The City of Munich Might Stick With Linux (fsfe.org)

Munich's "LiMux" project brought FOSS software to their city's IT administration -- until a vote last month on whether to abandon Linux and return to Windows. "Since this decision was reached, the majority of media have reported that a final call was made to halt LiMux and switch back to Microsoft software," reports the Free Software Foundation Europe. "This is, however, not an accurate representation of the outcome of the city council meeting." An anonymous reader quotes their report: The opposing parties were overruled, but the decision was amended such that the strategy document must specify which LiMux-applications will no longer be needed, the extent in which prior investments must be written off, and a rough calculation of the overall costs of the desired unification... [Only then will the city council make their final decision...] We succeeded thus far in forcing the mayor Dieter Reiter to postpone the final decision, and this was possible through the unwavering pressure created by joint efforts between The Document Foundation, KDE, OSBA, and the FSFE together with all the individuals who wrote to city council members and took the issue to the media.

Although the mandate is highly suggestive in that it suggests that the existing vendor-neutral approach is to be replaced with a proprietary solution, it leaves the door open... The new mandate buys us some time. And we will keep going.
Some politicians said they'd never received this much input from the public before, and the Free Software Foundation Europe says the city's issues were caused "from organizational problems, including lack of clear structures and responsibilities," which should not be attributed to the Linux operating system. "LiMux as such is still one of the best examples of how to create a vendor-neutral administration based on Free Software."

Comments

Global Politics

[phantomfive]

It's somewhat disturbing to me that they received pressure from so many groups around the world, who are really just hoping to promote OSS, not help the city of Munich run better.

On the other hand, they have a lobbyist from Microsoft who definitely isn't trying to help the city of Munich run better, so I guess it's fair. Must be overwhelming to be an administrator in Munich, though.

Re:Global Politics

[Kjella]

Unless....the reason for switching is because Microsoft bribed them in some way.

At the core is probably some TCO studies and they're not exactly indisputable facts. The licensing is just one tiny bit of it, then you try to estimate the productivity, maintenance and administration, difficulty of getting software and staff to operate it, training costs of users and so on. There's a lot of room for bias, particularly when it comes to omitting costs you would have with a different solution but won't be apparent until you get there. Also known as "the grass is greener on the other side", when you jump the fence you'll find the other side has its own set of disadvantages.

I'm sure Microsoft has made the pitch that Munich is actually losing money on their Linux adventure. And if you're not good at cutting through corporate BS and flawed assumptions - which most people aren't - it's not surprising that some policy makers believe them. Not to mention it probably involves a low-ball offer from Microsoft, which might actually be profitable in the short term until you're hooked on regular upgrade costs, software maintenance and so on in the future. But politicians often do things that look good in this election cycle. You don't have to imagine cloak-and-dagger operations.

Re:Global Politics

[execthis]

One thing that bothers me about the press coverage of this is that there's no discussion about why there was a call to stop using LiMux. I would like to know why - was it certain apps that underperformed? Certain features that didn't exist? What? Discussing this without describing actual details is worse than meaningless. People can suggest all kinds of things, but until anyone actually knows what the issues were, it's a moot point.