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Munich Council: To Hell With Linux, We're Going Full Windows in 2020 (theregister.co.uk)
The German city of Munich, which received much popularity back in the day when it first ditched Microsoft's services in favor of open-source software, has now agreed to stop using Linux and switch back to Windows. If the decision is ratified by the full council in two weeks, Windows 10 will start rolling out across the city in 2020. From a report: A coalition of Social Democrats and Conservatives on the committee voted for the Windows migration last week, Social Democrat councillor Anne Hubner told The Register. Munich rose to fame in the open-source world for deciding to use Linux and LibreOffice to make the city independent from the claws of Microsoft. But the plan was never fully realised -- mail servers, for instance, eventually wound up migrating to Microsoft Exchange -- and in February the city council formally voted to end Linux migration and go back to Microsoft. Hubner said the city has struggled with LiMux adoption. "Users were unhappy and software essential for the public sector is mostly only available for Windows," she said. She estimated about half of the 800 or so total programs needed don't run on Linux and "many others need a lot of effort and workarounds." Hubner added, "in the past 15 years, much of our efforts were put into becoming independent from Microsoft," including spending "a lot of money looking for workarounds" but "those efforts eventually failed." A full council vote on Windows 10 2020 migration is set for November 23, Hubner said. However, the Social Democrats and Conservatives have a majority in the council, and the outcome is expected to be the same as in committee.
Roll the clock back six months, didn't I read about this before?
I give it 10 days for another article to come out saying "No, we're staying with Linux."
I am always suspicious of things like this because someone is probably getting paid by Microsoft (nothing as obvious as cash, more like items of tangible value) to do the switch.
Also, first post? :)
Doesn't sound like installing Linux was the issue. It was converting all the applications they use to Linux. If all you do is email, write a document, and update a spreadsheet then sure, it is easy. But if you have hundreds of special written applications that use Windows languages and compilers -- not web sites -- that all need to be completely rewritten...that is hard.
Bad User. No biscuit!
No, someone like you would probably call them communists.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
She estimated about half of the 800 or so total programs needed don't run on Linux and "many others need a lot of effort and workarounds."
Different scenario but the small (about 50 ppl) co I work for looked into and rejected Linux for the same reasons.
What the Linux community needs to understand is people need real world problems solved. They do not need yet another reskin of the login screen, or Desktop Environment #933. They need Photoshop (NOT gimp!). They need their real accounting package (NOT gnucash). They need the applcations which drive real work in the real world, not some inferior hard to use and not very capable substitutes.
THIS is what holds Linux back on the desktop. People ask, "But will it run the software I need?" and the answer often comes up "No". You want to drive Linux adoption? Fix the real problems people have, rather than forking yet another distro or DE and things people don't need or care about. I know that's harder. I know it's not as "fun". But that's what is needed if you want us to use this thing.
You must be kidding. With everything moving to the cloud, the desktop OS becomes more irrelevant every year. You will start seeing other OS making inroads over Windows as this continues. This is more about some sales people bribing ("lobbying") the right people.
Save the Cloud thing, I've been hearing this for the past couple decades...
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Open Source software is free until you use it. There is a lot of "sweat equity" involved with adapting and deploying it. Doesn't mean you can't make it work, but you will pay for it one way or another.
WTH? E-mail is one of the easiest systems to NOT use any Windows-specific software with --- in fact, the more mature implementations of SMTP and IMAP servers run on Linux and much more robustly, than those pieces of shit called 'Exchange' and 'Outlook'.
Look next time just post: "I have no idea what I'm talking about". It would be easier on everyone.
Comparing IMAP/SMTP to an Outlook Exchange combination is like comparing chalk and a 5 course degustation de fromage. The two are so remotely different in capability and administration that it makes me wonder if you've ever administered an email server or have ever actually used outlook in a corporate environment.
Seriously.... 800 "Needed" Windows programs? WTF. I call BS.
And now you're showing just how little you know about the public sector.
It's interesting how much you can intuit about a company by how much microsoft they have running
Our company is successful, growing, progressive, and ethical. We use almost all Microsoft software. What's your point?
I don't respond to AC's.
And before I have to duck for cover, I'll have to say I favoured Munich move to FOSS, I used it as a case example advocating for similar moves (while also pointing out the errors, of course). I've been to Munich (Siemens Training OMC-S, great memories from Kunstpark-ost), and I love the city and its people.
If you are going from Closed source to open source, there are a few pitfalls to avoid.
First, for a project like Munich, the LAST thing you replace is the Desktop OS of Users. You first replace the apps. And DO NOT EVEN CONSIDER a rip and replace strategy.
You replace the apps it in waves, using your chosen crossplatform FOSS alternatives (I understand Munich did something along this lines).
And ALSO for each wave you have a SWAT/Crack team on the Helpdesk specificaly dedicated to help the users master that specific wave of the transition.
And ALSO adequate training for each and every wave to boot (and the training for each specific wave has to be done BEFORE the wave starts, and for Every employee)
Remember, for us techies, changing from IE11 to Firefox, or from word to Libreoffice writer may seem easy, but for a public servant who was trained as, say an administrator or lawyer, it may not come so naturaly.
First you start with the low hanging fruit of things like Your users' browsers (perhaps with a creative use of a plugin like "use IE here", prepopulated with suitable lists) and PDF viewers/generators.
Then along Comes Powerpoint (please notice that I said Powerpoint, not Office), with the trick of setting up PowerPoint Viewer as the default PowerPoint program and things like publisher.
Then comes the turn of Word. This will be a problem because all the damaged formats. Here Word Viewer and your SWAT transition team will prove invaluable...
Then comes a hard nut to crack. Excel. But by now, your users should have the perception that changes from Comercial SW to FOSS are not "that hard", and that the SWAT Team has their back.
Then, comes the boss fight: Exchange Server. Please remeber that exchange server is not only email, but also calendaring, and many of those functions are still unmatched by FOSS alternatives. Let alone migrating the historic data stores....
After all apps are more or less migrated (Including rewriting web apps to be crossbrowser, creative use of wine for some custom apps, directing user to web interfaces of certain packages instead of using custom clients), is the turn (finally) of the OS itself.
And here is were I explain why LiMux was a mistake. If you have limited resources, why on earth would you squander thoise resourses doing your own distro? And with NO commercial support to boot!
Instead they should have choosen a specific distro as prefered parthner, working with them on the distro (trying to steer them to a mutualy agreable middle ground) and then making a complementary package to further customize the distro. In the UE alone there are two well known players (Mandriva and Suse in alpha order). One of then (Suse) is even in your home country. Surely there are many more...
But nooo, for some reason, someone decided to re-implement the weel (without commercial support), henceforth LiMux.
Here in Venezuela, the same happened, instead of using an already created distro, they created something called Canaima (a distro to be used for both Desktops and Servers), with no commercial support, and is just a re-spinig of debian, squandering precious resources...
I am sad to see Munich retreat back to Windows. But I can also understand why they do it, and some of the mistakes they made along the way....
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
Exchange offers a lot of organizational-level management tools (e.g. revoking email privileges for a fired employee while retaining their emails for reference by their replacement) which are sorely lacking in open source mail servers. I despise Outlook and haven't touched it since my first contact with it in the 1990s. But I used to run a Unix-based mail server, and I totally understand why Exchange is so popular with companies.
What's going on here is a failure of open source to provide the tools the customer wants. Companies and organizations (charities, government) want these sorts of email management tools. But open source coders are very individualist and generally aghast at the idea of a manager having that sort of power over "your" email. So they don't put any work into adding those sorts of capabilities even if that's what the customers want.
Meanwhile, the customers are so desperate for said tools that they're willing to pay good money for them. Microsoft steps up and says they'll gladly take your money in exchange for creating these tools. And the open source community sneers at the entire thing even though they've basically driven the organization to Microsoft by refusing to provide the tools the organization needed to operate.
I can sort of see them going back to Windows 7, since that's an OS suitable for real work, but Windows 10?
It's hard to see how to get work done with all those annoying tiles moving around and vying for your attention and the flat white UI with thin borders which cause eye strain. I suppose IT can produce an OS image without all that crap, but will they get any support from Microsoft?
See, here's the thing (and I'm not the AC you're responding to, nor do I think the Linux desktop "sucks ass"); I have no problem with the Linux desktop. I have no problem using Libreoffice, although I think web applications (like Google Docs) cover the vast majority of the needs of most people. I use a web interface for email. So the thing is, if you're talking about a user where the vast majority of what they're doing is online - surfing, email, banking, facebook, whatever, then there's absolutely nothing wrong with the "Linux Desktop," or let's say the "Ubuntu" desktop, or "Cinnamon," or whatever people want to use.
In fact, there's nothing wrong with LibreOffice, or any of the other myriads of programs available for Linux at all... except when everyone else is using something that only runs on Windows. I get documents in Word that go crazy in LibreOffice. Yes, the idiot that wrote it formatted it like only a complete moron would, doing completely unnecessary formatting, undoing it, redoing a different way... nevertheless, I need to get those documents, read them, edit them and return them sometimes. I can't do that when using LibreOffice "breaks" the idiot formatting that was used.
I also have to write programs for Windows users. Period. That's what they're using - if I write something for them, I can't tell them they need to switch to Linux to use my software (as a result, I started doing a lot of web development for most programs that I thankfully don't need to do anymore). I can't tell photoshop users to use GIMP, I can't tell 3DS users to use Blender, I can't tell AfterEffects users to use... whatever the Linux equivalent is. Even if those tools were better than the Windows version, I can't tell a department of 30 people they need to switch so that I can write my software on Linux.
Munich could have, should have, been different - I can't imagine what they are using that requires Windows, let alone 800 programs, but I can understand when they say they have to jump through some hoops to get things running on Linux that otherwise would just run on Windows.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Don't be stupid. Of course you can revoke email privileges while retaining the actual emails with most (if not all) open-source mail servers.
Email isn't what drives Exchange. Calendar integration is what drives it. That plus ignorant managers who think that Outlook IS email.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
This right here.
Most people don't want to dick around with 27 independent utilities to get something simple done. With Exchange+Outlook, you install the server, you install the clients, and you use the admin interface on the server to allow the clients to do their thing. What thing? Email, shared calendars, contact management, task lists, integration with other systems that need to send notifications to your users or that your users want to send notifications out to external addresses on their behalf, that sort of thing. Using a hodgepodge of tools on Linux to do the same thing requires an insane amount of effort to configure, and then it's considered a non-standard setup that requires custom replacements and/or special upgrade procedures when it inevitably reaches EOL. It's a maintenance nightmare.
I see the same attitude from Linux devs about programmers that use an IDE. "Why would you want that? It just limits your choices." Because I don't make choices about this shit. I just want to get work done fast and with minimal effort. That's why.
Really, nearly every debate about FOSS vs commercial products comes down to this exact same argument. Commercial software isn't meant to be flexible, it's meant to do a single job (or set of related jobs) with minimal effort and user input. It's automation. You know those snarky t-shirts with "go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script" on them? Commercial software is that replacement for low-level users. You no longer need someone familiar with CLI tools to send email. It's automated, both for end users as well as admins. Nobody wants to pay an admin to handle basic email services anymore, and for good reason. It's not worth it.
Most public sector and utility spaces were among the first adopters of computers and as such invested heavily in automation of paperwork at the least. This means they all have dozens if not hundreds (all the individual clients I've had have had hundreds) of legacy applications with so much business logic it would take millions of dollars in development time (with low budget developers and no PM/QA/test/documentation accounted for) to replace a single one of them - in spite of each and every one looking ludicrously simple to an outside observer. To compound that issue on average 80% of them tie into at least 3 of the others with a spaghetti admixture of SOAP, sockets, databases, file/unix-like sockets, or native Windows IPC routines based on whatever was popular at the time in the shop that was developing them. You can't just cut those things out and drop them on a Linux box, most of them have been maintained by maintenance coders only trying to get it done as quickly and cheaply as possible for so long they barely run on Windows, and certainly won't if you so much as change some obscure network permission some poor bastard forgot to document a decade ago. Even those "web database applications" you work with probably have DLLs people lost the fucking sourcecode to back in the 90's.
And like I give a fuck about European/Scandinavian standards...?
I was asking a genuine question, from the viewpoint of an American if the Social Democrats in Germany would be similar to what a Socialist in America would be perceived as...
But from the US point of view...Obama was certainly NOT even a moderate leaning politician.
While I'd not say he was a socialist, he was certainly quite a bit more left than a lot of the US, and actually, truth be known, I think he himself would like to have gone even FURTHER left on most issues, but held back to try to not alienate too many in the US.
But I would say Obama is definitely NOT even close to conservative, and Bernie...definitely leans socialist.
One thing I respect about Bernie, at least he is up front about what he believes and is un-wavering.
I disagree with Bernie objectively on almost everything, but I do respect him at least that he picks his views, explains them and stick to them....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Excellent observation.
I retired from a state dept of revenue. We had been in the process of switching our 30 servers from NetWare to Linux. We used Lotus Notes and its groupware. We had developed over two hundred databases in that app, along with its email and calendar components. All tightly integrated. LN made getting work done easy. Then an election brought in a new Tax Commissioner and assistant TC. The assistant never had any experience with LN or Linux. Only Microsoft products. She immediately order the entire 13,000 state employees to switch to Windows and its apps. That meant that over 10,000 LN licenses were scraped, along with licenses for other non-Microsoft apps. At the same time, 10,000+ licenses had to be purchased for SharePoint, Access, Word and other new Windows apps.
Running under Windows servers access time to files and directories more than doubled. There was no effective or practical way to import LN databases and data into SharePoint, Access and other MS applications, so access to lots of data was lost. Crashes and lost data, which required rebooting and data re-entry, were common.
At about the same time a search for a database and dev tools to replace FoxPro took place. PostgreSQL was suggested but discounted because "there was no PAID support". Yes, it's true. When its taxpayer money at risk expense is no impediment. Since then the state has paid millions for Oracle's database products. The "paid" support? It's so poor and slow a website was formed by Oracle users so they could support each other.
All-in-all, the conversion cost state taxpayers millions, and renewal of license fees continued to add millions to the overall cost.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
There is no 800 programs. The real story is currently paywalled at lwn.net but the geist of it is that Microsoft just moved their German HQ to Munich and the current mayor of Munich has been pro Microsoft for years.
> their workers deserve a stable, robust work environment.
Agreed.
> half their applications won't run on Linux
A common, and fatal, mistake. They're trying to keep using Microsoft Exchange and 300 other Windows programs, on Linux. That's certainly the wrong way to do it. It works about as well as trying to run all software made on and for Linux, but run it on Windows.
If you're going to run on Windows, run software developed for and on Windows - IIS, Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, Edge, etc.
If you're going to run on Linux, run software developed for and on Linux - Apache httpd, Cyrus imapd, MySQL, Chrome or Firefox, etc.
You wouldn't say "I'm switching from Ford to Chevy" and then try to run a Ford alternator, water, headlights, etc in your Chevy truck. Yet that's what so many people try to do when they "switch" from Windows to Linux. They switch out the bare OS, not the whole thing.
My companies have been running purely on Linux since shortly after Windows 95 came out and it works beautifully, because we use Linux software in a Linux way, we don't try to run a Microsoft-centric network, doing things the Microsoft way, on a Linux kernel.