The City Of Munich Now Wants To Abandon Linux And Switch Back to Windows (techrepublic.com)

"The prestigious FOSS project replacing the entire city's administration IT with FOSS based systems, is about to be cancelled and decommissioned," writes long-time Slashdot reader Qbertino. TechRepublic reports: Politicians at open-source champion Munich will next week vote on whether to abandon Linux and return to Windows by 2021. The city authority, which made headlines for ditching Windows, will discuss proposals to replace the Linux-based OS used across the council with a Windows 10-based client. If the city leaders back the proposition it would be a notable U-turn by the council, which spent years migrating about 15,000 staff from Windows to LiMux, a custom version of the Ubuntu desktop OS, and only completed the move in 2013...

The use of the open-source Thunderbird email client and LibreOffice suite across the council would also be phased out, in favor of using "market standard products" that offer the "highest possible compatibility" with external and internal software... The full council will vote on whether to back the plan next Wednesday. If all SPD and CSU councillors back the proposal put forward by their party officials, then this new proposal will pass, because the two parties hold the majority.
The leader of the Munich Green Party says the city will lose "many millions of euros" if the change is implemented. The article also reports that Microsoft moved its German headquarters to Munich last year.

Comments

Someone has been visited by an MS rep

[bradley13]

I've seen this: some high-powered MS rep chats up a boss, and *presto*:

MS is great
We've got to migrate

Put that to whatever jingle you want. Also: inspect bank accounts and campaign funds.

Note also that the study supporting the move back to WIndows was carried out by Accenture (some of us know them better by their old name, Andersen Consulting). Accenture was Microsoft's Alliance Partner of the Year in 2016, so I'm sure that they have a neutral, objective reason for recommending Microsoft software.

Monopoly Abuse

[Anonymous Coward]

The desire to switch to an office suite with the "highest possible compatibility" clearly indicates they've had trouble opening MS Office documents, and that people with MS Office have had trouble opening ODF documents.

To maintain their position in the market Microsoft make a deliberate attempt to make other software incompatible with their formats, and make their software incompatible with other formats. For example, they claim 100% technical comparability with the ODF formats, but if you open an ODS spreadsheet in Excel it strips out all the formulas, thus rendering the spreadsheet worthless.

This seems like intentional abuse of their market position to me.

They were mostly alone, continue to be alone

[Kjella]

I'm sure the founders of the LiMux project thought that by 2017 the YotLD had long since come and gone, that mainstream drivers and software would be there almost by default at near zero cost. The latest stats from StatCounter says that worldwide Linux has 1.55% desktop OS market share. Even if I pick Germany which is a very pro-Linux market it's 3.46%. From a local politician's view I can understand that it looks like an endless uphill battle, regardless of the actual merits of the OS there will be far more solutions for Windows. It's just a fact of running an obscure solution.

Re: I predict

[Type44Q]

Anal ventriloquism; impressive. I've switched over hundreds of my clients [who are casual users] from Winblows to Mint over the past six years or so and the less technically adept they are, the more likely they are to benefit.

Re: but but but

[james_gnz]

Could you name the features the contemporary (or any) MS-Office has that are important to the average secretary and that are missing in LibreOffice?

Ease of use.

Yup, and this essentially amounts to doing things the way that MS Office does them. The way you've already learnt to do things is the easy way, because doing things any other way first requires unlearning the way you've already learnt.

100% perfect compatability with MS products since 99% of the people you will be exchanging info and docs with use MSkype products.

Yup, and it's exceedingly difficult to get 100% compatibility with MS Office without being MS Office. (Whereas MS Office gets it for free, by definition.)

Help and assistance on the Web when you need to figure something out. Easy with MS products just Google what you are trying to do and get 100s to 1000s of sites showing examples. With the FOSS options. That only works about 10% of the time.

Yup, and there'd need to be a large user base to change this

Need I go on?

Nope, that about covers it.

FOSS products for productivity and the desktop do not yet belong on the desktop in a corporate or government environment. They are still at least another decade away from such compatability.

About a decade away from compatibility with today's MS products. In another decade, they'll still be about a decade away. It's a moving target.

Re: I predict

[Anonymous Coward]

I, too, like leading people to their deaths over a cliff while telling them "it's really cool over there!" I'm a Linux user, and there's no way they didn't have some issue with breakage or missing software they needed. Or they're a bunch of monkeys on typewriters.

TL;DR: you're full of it

Re:My business went Linux, then back to Windows

[terjeber]

However, expecting Microsoft Office docs to work 100% in OpenOffice or LibreOffice was your first mistake

Here's the thing. An enterprise has to be able to work with old documents (from well before you were born) and documents created in other enterprises and elsewhere. If OpenOffice or LibreOffice can not do this, then OO and LO are 100% useless. Period. Enterprises are not playing, they are trying to make money and not being able to properly use and exchange documents is vital.

This is only one problem here, and it's not really the fault of OO, LO or Linux. If Linux had ever made a dent in the desktop market place then the other players would have taken Linux into consideration. It never did. Never will.

Re:My business went Linux, then back to Windows

[terjeber]

The problem is as follows. You are a kid. You play with your home computer and use it as a toy. Most enterprises, though probably nowhere near as sophisticated as you are, are not. They have to use software that works. Most of the time, preferably all of the time, on the platform they chose. I work for a small/medium enterprise and we use, among a lot of others, the following apps that have no proper alternative on Linux:

• Photoshop - no real alternative on Linux, no, seriously. Not for work. Seriously, GiMP is not an alternative.
• Illustrator - again, no matter what they claim, no real alternative on Linux.
• Office - sorry, Libre/Open doesn't cut it. There is no way we can re-open 25 years worth of documents and convert them manually where the formatting fails in OO/LO. A large number of these documents are signed digitally and we are not allowed to change them at all.
• A number of industry-specific applications that we have no control over, but have to use.
• ... and lots more

Enterprises and municipalities have completely different requirements from their software, and Linux simply doesn't deliver.

Interestingly, Apple has a tiny, tiny market share on the desktop, and still a lot of applications are developed for OSX (MacOS now I guess). Didn't even happen for Linux. The fault lies 100% in the lap of Linus, and his choice way back when, is the main reason that Linux didn't, and never will, be a player on the desktop. Can you guess what it is? If not, consider what the main difference between Android and Linux are for an independent software developer. There is one huge one, and that's the main reason Linux thrives on mobile and never will on the desktop.