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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? :)
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.
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.
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.