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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.
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.
linux is not for the general public, it is for the computer literate.
I've seen this: some high-powered MS rep chats up a boss, and *presto*:
Believe it or not there are other issues beyond "Libre/Open/WhateverOffice is just as good", because you see, big organizations such as municipalities use more software than just office, and many of them simply don't run or run well on Wine or such. And the alternatives to Excel for very complex spreadsheets leave a lot to be desired.
It's easy to think that money changed hands, but there may just be more to it than that.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
--I bet somebody's getting "compensated" in some way to bring this forward. Not only would they be giving up flexibility for a corporation-centric solution, but they would be giving up privacy as well. This site alone is full of Win10 articles detailing what a POS bit of spyware it is, masquerading as an OS. Not to mention random reboots due to upgrades.
--I can only hope this doesn't get approved, but in this world currently nothing is apparently safe or predictable.
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== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
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?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If the leader of the Munich Green Party is right and the city will lose "many millions of euros" if the change is implemented, it's too bad they don't use all that money for hiring an army of programmers. They could implement the changes they want in the FOSS themselves, and give something back to the community for the billions they will save over the next 100 years.
Linux is mainly for servers and embedded systems. On the desktop it's for people that enjoy tinkering with computers rather than getting work done.
There is no need to try to guess...it was widely reported the choice varies the two dominant political parties. It is just a matter of who is in the office. One has probably the hands greased by Microsoft, and the other party does not want to.
I mean, that's just an assumption about what Linux users do with their systems. Microsoft has great data on what their users use their systems for- timestamps of executable programs, all data typed by keyboard, which ads are most likely to lead to sales, etc. Until someone starts tracking everything done by Linux users in the same manner Microsoft tracks all Windows users, I'm afraid your assertion is likely to remain unproven...
Quote: The article also reports that Microsoft moved its German headquarters to Munich last year.
There you go - take our software and we'll move to Munich, that way you gain the income taxes of our workers regardless of how shitty our software is.
The issue here is that these decisions are made for political reasons, not technical ones.
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If you're in IT, linux is whatever you make it. If you have end-user desktop needs, you manipulate it in a way that's friendly to the end-user on the surface.
If you can't do that, then you have no business in IT in that particular organization.
"but windows and mac can work for everybody very easily"
Until they don't. And then Linux saved my sanity.
Don't step on the baby.
Confirmed basement dweller. None of these are problems if you buy Enterprise versions..
Right, so the solution to the problem of Microsoft software getting in the way and reducing productivity is to..... Give them more money?
Where I come from we have a word for software like that.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
You can also continue using LibreOffice and Thunderbird on... Windows! By saying they want to dump those applications, which have the highest compatibility, they're essentially saying that they want to buy in into the classic corporate culture (spend, spend, spend) with no true reason for it except marketing. Meanwhile the classic corporate culture is moving away from a Microsoft monoculture.
Kindof unpleasant experiencing a total system lockup when you are presenting to 200 scientists. People in the audience actually said: "I can't believe you attempted this using Libre!", "Why are you using Linux for this?"
But the funny thing is I've also seen, MANY TIMES, someone try to present only to pull up their laptop...
"Windows is updating. 3 of 97. Please do not turn off your computer." ...
I've seen presentations rescheduled, the order juggled, or a presentation even outright cancelled because there was no other time, and there was nothing the presenter could do ... his 45 minute allotement was the only spot, and there was NOTHING he could do now but wait until Windows decided he could use his laptop again.
And the audience? They don't generally berate you for using Windows... they just groan in sympathetic empathy; because that's interrupted nearly all of our workflows at some point... although perhaps not so catastrophically.
Not for the people being subjected to it.
Also since the final resting place of a good presentation is on an intranet to be viewed by a web browser it's a pretty stupid idea unless a web browser can also render it.
That sounds obvious but it doesn't apply as much as you would think.
A few years ago I was running practical class sessions for first year engineering students that included a segment on graphing a stress-strain curve of a specimen that the students had tested, and doing a few very simple calculations based on the data. At a staff meeting we decided to change to MS Excel to do the graphing because "they have already learned how to use Excel". It turned out that they hadn't. The prac class turned into a nightmare that always ran over time that ended up being a class on how to do line graphs in MS Excel.
So I and everyone in that meeting had the same preconception you do and we were wrong. Just because a lot of people have used MS Office to do things does not mean the fastest way to get them up to speed on a task you want them to do is to use MS Office to do it. That especially applies now with the ribbon making it much harder for people unfamiliar with a task to find the way to get MS Office to let them do it.
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.
How, by being tied to you for paid support?
I've run Linux farms, and won't go anywhere else for most application servers, because they can configured perfectly for the task at hand. But user machines need to be prioritised to UI, device compatibility, and familiarity and Linux is horrible by comparison.
I don't expect much agreement in here, but I've worked in several places that allow techy staff (non-MS techies) their own machines (laptop/desktop), and most of them choose Mac or Windows. I know of precisely zero non-techy staff that have even heard of Linux.
There is a reason that the Linux desktop has failed outside a few fringe experiments (like Munich) because it simply doesn't stack up.
I'll back that up. I've been part of a few "let's dump Microsoft" projects, and they all ultimately failed, because the driver behind them wasn't let's use the best product, it was an ideology that MS sucks so let's use something else instead regardless. That is a poor requirement for any solution.