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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 canopic jug on Saturday January 23 2016, @09:49AM
Good luck getting binaries from one linux distro to run on another from a different "family", or even the same family several years later.
The binaries are irrelevant. It is the source that matters with Linux distros. That is the currency to track, and what enables portability and endurance. However, to take it a step more abstract, it is really FOSS's use of open standards for data and protocols that really reduce long term costs. You don't work with programs, they come and go, too, as much as you use the programs to work with data. It is the data that sticks around the longest and open standards enable independence from individual vendors or programs. The article blames "old applications", but I wager that it's really access to the data that these applications work with that is the bottleneck.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday January 24 2016, @07:44PM
That's great if you're using open source or internally developed software -but there's no guarantee that the software you need/want to use is available as such.