be a random directory on another computer, to a drive letter. And then one could create a shortcut from a specific folder to such an arbitrary location.

If your Windows admin has never had an occasion to connect to a random directory on a networked computer or use a shortcut to get to another root director on a drive... well, I don't know what to say. But if he/she has, the concept of Linux filesystem should just be a simple extension of that.

I'm sure Windows USERS often have trouble understanding the Linux filesystem. But a Windows admin who couldn't figure it out after a few days should be fired.

Re:I wonder about man hour figures...

[Mr 44]

Spoken like a man who's never used RHEL.

Re:I wonder about man hour figures...

[AthanasiusKircher]

To me, this indicates a change in attitude. No longer are they striving to put out the best software, they're churning revs to keep revenue up. It's a sign of desperation and it has been going on for several years, now.

Meh. It's been going on for several decades. 20-ish years ago I was beta-testing Windows 95. Then I bought Windows 95 when it came out. It had some great new features, but it also was seriously broken in many ways. Office 95 was prettier and had some new features, but in other ways it was a bloated piece of garbage.

I knew a number of people who kept using their DOS version of WordPerfect until the early 2000s on their personal computers -- it was stable, it had basically all the features you could want... why change, other than to get something a little prettier?

At least with word processors you might be able to justify the WYSIWYG factor and the graphical elements as an important advance in functionality for people who like to play around with weird fonts and tweak the appearance of documents (usually without any decent sense of design).

But spreadsheets? Once pivot tables were invented in the early 90s, what did subsequent versions of Excel add other than bloat and prettier graphics? Yeah, you got your 3-D charts. Fantastic. Looks snazzy. But was it worth the HUGE increases in system resources for that?

The GUI for Windows 95 and subsequent versions has been useful. But let's be serious about this -- the standard features of the most common business applications reached maturity in the late 80s, and accumulated only a few more important features in the early 90s. Ever since then, it's mostly been about eye candy and arbitrary changes in interfaces, rather than the "best software." Sure, there are lots of advanced features that some people need that have been added, but mostly Microsoft has been about producing bloated stuff with new interfaces for at least 20 years... generally first with a crappy buggy version followed by something that keeps the same basic interface but fixes the problems... then a new interface and repeat the cycle.

Re:I wonder about man hour figures...

[swv3752]

Or go the Red Hat or SUSE solution. For RHEL, you buy an rhn subscription and use Satellite, or go free and use CentOS and Spacewalk. On SUSE use SUSE Manager, it will manage Red Hat as well. One could use Spacewalk to manage SUSE as well.

Satellite is reported to cost $10000 but that is a flat fee, not a per client based license. So for Munich with 15000 clients, that is way cheaper than other options including Microsoft. SUSE says that SUSE manager is up to 50% cheaper than Satellite.

Re:I wonder about man hour figures...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, what drive is it on?

There's no worring about C: or D: or E: in Linux. It's all one filesystem.

Why is my thumb drive copied to the hard disk when I put it in?

What makes you think it is?

Why does Loinox use the wrong slashes?

Some might say that DOS/Windows is using the wrong ones because Unix-style paths' predate the use of "\" by Windows.

Everything in Linux is NOT one filesystem, and it's not the best way of doing things.

Filesystem boundaries in UNIX are transparent to applications, and if they are nested badly can be a maintenance nightmare.
Especially remote SAN/NAS mounts, those should never be nested in each other, or deep in the local filesystem.

Windows drive letters make tons of sense for remote or removable volumes. The only thing I think would be better than both Windows or UNIX approaches might be the old Mac OS trick of referencing things by filesystem label.
Coincidentally, that is basically what ZFS and BTRFS do.

NO!
LOCAL /
LOCAL /usr/local
SAN: /usr/local/myapp

BETTER
SAN: /myapp

I'm just just tired of +1 I Like Linux moderation...

Re:I wonder about man hour figures...

[Anonymous Coward]

No - not if it's a traditional IT/Computing BSc.

But Im quite old now :p Linus hadnt even made his 1st kernal when I finished Uni. But there was Unix - and we used alot of that.

Im an Oracle DBA working for a company that outsource our skills to companies that dont have our specialties. We specialize in anything from BAU Oracle to the more extreme Goldengate/Exadata/NoSQL/RAC/etc .. skills that alot of shops dont have.

Of our 80 odd customers we have 3 that are major UK universities. They all run RH or OEL (A Red Hat fork) to host their Oracle databases. Some of these databases are internal to the universities (accounts systems... their own media content.. etc) and others are for "Student use".

If I were to log onto a student server I would see 1000's of student schema's ... and similarity would see a similar number of OS user accounts. Some have never used... but most have.

So even if the evidence is circumstantial - thats how I drew up my conclusion.

OTOH: If the degree is one of those worthless mash-up ones that seem so popular this past decade then perhaps it's all done in Windows.. or even worse on a Mac!

Re:I wonder about man hour figures...

[bmajik]

The office file formats have been stable for several releases.

One of the big changes I appreciated from excel was the expansion of the 65k row limit to now 2^20 allowable rows. That required a file format change. But that happened several releases ago.

Visual Studio generally supports n+1 version round tripping, e.g. VS 2013 will round trip VS 2012 project files and assets in most cases.. so that mixed organizations of VS 2012 and VS 2013 can work together...

The Office Ribbon UI was created because the Office UI needed a reset. The tool-strip idea was appropriate back when Win32 was created... in the early 1990s. A fast computer then ran at 33mhz, and a high resolution display was 1024x768. Touch computing was a niche.

Office has had 20 years of adding features since then. Features that few could use because they couldn't find them, buried in menus and tool strips and everywhere else. Display DPI has changed. Touch computing is pervasive

The UI needed to change. It did. Most people who don't have an automatic rejection of any change prefer the new UI.

Most office documents are now editable on the web and on the phone. That's kind of a Big Deal.

Now. I think we don't need to look very hard at Slashdot to see that, even if you think MS is making unneeded changes for dubious reasons, they're certainly not the only guilty party. How many Slashdot stories have we read of people who are furious about systemd? How many stories about all of the UI changes in Ubuntu?

There are people who claim that these changes are necessary, but there are also a convincing and vocal contingent who claim they are bad change for bad change's sake.

I learned unix and Linux systems more than 20 years ago, so when I see things like systemd or replacing X11, I just shake my head because I am perfectly happy with the existing systems and do not want to re-invest the time to learn different ones.

Microsoft is by no means unique in forcing change to established patterns and systems.

Re:I wonder about man hour figures...

[Anonymous Coward]

And even more fun, on Japanese and Korean locales, it renders as the yen sign (¥) or the won sign (). Yes, even in paths. C:¥Program Files¥SeaMonkey¥seamonkey.exe

People tend to get used to it, though.

Re:I wonder about man hour figures...

[UnknownSoldier]

You see, that's the beautiful thing about Linux -- if one company doesn't respect the freedom and spirit of the GPL we have options -- with Microsoft we don't. In the best case, other distributions on the desktop. In the worst case, even BSD on servers.

If some sys admin "sold" out to Red Hat and wonder why they don't have the same freedoms, they are the cause of the problem, not Red Hat for trying to take advantage of the situation.

Re:I wonder about man hour figures...

[budgenator]

The hardest part is training the support staff if they've been Windows-centric their whole careers. Somehow just reiterating that everything-is-a-file isn't enough, and many professionals struggle to understand UNIX-style paths.

People struggle to understand windows-style paths too.

Re:I wonder about man hour figures...

[Anonymous Coward]

Your dreasy sarcasm is as tired as your scraggly neckbeard. You should either shave your neckbeard to make your sarcasm fare better by comparison, or employ some other mechanism besides teenage sarcasm.

This may seem harsh, but I'm just trying to help you.

Re:I wonder about man hour figures...

[Dutch Gun]

Someone on the MS Office team (if I recall correctly) was once asked why Microsoft doesn't release a Word "lite" that stripped out a lot of the "unnecessary features", or "bloat", as you call it. As it turns out, it's very hard to pin down what features should actually be stripped from a "lite" version, because everyone has their own favorite features. Beyond the primary features that nearly everyone uses, the use pattern for the rest of the features tends to be a very long, shallow tail.

You talk about 'advanced features that some people need have been added', but that's one of the reasons for Office's popularity - whatever people need it to do, there's a good chance it can do it. No one uses *all* of those advanced features, but nearly everyone uses *some* of them. That's entirely the point. People mistakenly call the features they don't happen to use "bloat", but your bloat is someone else's "critical feature".

A lot of modern software is like that. What you call bloat I call feature-rich. Go back to 80s or 90s software that was expensive, hard-to-use, and much more limited in capabilities? Once you take off the rose-colored glasses, I suspect you'd discover a whole lot of annoyances and limitations in software of that era that you completely forgot about.

Re:I wonder about man hour figures...

[Darinbob]

Ironically, many more secretaries and admins and basic office grunts understood this sort of stuff before Windows popped on the scene. There were perfectly capable of using IBM mainframes, VAX minicomputers, doing all the work on a local TTY, and managing files through the command line. Why then today are they incapable of learning this stuff? Have humans devolved?

Re:I wonder about man hour figures...

[CmdrTamale]

Perhaps Microsoft has a patent on this new technology?

          Amazon has a provisional patent for this in the pipeline I hear.

And Oracle has several of the copyrights.
--
How many copyrights could a copywriter write if a copywriter could write rites?

Re: I wonder about man hour figures...

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who manages large scale Linux and Windows infrastructure, I can safely say that Linux is much easier overall. Puppet is scalable and is much easier to document then group policy objects, plus you can easily add version control to your Puppet repository via Git or whatever takes your fancy. The other big issue I have with Windows is application deployment - applications generally need to root themselves into the registry and all manner of places and many vendors supply an obscure pile of binary installers and weird scripts that are a right pig to wrap up and centrally deploy properly. Package management for applications in Linux for is far easier and smoother - try creating and then deploying a Deb package vs an MSI for example.

Re:I wonder about man hour figures...

[tibit]

It's not like an RHEL system will magically stop working because the licensing is messed up. Updates from RHEL servers will be unavailable for the time being and that's it.

Re:I wonder about man hour figures...

[Peter Simpson]

The Office Ribbon UI was created because the Office UI needed a reset.

A "reset"? I was doing just fine with the old menus. I have no problem with a "reset" if that's what you want. But I'm more efficient when I use the UI I'm used to. So at least, give me the option of keeping the old UI. You can even make the new UI the default. Just leave me a way to use the one I'm used to.

The UI needed to change. It did. Most people who don't have an automatic rejection of any change prefer the new UI.

I have yet to meet one person who prefers the ribbon over the old menu system. Maybe they exist, but I haven't met them yet. If you want to talk about UIs that need to change, I present: Visio. Purchased by Microsoft from Visio and, to this date, the UI is quirky and out of step with the other Office products. And that's putting it kindly.

Office has had 20 years of adding features since then. Features that few could use because they couldn't find them, buried in menus and tool strips and everywhere else

I'm sorry -- is this a plus or a minus, or just a clear indication that Microsoft's Office development team has been badly in need of a competent UI designer for over 20 years?

Most office documents are now editable on the web and on the phone. That's kind of a Big Deal.

Maybe for you. I edit my documents on a wide screen laptop. I'll grant you that being able to share documents is a big deal, but you will never convince me that being able to edit documents on your phone is a major leap forward in anything but frustration and eyestrain.

money saving? Nice!

[Anonymous Coward]

good for them lets hope it actually saves money in the long run and microsoft isnt going to pump money bonuses in other city councils.

if microsoft doenst pump money into council's then maybe other city's will switch over to a cheaper system.

Re:money saving? Nice!

[kenh]

Yeah, why would MS try and retain clients? They'll just let cities drift off into "roll your own" land and watch their business revenue shrink...

Governments need the source code

[bigpat]

At this point I am surprised that any government would trust a compiled OS that they can't effectively scan for any ease dropping code, intentional back doors or just vulnerabilities. Sure they can monitor the network to see if it is doing something obvious, but with a compiled OS it could be wide open to be compromised with either a back door or some code to send data off someplace and you would likely never know it. At least with Linux you can maintain your own verified version based on the source code. Of course even with wide open source code you get security issues... like openssl. But without the source code there could be a thousand of those types of vulnerabilities and only insiders at Microsoft could know about them. Maybe for most people it is a non-issue, but for governments and large corporations that level of pants around the ankles situation can have very big implications to national security and the economy.

Re:Governments need the source code

[L4t3r4lu5]

Large organisations and governments typically do have access to the source code, under heavily restrictive NDAs.

You don't get to put Windows on a warship without the DoD being able to see what it does.

Re:Governments need the source code

[bigpat]

And at this point you have to ask whether the NSA took a look at the code for the Pentagon and found some holes and diligently reported them back to Microsoft to get them fixed... or did they certify the code figuring it was better to know about the vulnerabilities and be able to exploit them than to try and fix them? I think the track record here is that relying on the NSA to certify windows at least in some way has been an exercise in balancing an inherent conflict of interest. And in terms of institutional self interest it seems that the NSA is going to be more on the hook for what they can find out through surveillance than what kind of compromises of US computers there are on their watch. That combined with monthly patches creates a moving target that is probably well beyond the capabilities of even hundreds of dedicated people to adequately keep up with. In that environment finding a few holes out of perhaps many and exploiting them, at least for some period of time before reporting them, is clearly in the NSA's institutional best interest even if that means leaving the DOD and Industry more vulnerable. Even the latest directive from the Obama administration left that door wide open... saying that the NSA only had to report security vulnerabilities if they couldn't be used in the interest of national security... so basically publicly confirming the NSA policy of finding vulnerabilities and not reporting them because they can use them for their own surveillance activities.

Re:Governments need the source code

[Anonymous Coward]

That's still not the same, unless they spend billions hiring people to look through the code. Each organization could not share findings with each other, so every one has to start from scratch. In addition, you can't really be sure the code is correct, as what is the likelihood of the organizations being able to compile from the source they were given. Having the source code is meaningless with a closed source product.

Re:Governments need the source code

[PPH]

"have access to" or "can independantly build new systeml from source"?

I wouldn't trust Microsoft to provide the complete or even correct source, NDA or not.

Re:Governments need the source code

[schlachter]

You don't get to put Windows on a warship without the DoD being able to see what it does.

Actually, you don't get to put Windows on a warship, period.

They're all running Linux/Unix/Custom OS

Re:Governments need the source code

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't you hear?

The navy is replacing that "Windows for Warships" with Linux.

They need a system that won't make the ship dead in the water and have to be towed back to port.

Re:Governments need the source code

[kenh]

You imagine governments are staffed with computer professionals capable and motivated to worry about their OS being compiled by the Mfg.?

At what level of government do you imagine would be performing code reviews and building their own OS images? Federal? State? County? Municipal? Here's a better idea, keep government worker desktops off the Internet, then it doesn't really matter how vulnerable a desktop OS is if there is an air-gap between it and the internet.

Re:Governments need the source code

[kenh]

I always laugh at those that say we need to "read the source code" - with apologies to Rep. Conyers.

Re:Governments need the source code

[bigpat]

The US government is actually staffed by tens of thousands of computer professionals. The problem is that only a select few get to analyze the Windows source code for problems.

Here is an even better idea. Just give people iPads or android tablets and forget about desktop OSes altogether unless you are running specialized software for engineering or something specific. In which case you can probably run Linux or Macs.

Re:Governments need the source code

[Threni]

How is moving from Windows to a Mac an improvement?

Re:Governments need the source code

[kamapuaa]

Linux takes contributions from a basically anonymous group of international contributors. It seems to me extremely naive to believe that there are no intentional backdoors built into Linux by every single spy agency,

Re:Governments need the source code

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't get to put Windows on a warship without the DoD being able to see what it does.

Oh, Dear God!!! I work for DoD. It's a R&D type job. As a computer jockey doing simulations nothing I do ever puts lives on the line; at least, not until something I simulate is fieldable. Thankfully, most of my working day I use linux. But what really makes me shudder is the thought that Windows may be installed on warships and other frontline hardware where lives are at stake. I can just see it now: a missle is incoming, projected to reach you (the 'target') in less than a minute when suddenly the windows machines for command and control all say in unison, "Must reboot now to install upgrades." NoooooOOOOooooo!!!

Re:Governments need the source code

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't you hear?

The navy is replacing that "Windows for Warships" with Linux.

They need a system that won't make the ship dead in the water and have to be towed back to port.

BSOD, must reboot now.

Re:Governments need the source code

[Steve Hamlin]

"Actually, you don't get to put Windows on a warship, period."

While it was only a test bed, the USS Yorktown (USN cruiser) was using Windows NT in a test capacity and in 1997 a divide-by-zero error took down the integrated control, navigation, engine and machinery monitoring systems.

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

Re:Governments need the source code

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux takes contributions from a basically anonymous group of international contributors. It seems to me extremely naive to believe that there are no intentional backdoors built into Linux by every single spy agency,

If you know of any, please point them out. I'm sure every one of us would be very interested.

Re:Governments need the source code

[Barsteward]

that is an embarrassing post, probably would be best for you to have just thought it and not posted it.

Re:Governments need the source code

[bigpat]

Linux takes contributions from a basically anonymous group of international contributors. It seems to me extremely naive to believe that there are no intentional backdoors built into Linux by every single spy agency,

It would be extremely naive to believe they don't try. And if they are subtle enough, like the openssl issue these back doors can even skirt by for a while... not saying that openssl was intentional. The issue is that it would be extremely naive to think that both closed source and open source are not subject to the same issues of intentional back doors and coding mistakes.

The difference is that with the whole world able to view the source code there is a much greater chance of discovering these issues in open source software versus a select few being privy to the source code of windows where there could be any number of purposeful back doors and software flaws. So there are two problems. One that there aren't enough eyeballs on the code. And two, the people that do get to look at the code might be in on the backdoors or otherwise might have an incentive to keep the problems to themselves.

Re:Governments need the source code

[bigpat]

True not much of an improvement. Although major components of OS X are made available as open source, so I would say there is some improvement from that perspective.

Re:Governments need the source code

[Anonymous Coward]

Option 3: In high security applications, the NSA secretly requested a special version of windows with the various items fixed; or rather fixed it themselves and compiled their own.

Then you get the best of both worlds.

Re:Governments need the source code

[kamapuaa]

Is that really a model for security? Heartbleed is a huge vulnerability that was inserted, by accident, more than two years ago, without getting fixed. The code was written by somebody way better at coding than me. It was reviewed by somebody way better at coding than me. Surely it was looked over by a number of people way better at coding than me.

Is it really hard to believe that an intentional backdoor by an expert could get past this review process? A review process that couldn't even stop an accidental buffer over-read?

At the very least, the CIA/KGB/Pinkerton Detective Agency must have looked at Heartbleed lasting in the wild for more than two years and thought "very interesting - we can do that, but even better."

Re:Governments need the source code

[kamapuaa]

Are you saying there's no vulnerabilities in Linux? Or that nobody would ever intentionally put a vulnerability in Linux? Or just being mean?

Re:Governments need the source code

[Anonymous Coward]

doubtful....

if usable code was made available to any third party, you would certainly expect that in this day and age, that code would have been freed (read: leaked out to the internet).

Re:Governments need the source code

[Anonymous Coward]

So you think that a government would have the ability to read and understand the bazillion lines of code that make up Windows?

Re:Governments need the source code

[Barsteward]

no, its this statements that marks you out as "not thought it through" or doesn't understand open source - " It seems to me extremely naive to believe that there are no intentional backdoors built into Linux by every single spy agency"

Re:Governments need the source code

[RandomSkratch]

I would think that putting windows on a warship would seriously compromise the hull integrity...

Portholes maybe... but Windows?

Re:Governments need the source code

[Anonymous Coward]

And the error had nothing to do with Windows, and was actually related to control software that wasn't by Microsoft.

Re:Governments need the source code

[Anonymous Coward]

He is saying you are a dumbfuck. Very few people have commit access to the official source repo. Very few, being you can probably count them on one hand.

Dumbfuck

GNU/Linux

[2ms]

Ok, I find RMS to be completely annoying, but I find myself being even more annoyed, at this point, by people calling GNU/Linux Linux. Linux is a kernel. Why do people continue to call GNU/Linux (i.e. the whole system) by the name of the kernel it uses? To me it's like if you were to call the Tesla Model S "Goodyear" or something because it had Goodyear tires. Would seriously like a person or two to explain what exactly the reasoning behind this phenomenon is, if indeed there is any.

Re:GNU/Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Would seriously like a person or two to explain what exactly the reasoning behind this phenomenon is, if indeed there is any.

It's lack of pedantry.

Re:GNU/Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do we call a refrigerator a "fridge"? It's just easier.

Re:GNU/Linux

[2ms]

If GNU/Linux is too detailed, then why don't people just call it GNU then?

Re:GNU/Linux

[JaredOfEuropa]

A few reasons:
1) People prefer easy to use names. "GNU/Linux" is an awkward mouthful, "Linux" is a nice simple name. For the same reason people refer to the "Tesla Model S" as "Model S", or simply a "Tesla", since the S is the more common model here.
2) "Linux" has been the most commonly used name from day 1, and that's not going to change, for the same reason that the public will continue to take "hacker" to mean someone who breaks into computer systems.

Re:GNU/Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't say verbosity. I said pedantry. Average Joe just doesn't give a fuck.

Re:GNU/Linux

[L4t3r4lu5]

For the same reason you ride an escalator up and down floor levels, you take aspirin as a pain killer, and you store your hot beverage in a thermos.

It's not a genericised trademark, per se, but the term "Linux" is now used to describe the whole, incorrect or not.

Re:GNU/Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

What non-GNU Linuxes are there?[*] People also say a M3 when they should say a BMW M3 or a Testarossa when they should mention that it's a Ferrari or a MacBook Pro when they should say it's an Apple MacBook Pro. Do you care about those? Until other non-GNU ones are common and also called Linux, there's no reason to spend the extra-time saying "GNU/". Everyone knows who makes the iPads... and even if they don't it doesn't change anything.

[*] Google's Android is one of them, but no one calls it just Linux. A few other options in embedded systems, but no one refers to them as Linux either.

Re:GNU/Linux

[PReDiToR]

Because GNU's Not Unix, but Linux is very like Unix.

Re:GNU/Linux

[krashnburn200]

Linux is easier to say, and everyone already knows what I mean when when I say it,
even you,
even RMS,
or else you would not be telling everyone what we really mean is GNU/Linux.
It's here it works get used to it.

At the same time I also understand your frustration with the fast and loose nature of our language usage
Like so many things it's just human nature, you want to fix something help fix humans, after all someone is going to be releasing the first patches for the human genome soon,

I for one hope it's open source....

Re:GNU/Linux

[Tx]

I think you're just trolling. Seriously? You're annoyed that common usage of a term has diverged from its original correct usage? Better rip out about 90% of your dictionary and burn it then. So operating systems using the Linux kernel have become known as Linux in common parlance; how infuriating. I tell you, I am completely fascinated to know what other earth-threatening evils are giving you ulcers right now.

Re: GNU/Linux

[samkass]

I think you have it reversed. The OS was originally called "Linux", and it included a kernel, GNU user space tools, MIT's X-windows system, some BSD api's, and later Apache web servers, etc. There was a Linux kernel, but also an entire Linux distro.

It was only years later that RMS tried to retroactively name someone else's project with his organization's name, and that's one reason there's resistance there. Now the Linux kernel has "kernel" dropped and people try to say "Linux" only refers to that part. Ok, whatever. It's just RMS politics. People can name their distro whatever they want. But don't pretend GNU/Linux is a more "correct" way to refer to anything-- it's just a brand.

Re:GNU/Linux

[DrXym]

Because Linux is the name of the kernel and also the name used to call distributions of Linux (the kernel). Context normally makes it clear what the word means and if necessary it is appropriately qualified. Whereas GNU/Linux is just sour grapes.

Re:GNU/Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh?

Most people DO call the Tesla Model S "Goodyear"

Re:GNU/Linux

[Kjella]

Linux is a kernel. Why do people continue to call GNU/Linux (i.e. the whole system) To me it's like if you were to call the Tesla Model S "Goodyear" or something because it had Goodyear tires.

Well if you're going for a car analogy then Linux is obviously the engine, not the tires so you're painfully trying to avoid the flaws in your own argument. And GNU is not the rest, not for the user. What they see is the chassis and the interior. which might be called KDE or GNOME or XFCE. GNU is more like the gearbox, suspension and steering column - you wouldn't want to try to drive without them but to most people they're just hidden middleware. And it's what everybody has and uses, would you say "I've bought myself a new car with windshield wipers"? What's the point? Every normal car has them so it's totally redundant.

Re:GNU/Linux

[kenh]

Because Linus referred to it as Linux when he released his kernel, and when other people added a large number of GNU utilities to that kernel and called it an OS they simply perpetuated the name.

Any thoughts of a greater "conspiracy" is a wasted effort - maybe if RMS had actually focused on writing his own kernel instead of taking a decade to decide on the "proper" kernel his suite of software utilities and another decade to write the kernel then it would be regarded as something more than a set of tools added to Linus's OS.

Re:GNU/Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

GNU/linux? Why? Everyone's whining about the desktop. Don't you mean KDE/linux? Or Gnome/linux? GNU supports the command-line. No one uees the command-line.
In 1986 I was working on some F-code for a Sparc that was just delivered. I noticed some goofy results from some of the shell commands. I mentioned it to an old-timer'. "Oh, that machine hasn't had GNU installed on it yet." That's the first time I heard of GNU. It was standard practice to put it on Solaris and HPUX and the SG machines. But no one called it GNU/Solaris or GNU/HPUX. It was just taken for granted that GNU was on there. Same thing at another UNIX shop I worked at.
Most linux users today are just MS fanboys in disguise. They got to have their little trash cans and task bars and folder icons so they can still play Windows. None of them give a hoot about GNU tools. So give it up. Quit pretending that you have some 'deep insight' into a system you don't really make use of.

Re:GNU/Linux

[TheP4st]

but I find myself being even more annoyed, at this point, by people calling GNU/Linux Linux... Linux is a kernel. Why do people continue to call GNU/Linux (i.e. the whole system) by the name of the kernel it uses? Would seriously like a person or two to explain what exactly the reasoning behind this phenomenon is, if indeed there is any.

I have two theories.
1. It is convenient and only annoy a tiny minority.
2. It is a sinister conspiracy with you as the target of the clandestine organization THEY (affiliated with Illuminati, Scientology, Bert and Ernie) with the single purpose of annoying you on a every time you visit /.

Re:GNU/Linux

[TheP4st]

And the annoying phrasing of my last sentence was a sinister plan by my dog to annoy all the grammar nazis out there by distracting me while editing.

Re:GNU/Linux

[UnknownSoldier]

And you still call your TV "Television", your car "Automobile" or "horseless carriage", your ATM "Automated Teller Machine", Fax "Facsimile", Kleenex "Tissue", Xerox "photocopy", etc. right?

People abbreviate things over time. It is efficiency or an optimization in time spent communicating: long words slowly become shorter words; usually a few syllables for convenience's sake.

Re:GNU/Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

This should have gotten 5.

Re:GNU/Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

"Would seriously like a person or two to explain what exactly the reasoning behind this phenomenon is, if indeed there is any"

People who dont have OCD can do things like this without having it bother them. Thats why people who do have OCD - like yourself obviously - are handicapped.

Re:GNU/Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Glinux sounds pretty cool and just as easy to say... LOL
It can have Glinda the Good Witch as its mascot...

Re:GNU/Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux was actually going to call it freex. It was the maintainer of the server the first public version was posted to that named it Linux.

Re:GNU/Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

*Linus

Use Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Any city of any size gets it's tech support from somewhere, whether they have "a man" or not. The choice is do you get that tech support from Redmond, or do you pay someone in your own city to do it?

Since no one reads the story - MS was cheaper!

[kenh]

As the study progressed, two main options emerged as choices for the council: remaining with a purely Microsoft solution, which would involve upgrading existing Windows NT and 2000 systems to XP; and moving to a purely Linux and open source alternative. “If you lay more emphasis on the monetary side, the pure Microsoft alternative would have won, or if you lay the emphasis on the strategic side, the open source alternative was better.

This was not a decision based on cost, it was based on functionality - being able to invest in their platform and implement exactly what they wanted was worth the additional expense, in large part because they committed to investing the money that would have gone towards US license fees into the local economy.

Re:Since no one reads the story - MS was cheaper!

[buchner.johannes]

Keep reading to the end ...

Re:Since no one reads the story - MS was cheaper!

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently you didn't read it either.
2nd paragraph of the section "Money talks" says
"Yes, it has, depending on the calculation. We did a calculation and we made it publicly available on our information system for the city council. We have the exact same parameters for staying with Windows as with the migration to the Linux platform. Based on those parameters, Linux has saved us €10m.”

Re:Since no one reads the story - MS was cheaper!

[StormReaver]

Also keep in mind that Ballmer flew to Germany to personally offer HUGE discounts if Munich stayed with Windows. Microsoft was only cheaper because Microsoft was willing to do just about anything to prevent a high profile switch to Linux.

And the Microsoft experience is so bad that even that wasn't enough to sway Munich. And I wholeheartedly agree.

Not only that...

[NapalmV]

... but they're also taking care of the citizens screwed by the XP-end-of-life:

http://www.itnews.com.au/News/...

.

Re:Not only that...

[DogDude]

... but they're also taking care of the citizens screwed by the XP-end-of-life:

"Screwed" because MS only supported their OS for 13 years? Riiiight. Which Linux company is going to maintain a version of their OS (for free) for 13 years? Hell, which Linux company is going to maintain a version of their OS (for free) for 3 years?

That's one of the main reasons my company won't consider Linux on the desktop.

Re:Not only that...

[MeistaDieb]

you can't mix up private use with business use. If you use Debian, Kubuntu, CentOS etc you will always have a maintained OS for years. You don't have to pay for updates if you use them on your private computer. In business you don't want to update your users desktop that often. People don't like changes ;-) But you don't have to consider Linux on the Desktop, stay with MS, just change your server OS. People won't remark it and you will get much more possibilites in using different software =) Or just expand your MS environment with OpenSource software. There are millions of possibilities to make a admins life easier :-D

Re:Not only that...

[Anonymous Coward]

Helping them with migration?

Re:Not only that...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Screwed" because MS only supported their OS for 13 years? Riiiight.

They still sold brand new Windows XP licenses till Win 7 was ready in order to get a foothold into the netbook/subnotebook market and that was not full 4 years ago (Debian LTS is 5 years with free upgrades). The 13 years only counts if you had it from day one, in which case the pain of pre service pack 1 Windows XP would have screwed you at the beginning instead of the end.

Re:Not only that...

[NapalmV]

Screwed because MS abandoned it without offering any sensible upgrade path. Try to migrate an XP machine to Windows 8 and let us know how it went.

Re:Not only that...

[mikechant]

"Screwed" because MS only supported their OS for 13 years?
But also sold it on some new machines as recently as 4 years ago...

Hell, which Linux company is going to maintain a version of their OS (for free) for 3 years?

Err...several, for free, for considerably more than 3 years.

Common examples:
Ubuntu LTS: Now 5 years (increased from 3 years at V12.04)
CentOS: Pretty much follows Red Hat. e.g CentOS V6 maintained for 9 years (2011-2020).
Given that XP was atypical with 13 years support and Win7 gets 11 years (2009-2020), CentOS is very much in the same ballpark.

But wait: CentOS 6 will get 9 years of *full* support (including new hardware support every 6 months and new features mainly every 2 years). Win7 only gets 6 years full support and 5 years extended (security updates only).
I'd say that's a draw between CentOS 6 and Windows 7.

Re:Not only that...

[PRMan]

You can easily have a 13-year-old machine running on modern Linux. This isn't possible on Windows.

Re:Not only that...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is only feasible if all your software requirement do not need or rather, exist under linux. Even some web base platform can require so software like silverlight and if it's not there, well screw it.
And running just the OSis a thing vs using a complete set of bundled software is another. You cannot compare, i would like to see what they are using on those machines.

Re:Not only that...

[Anonymous Coward]

As opposed to the _awesome_ upgrade path from Linix ca. 2001 to a modern Linux release, right? Dipshit.

You neckbeards, man you crack me up.

Re:Not only that...

[guruevi]

What's so difficult about updating a 2001 Linux to a more modern system? If you've kept up to date on the software updates the system will have updated throughout the years. It's not hard.

Re:Not only that...

[Darinbob]

You choose software that does not require obscure and buggy components. You can survive quite well in all departments of the modern corporate world without ever using silverlight. If you find a new product that requires it then you don't buy that product and choose an alternative. If there is no alternative then you just cancel whatever goofy project wanted it.

Re:Not only that...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes an AD2002 PC can run happily with a up to date Linux distro with Light Desktop (Lubuntu ,Xubuntu),but it is recommended to beef-up RAM for these 32 bit machines preferably up to the maximum .
I use an AMD Athlon ,1GHz PC with 1GB RAM running it with Lubuntu 14.04.

Re:Not only that...

[jp10558]

Hell, which Linux company is going to maintain a version of their OS (for free) for 3 years?
Red Hat maintains RHEL for 10 years. As CENTOS is now part of RHEL, I expect Red Hat is maintaining it for the same time. Scientific Linux is a third party rebuild of RHEL that also has a 10 year support cycle.

Re:Not only that...

[EmptyHead]

As opposed to the _awesome_ upgrade path from Linix ca. 2001 to a modern Linux release, right? Dipshit.

You neckbeards, man you crack me up.

Things tend to be pretty modular or easy to convert in the Linux realm. Aside from dependencies such as libc, migrating an app or configuration files for a service is as simple as a copy. Big things, with a tar command and a quick FTP transfer. Got me through lots of sytem migrations for Y2K including Linux, AIX (additionally, MKSYSB rocks for migrations across hardware platforms), HP-UX, Xenix and a few others.

MS stuff wasn't quite so easy to migrate. Ferreting out all the little places apps dump their garbage is a mess.

DOS was nice, things were contained in one directory, including all configuration files, etc. MS killed that by chaining command.com to win.com in 1994's Win95. Check out offset 10BB0 in the original Win95 command.com, change win to ver in a hex editor!

confirmed: Linux a communist plot

[Trepidity]

angry ... left political party ... politicians backed the idea of the city council switching to Linux

There was also transition to Linux and... back

[Kartu]

Open Source Advocates Angry at German Gov't Decision
May 13, 2011

The German Foreign Office first started using Linux as a server platform in 2001 before making Linux and open source software their default desktop choice in 2005. Most observers thought the move a success. However, the government will now transition back to Windows XP, to be followed by Windows 7, also dropping OpenOffice and Thunderbird in favor of MS Office and Outlook.

http://www.pcworld.com/article...

Re:There was also transition to Linux and... back

[Anonymous Coward]

The NSA threatened to bill the BND for the additional cost it would have taken to compromise, download and convert Angela Merckel's private documents from her computer.

Re:There was also transition to Linux and... back

[higuita]

They where using ancient versions of thunderbird and openoffice because of internal rules that didn't allowed upgrades... by doing this, of course any interoperability problem would get worst each year. They even report that updating most software would solve most problems...

So it was not a open source problem directly, but a internal planning and rules that caused the problems. I'm just guessing, but i suspect that the one that made the "no updates" rule didn't knew anything about computers or was already secretly preparing everything to cause problems and propose later a migration.

Re:There was also transition to Linux and... back

[Darinbob]

Add the same stupid requirement to windows and you have the same problems. (though only partially, because the 15 year old version of Office is superior to the latest version, whereas the opposite is true with openoffice and thunderbird)

Re:There was also transition to Linux and... back

[Kartu]

Exchanging documents between OpenOffice and MsOffice is a major pain on the OO side, regardless of the distribution you take.
Regardless, my point was: it's old news, it didn't succeed.

Short-term costs...LONG TERM savings!

[Anonymous Coward]

You conveniently left out this part of the article:

the calculations were based on a five-year period, so they mostly covered migration costs (staff, technical support, retraining users etc.) rather than operational costs (buying new hardware, licence fees and so forth).

In the short term - they would have saved. However over the 10+ years since initial migration, they've saved and estimated 10 million Euros:

Today, over a decade down the line, has LiMux been a good idea in terms of finances? “Yes, it has, depending on the calculation. We did a calculation and we made it publicly available on our information system for the city council. We have the exact same parameters for staying with Windows as with the migration to the Linux platform. Based on those parameters, Linux has saved us €10m.”

  Here is an english article discussing that publicly released report. For the actual german report. see here

Re:Short-term costs...LONG TERM savings!

[Manfre]

I call bullshit on their training claims. Staff that used Windows at previous jobs or at home will have a lower training needs. They also assume that staff time is free and ignore any lost productivity or errors from their new OS and applications.

Re:Short-term costs...LONG TERM savings!

[Entropius]

Training people to use Linux is pretty simple unless they're dense. I've known quite a lot of nontechnical people who, when presented with LXDE or similar, go "oh, okay, this is pretty easy" and proceed to do all their shit just like they did before, except the slashes go the other way.

Re:Short-term costs...LONG TERM savings!

[Anonymous Coward]

I call bullshit on their training claims. Staff that used Windows at previous jobs or at home will have a lower training needs. They also assume that staff time is free and ignore any lost productivity or errors from their new OS and applications.

Doesn't take much to have users clicking on icons. Not like they need to know the deep things in Linux nor Windows. That what administrators are for and I'm sure the Administrators that did the migration already had the training (one would hope that is the case in both with Linux and Windows.)

Now, the real training might be what programs that are used by the users and who knows what that actually requires other than the people involved.

Re:Short-term costs...LONG TERM savings!

[RabidReindeer]

I call bullshit on their training claims. Staff that used Windows at previous jobs or at home will have a lower training needs. They also assume that staff time is free and ignore any lost productivity or errors from their new OS and applications.

Two Words:

Metro Desktop

Oh, you mean I'm supposed to learn to deal with this thing (and the Ribbon) for FREE?

Re:Short-term costs...LONG TERM savings!

[kenh]

When they decided, their best information AT THE TIME was that Linux was the more expensive, yet preferable option.

If they simply looked at cost (which they didn't) they would have gone with MS.

Hindsight is only available after the fact, I was commenting on the inputs they had to their original decision. That they would ultimately save money was, at best, a leap of faith when they committed to Linux over MS WinXP. They saw (and have since realized) many reasons to choose Linux and did.

Re:Short-term costs...LONG TERM savings!

[kenh]

Training people to use Linux is pretty simple unless they're dense.

Dense, no, they are government workers.

Re:Short-term costs...LONG TERM savings!

[westyvw]

I agree. I would go furthur. If your users are even aware there is a filesystem or locations for them to save work, you have a problem. Define workflow, manage it, and make it obvious what you expect them to do and why.

Re:Short-term costs...LONG TERM savings!

[AthanasiusKircher]

I call bullshit on their training claims. Staff that used Windows at previous jobs or at home will have a lower training needs.

Uh, how many training hours do you think were wasted converting users to the "ribbon" interface of Office 2007? Windows had a menu interface that worked, and admins could even customize shortcut menus on top if the workers needed specific access to common buttons, rather than digging through menus. But then there was a redesign... either you upgrade and retrain, or you deal with an inability to adequately use the new file formats when you need to communicate with others.

And that's just one significant redesign. When will Microsoft do another one?

In comparison, major Linux projects are often very stable in terms of interface. Even when a team decides to make major changes, it's usually possible for an admin to reconfigure the interface so it basically functions as before... and if there is any significant dissent about a new interface, there's generally a fork or alternative package to maintain the old one for quite some time.

And since source code is available, even if the Linux project goes in a different way, the government or company can easily pay coders to create a custom package or maintain the old one.

They also assume that staff time is free and ignore any lost productivity or errors from their new OS and applications.

Again, productivity is lost whenever Microsoft changes its interface on a whim. At least with Linux you often have a choice concerning major changes -- and if you don't, you have the source code to customize it yourself.

As for "staff time," well... if you're talking about staff for retraining, I've already discussed this problem is not unique to Linux -- and once the transition is made to Linux, open source ensures that companies can choose when and if they ever want to change something that would require retraining... rather than being forced to follow Microsoft's arbitrary upgrades or pay Microsoft to maintain compatibiility and patches on archaic versions without the option to do it yourself.

If by "staff time" you mean admin -- well, there's a reason why the vast majority of the world's servers run Linux. It's VERY stable on the server side, and though one may still encounter some annoying bugs on the desktop side, once the admins deal with the problems, they tend to stay fixed... unlike Microsoft patches and upgrades which sometimes fix one thing and break another, but because it's closed source, there's no way to avoid many of them in order to have a secure system.

Re:Short-term costs...LONG TERM savings!

[guruevi]

I call bullshit on the claim that you need to train people. I stick people in front of Mac/Linux systems ALL THE TIME because that's what we run and most scientific software runs on those platforms.

After a quick primer (if that's even necessary) on how to find the application they need (3 clicks or less), most people will find their way around and find it a lot easier than monkeying around with virtual machines or VisualStudio to compile something.

"It has saved money..."

[Assmasher]

I think they made a smart decision that keeps their money in their borders, but the "calculations" as the main proponent of the migration used are really bent towards Linux.

Just one example would be that he considered the cost and effort to retrain people from Windows XP to Linux and the cost and effort to train people to already using XP to Windows 7 would be equal.

That's ridiculous.

Again, it's a smart decision, but not because of saving money - but instead keeping the money circulating in your own economy. It may ultimately save money due to increased tax revenues but that's a tough one to figure.

Re:"It has saved money..."

[Anonymous Coward]

how is it ridiculus? for an enduser without admin rights (i.e. pretty much any and all governement workers) the differnces between windows and a linux gui are minimal, it shouldn't cost much in training either way

Re:"It has saved money..."

[BadDreamer]

That is correct. Generally training people used to XP to use Linux is much cheaper than training them to use Windows 7.

Re:"It has saved money..."

[Assmasher]

Having done this personally I have to point out that you're wrong. It is trivial to move people from XP to Windows 7. Moving them from XP to *nix was far more difficult. Did this about 7 years ago. Ironically, the people who had the most difficult time were the people who were most comfortable with a computer.

Re:"It has saved money..."

[BadDreamer]

Having done this personally I have to point out that you're wrong. It is trivial to move people from XP to Linux. Moving them to Windows 7 was far more difficult. Did this last year. Ironically, the people who had the most difficult time with Windows 7 were the people who were most comfortable with a computer.

Re:"It has saved money..."

[Assmasher]

Sure, I believe you :)

Re:"It has saved money..."

[BadDreamer]

Anecdotes are just that. Anecdotes. But most people who know office well do not work nearly as fast or efficient with the ribbon infested new versions. And if you had selected a UI closer to that of XP instead of whatever you picked things would have gone much smoother.

Re:"It has saved money..."

[Assmasher]

Sure, it's us that were incompetent. We didn't carefully evaluate our options because we weren't interested in saving money, we're secretly Micro$oft shills.

I guess personal anecdotes are less valuable that your hypotheticals and pure speculation...

Re:"It has saved money..."

[BadDreamer]

I'm sure you were careful. Most people trying for a switch like this are. But your results speak for themselves; careful or not, you did not have the required knowledge to make the transition to Linux easy for experienced users.

I've eased people into Linux in many roles and at multiple times since the last millenium. It's become a lot easier more recently. In the last few years it has become so easy that it's pretty much just pointing out a few differences and off they go. Quite interesting. 5-10 years ago it was harder, and before that nearly impossible.

You have personal anecdotes, I have personal anecdotes. That is what it is.

Re:"It has saved money..."

[Assmasher]

Sure we did, the only problem with your assumptions are that it was easier for them to transition from XP to Linux than it was for them to transition from XP to Vista. It wasn't.

The other problem with your assumptions is that you treat this problem like the only people who need transitioning are the office users, that's not the case in a real world migration.

The worst problems we had were with IT people who had to kludge all kinds of crap together to barely begin to approach what they were capable of doing with AD.

I'm sure you'll simply claim that they were stupid, or that they didn't get the proper help in moving away from Windows.

I'm sure that's your answer anytime someone finds it easier to move from one OS to the other and it doesn't result in a win for *nix.

I can simply denote the experiences I have actually had, moving from XP to Linux 7 years ago was VERY hard for IT people and for office users it was difficult as well. Moving from XP to Windows 7 about 4 years ago was trivial.

Personally, I've been triple booting OSX/Windows/OpenSUSE(now Mint) for years so I don't personally care one way or the other. They're all tools in the toolbox.

I have been enjoying (rather shamefully) IIS on WS2012 the past year though, otherwise I use CentOS/nginx when I can.

Re:"It has saved money..."

[BadDreamer]

You keep asserting I made assumptions. I did not. I performed this switch, multiple times. My answer is rooted in real world experience, just as yours is.

I'm sure that every time someone has a different experience than yours it must be wrong! ;)

Re:"It has saved money..."

[Assmasher]

...if you had selected a UI closer to that of XP instead of whatever you picked things would have gone much smoother...

Assumptions about OUR migration, and yes, you did.

I'm sure that every time someone has a different experience than yours it must be wrong!

Oh, the irony... ;)

Re:"It has saved money..."

[BadDreamer]

There is no assumption that it was easier for them to migrate to Linux than to Vista in that sentence. In fact, there was no mention of Vista anywhere at all in my comments. I've never performed a migration to Vista, only to various Linux variants, to Windows NT 4, Windows 2000, XP and Windows 7, so I most definitely have made no assumptions or conclusions about migration to Vista. It is nothing I have ever considered or paid any attention to, nor will I do so.

You seem quite confused. Perhaps you're mixing up what I wrote with what you think (or wish) I wrote.

Cost RTFA

[puddingebola]

1. Initial costs of staying with Microsoft's software were lower.
2. Customizable security was one of the pros of switching to Linux.
3. Initial costs were projected over 5 years.
4. 10 years have now past and the city made an assesment of cost. Conclusion was 10 mllion euros saved.
5. HP made there own analysis and concluded that the Linux conversion had cost the city 60 million Euros more. However, when contacted for their methodology and numbers for the analysis, they declined to provide the information.

fragmentation

[Anonymous Coward]

At least it is open for anyone to view and find any holes, the problem as has been stated on /. no one is really investigating the code for those holes. Everyone just keep adding to it, but there needs to be a better attempt at getting hosts of programmers/security researchers to view the code and try to find an exploit. The community is fragmented, and there really is unified effort to prevent openssl, but that can change from the openssl debacle hopeful everyone takes notice and does something.

I read the entire article, and the city knew the costs, and those costs were the initial costs of getting the entire thing up and running. Once it is there it pays for itself. I kind off figured you would get nothing but MS fanatics on /. bad mouthing the entire move. And now with Windows 8.X they would have to upgrade yet again.

This is a huge step for free software, but only if the programmers can make the OS's more user friendly to eliminate the need to hire linux specialists in order to train employees. Of course I am aware the switch started 10 years ago, so things have changed quite a bit for Linux.

The humorous part of the article is when Ballmer went to Munich to talk to the Mayor, and the mayor isn't good at English so his translator told him if he doesn't understand just reply "what else can you offer?". Ballmer being a total idiot admired the mayor for being a hardline negotiator.. ;)

Only One Thing to Say About This

[LifesABeach]

Bravo

nannyware and other excuses

[bzipitidoo]

Nearly everyone fights change. In the absence of good reasons, MS will desperately push out slanted, factually incorrect studies with huge omissions. And it works. Local governments gratefully seize on these as the excuses to keep their old Windows systems.

Software is a big excuse. For example, somehow, computers in the public library can't simply be connected to the Internet, no. They have to have nannyware. On further inquiry, it turns out that such software has to be approved, and approval is a lengthy process. Naturally, the approved nannyware is Windows only. (What nannyware is there for Linux?) They will wax poetic about how they don't want the town to be sued because Little Johnny saw something inappropriate on a computer at the library. Yes, Little Johnny's eyes are why they can't switch away from Windows, even in the back office in city hall.

The most likely way to get the local politicians and bureaucrats to move on something like that is to make them more afraid of not doing it. Repeat, over and over, that Windows is much less secure. Ask them if they'd enjoy being sued because Big John had his passwords intercepted on a library computer. Or sued because hackers broke into their database and got all their information about property owners in the town. Would they enjoy being another Target? Saving money also gets their attention, but not as much as fear.

You'd think that the military, an organization that is under constant attack, would want more security than Windows has. Maybe more than plain Linux, maybe SELinux, or OpenBSD. Or make their own, which they can afford to do. But no. The soldiers are mostly young men who grew up with PCs that had Windows installed. The officers will argue that it is also important that soldiers be able to do their jobs, and that's why they have to have Windows, because that's what they know. Train them on other OSes? Never! The officers aren't experts with computers either, and will demand contradictory and downright stupid things of any proposed replacement. They will also want to be in control, and try to keep everything secret, thus virtually guaranteeing that any project they launch will fail. Though they have the resources, their ability to make their own is poor. Another excuse in the US is the home grown argument. MS is American, Linux is not. Who knows what hacks some foreigners might have inserted in Linux, as if, unlike MS's code, they can't check the source themselves, and as if MS never outsources any software engineering work or hires foreigners.

Munich is where now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Located in the southeast of Germany, Munich is surrounded by nature being situated on the river Isar and north of the Bavarian Alps.

Re:Munich is where now?

[ssam]

Bavaria doesn't count as Germany?

Re:Munich is where now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends, any Bavarians present?
More seriously, compare GP to TFS and TFA.
Hint: east != west.

Re:Munich is where now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Some have asked for a wall.

TAANSTAFL.

[DerekLyons]

At least with Linux you can maintain your own verified version based on the source code.

At the cost of maintaining your own IT department or an ongoing contract with a third party.
 

But without the source code there could be a thousand of those types of vulnerabilities and only insiders at Microsoft could know about them.

Even with the source code, there could be vulnerabilities - that nobody knows about. Look how long Heartbleed existed before it was discovered more-or-less by happenstance.

TANSTAAFL.

Re:TAANSTAFL.

[bigpat]

At the cost of maintaining your own IT department or an ongoing contract with a third party.

Yes, because Windows just runs fine without IT departments? Talk to me when everyone is issued smartphones instead of computers and then you might have a point.

Re:TAANSTAFL.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well the cost is, you have a IT department that just trusts the closed source software, or you have a IT department which has access to the closed source, but cannot do anything about it, except report it to the corporation, or you have a IT department which has the open source, can either fix it themselves and/or report it to the project and share the change to other departments. Of course it depends on what you do, can you afford not to check the code?

Re:TAANSTAFL.

[DerekLyons]

If you don't grasp the difference between the sysadmins required to run a Windows based system, and the expertise needed to audit and maintain an open source based system... you're on the wrong site.

(Actually, scratch that, ignorant bias is practically a hallmark of Slashdot.)

Re: TAANSTAFL.

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference is that with Windows and closed source you accept ignorance and lack of accountability and lack of auditability as the status quo. You can do the same with open source too, the only difference is that with open source you and many more people have the option to look at what the code actually does.

Re:TAANSTAFL.

[Anonymous Coward]

Heartbleed was patch long before an exploit for it existed in the wild.

Open government ...

[Rambo Tribble]

... cannot be achieved without open standards, and open standards in computing can only be guaranteed through Open Source.

Munich is in South-East Germany

[dave420]

Munich is in South-East Germany. Google Maps isn't that hard to use, is it? :)

Re:Munich is in South-East Germany

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you for that, I was about to say the same thing.

For a moment, I wondered if I'd had a small stroke when I visited there, because I was pretty sure it was in the south east.

Excellent summary and information

[Anonymous Coward]

The PDF article is excellent. This should be distributed widely to show that Windows to GNU/Linux migrations are possible in large scale. I am glad finally a large organisation has accomplished this task to pave the way for future migrations. The City of Munich is way ahead in the game.

Geography 101

[yacc143]

Munich is in the southeast of Germany.

Re:Geography 101

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess if you are not in the former Communist Germany, you are considered in the "west" today. So Bavaria is "southwest" even though it is really "southeast".

Its Linux; completely and correctly.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the FSF owns the GNU and the associated Trademarks. So in order to actually call it GNU or GNU/Linux the distro developers would be infringing on the GNU trademark.

Furthermore the FSF demands that the copyright all code to committed to a GNU project be signed over to the FSF.

So I can only guess that RMS was trying to hijack Linux when he suggested that Linux be called GNU/Linux because of the FSF's failed attempts to create a kernel. If Linux called his system GNU/Linux the FSF would have had basis to actually try and acquire the copyright.

And lastly, GNU/Linux is incorrect because there's nothing in the GPL that requires GNU be included in the naming of the software, nor is there anything in the GPL that permits GNU to even be used in a product that allows the GNU trademark to actually be used by organizations other than the FSF.

So the only possible, name for the OS is Linux.

Also note there nothing prevents others from using the kernel for some other purpose and calling the OS whatever they want to say Android?

Re:Its Linux; completely and correctly.

[AvitarX]

10 years ago I thought GNU/Linux was silly, but now the largest Linux distribution doesn't really use the GNU part (Android), so it's a lot less silly to refer to traditional distros as GNU/Linux now.

What Linus works on is obviously Linux, I don't know anyone who thought he should all that GNU/Linux.

Get with the times

[Anonymous Coward]

"Windows is the only complete system able to run userland on so many different configurations."

You need to get with the times. You are thinking of linux from 2001. I run linux on 16 different system configurations. I get FAR better hardware support and stability from Fedora on those machines than I do from Windows 7 or Windows XP.

Normals don't need new hardware if old still works

[Anonymous Coward]

My laptop is almost ten years old. Still works fine for profit-making activities, although it no longer can play high-end video games or run Windows. I run Ubuntu on it, with OpenOffice and Firefox and gmail.

See, when you said "a given laptop has a five-year useful life" you identified yourself as an edge-case customer. You're not normal. Either you are brainwashed by closed-source memes, or you are a "gamer", or you are part of the 1% of the people using computers who actually need increased computing power with time in order to complete your work.

Government employees doing routine clerical work for a nation that's a thousand years old aren't going to need continual upgrades to do the same job they did last year... unless they run Windows, in which case they have to chase the expensive upgrade devil to remain supported. It's a no-brainer to use an OS that supports old hardware better, because that way you don't need to replace systems until they actually physically fail... which can be anywhere from 2 to 15 years with currently shipping kit.

Renting

[DarthVain]

A good analogy is renting vs buying a house.

Your mortgage payment might be a bit more than your rent, but at least you are making an investment rather than just giving your money away...

In the end you have a house as an asset.

Proof is in the pudding

[Anonymous Coward]

Shoddy journalism

But the proof is in the pudding: LiMux has been a
success, has shown ...

Oh dear. 'Proof of the pudding is in the eating'. :)

Retitle: "Local Socialists Create Make-Work Jobs"

[Anonymous Coward]

This is news?

All well and good until...

[PNutts]

Microsoft makes him an offer he can't refuse and he wakes up with a penguin head in his bed.

It's funny seeing you RUN, Forrest

[Anonymous Coward]

K. S. Kyosuke: You cringed & ran - You've been called out (nametossing) "forrest" from a fair challenge http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Re:It's funny seeing you RUN, Forrest

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, I keep seeing this, and finally figured out that the reference is to Forrest Gump running in that movie.
But doesn't Forrest run from Bullies in the film? So someone shouting "Run Forrest Run" would be indicating that whatever they're fleeing from are bullies.
Just my two cents.

I remember

[rainer_d]

When this was still in the decision-phase and the City of Munich solicited offers, Microsoft started to offer big discounts. As the "Linux-option" became more and more credible, the discounts got even bigger.
This, in turn, angered high-level officials because the realized, perhaps for the first time, how much they had overpaid for the last decade.

Re:I remember

[Darinbob]

Now if Microsoft had offered retroactive discounts plus a personal apology from Bill Gates, maybe they would have accepted.

& you getting booted off Ars 4 TIMES was price

[TrollingForHostFiles]

Roses are red,
Violets are blue.
You're not at all clever,
And we're all onto you.

BURMA SHAVE

Re:& you getting booted off Ars 4 TIMES was pr

[Anonymous Coward]

apk booted arseholetechnica in the ass so badly they were laughed off Windows IT Pro forums (jeremy reimer and jay little had their websites removed by their hosting providers). apk also corrected huge code blunders in their 'wares' in coolmon (the fool that wrote it didn't even know how to detect performance counters being on or off for pete's sake, & apk had to tell him that much). By the way Zontar the mindless, we know you are the sockpuppet master behind TrollingForHostsFiles http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

K. S. Kyosuke gets called out & ran

[Anonymous Coward]

From a fair challenge like a chickenshit blowhard http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

K.S. Kyosuke, looks like a failed

[Anonymous Coward]

Illogical offtopic ad hominem attack from you (that got your ass kicked) here http://slashdot.org/comments.p... and you ran from it like a scared little bitch.

Wrong slashes - it's history, man

[CmdrTamale]

In the 1960's Digital Equipment had a cross-platform command line file manager called PIP, Peripheral Interchange Program. See

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

On all their various operating systems, it was a uniform means to copy, delete, rename, print, list, etc. files.

PIP used slash to mark its command modifiers -- switches. Let the details of DEC's file naming schemes rest in peace. Please do not disturb them less they rise to haunt you as they do me even now.

When Gary Kildall created CP/M, he made a faithfull reproduction of DEC's PIP, with slashes. Remember, CP/M started off using 5.25 inch floppies, and a file system with no sub-directories. My wonderful Kaypro10 had a vast 10 megabyte hard drive that was subdivided as two 5 Megabyte drives, because CP/M coulldn't cope with that much space. CP/M is also to blame for the A/B floppy drives, and the magical vast, fast C/D hard drives, and the colon. Maybe not the colon -- DEC could have done that.

When Seattle Computer Products wrote a 16 bit version of CP/M, which MS bought to make MS/DOS, they included PIP. And the original MS programmers spent a lot of time using DEC systems while developing MS-BASIC.

So that might explain why MS did not use slash in file names. Why they chose backslash instead, I leave as an exercise for the reader.
--
Did you really read this far down the drunken misrememberings of an old programmer?

I knew it!

[sethradio]

Those european communists are at it again!

Cheaper Beer

[Anonymous Coward]

quote ====
Windows is cheaper in the short run because people already know how to use it, and more importantly, already know how to use MS-Office.
unquote=====

People familiar with M$-Office ,wont have any problems with Libre Office in which one , if wanted, can save documents in .doc documents (hence it is M$-Office compatible).

Libre Office (developed by the Open Document Foundation) is FREE .....as in beer.

Adoption of Libre Office does not require re-training of staff

Conclusion : Linux is the way to go .....for any enterprise or any public sector entity.
                                      And , as stated before many times : cheaper in the longer term !

A study PROJECTED that MS would be cheaper

[daboochmeister]

Agree completely with your comment that the decision wasn't based on cost - because they were deciding based on a study. The projections in that study indicated staying with Microsoft would be cheaper. But also important to note that that's not how it played out in the end - in addition to the expected benefits of re-investing in the local economy and establishing autonomous control, they also saved money.