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Munich still uses 41 proprietary apps that will only run under XP or 2000. The city has estimated it will cost $18M to replace them over a 4-year span.
Nick Heath at TechRepublic reports
Windows XP and 2000 are used by fewer than 1,500 of the more than 16,000 staff at the council, which relies on the aged Microsoft systems to run 41 applications.
[...] In order to stop using Windows XP and 2000, these 41 applications will either be migrated to a newer, supported operating system, replaced with more modern software, or phased out--as part of a four year project costing €16.6M ($18.03M).
[...] Munich carried on using XP and 2000 due to these 41 applications being used for crucial work in the city, from monitoring emissions for air pollution to flood protection.
To secure the OSes, Munich ran them on virtual machines and on standalone computers, as well as using what it calls "restrictive data interchange", quarantine systems, and additional protective measures.
The council has decided to stop using these older unsupported versions of Windows now as, not only are they a security risk, but according to a report [PDF, Deutsch] they have limited support for network and data security features the council wants to use.
[...] Often it can be the case that organisations can't update the application to run on a newer OS because the people with the necessary skills are gone or the company that originally wrote the software no longer exists.
[...] The project at Munich will be split into two phases: The first will assess the work needed and the second will carry it out. Work got underway at the end of [2015] and is expected to be complete by the end of September 2019.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Friday January 22 2016, @01:48PM
$9 million doesn't strike me as expensive at all. They have legacy software that needs replaced or updated. Forty one pieces of legacy software. Those will need to be individually evaluated, and likely most of them will need to be replaced. Maybe some can be combined, maybe not. In the worst case, you are looking at 41 instances of software development.
$9 million / 41 = an average cost of $200k per application. If these applications are anything but trivial, that is not at all expensive.
FWIW I don't see any advantage of OSS here. Even if they had the code (and maybe they do, in some cases), it is at least 15 years old, likely more. It is out of date. It is written in dialects of languages that are no longer supported. You don't want to port it, you want to replace it.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by stormreaver on Friday January 22 2016, @02:59PM
FWIW I don't see any advantage of OSS here. Even if they had the code (and maybe they do, in some cases), it is at least 15 years old, likely more. It is out of date. It is written in dialects of languages that are no longer supported. You don't want to port it, you want to replace it.
Having the source code for the old software, even in the case of a complete rewrite under the circumstances you outlined, provides a huge time and cost advantage. I had to do that very thing for my organization: a complete (and I mean from the first byte to the last) rewrite of a large, obsolete system that was written in-house by a sole, now-retired programmer 25 years ago in a horrible language/environment that few use anymore (UniVerse). Having the old source code was invaluable, and saved me a ton of time trying to figure out the business logic that nobody fully understood.
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Friday January 22 2016, @03:04PM
FWIW I don't see any advantage of OSS here.
This. Software maintenance is a cost of doing business. If you're a big company or institution, getting stuck with legacy systems is a planning failure on your part. That $18M isn't a cost - its just money that should have been spent on IT support over the last 10 years (plus interest) that was probably recorded as 'efficiency savings' by the previous management before they moved on.
Sure, any human being could be caught out like this, but its still their responsibility.
From TFA: "When you're a big company or a big organisation, projects don't happen quickly. You may have seen it [the end of support for an OS] coming since 2013 and said 'We're going to shut this application down because it's not worth updating it to the new operating system but the quickest we can shut it down is 2016," he said.
Nope, the end of support for Windows XP has been coming since it was launched in 2001, and odds are that, since these applications won't run after XP, they were already relying on 16-bit "legacy support" then. The process of replacing the applications should have started six months before the end of whatever support contract they had with the developer. If it was a kludgey, skunkworks solution brewed up a long-departed employee, then the cost of replacement should be set against the $$$ that employee probably saved the company by implementing something that did the job for 10 years.
The important factor isn't open source: its open data. Hard to migrate if your data is tied up in a proprietary format...
(Score: 2) by bill_mcgonigle on Friday January 22 2016, @03:14PM
Right - the apps are being replaced because they're not featureful, not because security is a nightmare for the IT staff. Does anybody actually think that IT wasn't recommending that these all be replaced before the XP EOL deadline? These changes are being driven by the politicians, unfortunately.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 22 2016, @04:43PM
FWIW I don't see any advantage of OSS here. Even if they had the code (and maybe they do, in some cases), it is at least 15 years old, likely more. It is out of date. It is written in dialects of languages that are no longer supported. You don't want to port it, you want to replace it.
Why? Only proprietary source code stays antiquated and untouched. If they wanted to make improvements to the code base they could. 15 years is a pretty long time for anything to stay constant.
And you mean ancient languages, like C, ada or lisp?
It's cute to be an apologist for proprietary software but please at least come up with reasons that make sense. Which I realize is hard.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 22 2016, @05:54PM
18000000/4/41/1500 = $73 per year per application per employee who uses said application.