SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Nick Heath reports
[Munich's city] council is intending to conduct a study to see which operating systems and software packages--both proprietary and open source--best fit its needs. The audit would also take into account the work already carried out to move the council to free software.
Now, in a response to Munich's Green Party (PDF), Mayor Dieter Reiter has revealed the cost of returning to Windows.
Reiter said that moving to Windows 7 would require the council to replace all the PCs for its 14,000-plus staff, a move he said would cost €3.15 million. That figure did not include software licensing and infrastructure costs, which Reiter said could not be calculated without further planning. He said a move to Windows 8 would be far more costly.
Reiter said going back to Microsoft would mean writing off about €14M of work it had carried out to shift to Limux, OpenOffice, and other free software. Work on project implementation, support, training, modifying systems, licensing of Limux-specific software, on setting up Limux and migrating from Microsoft Office would have to be shelved, he said.
He also revealed that the move to Limux had saved the council about €11M in licensing and hardware costs, as the Ubuntu-based Limux operating system was less demanding than if it had upgraded to a newer version of Windows.
Related: No, Munich Isn't About To Ditch Free Software and Move Back to Windows
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 17 2014, @09:32AM
No disputing that it would cost a lot to switch back, but OpenOffice is available for Windows so they would still be able to use that and the cost of switching from MS Office (e.g. training) wouldn't be wasted.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 17 2014, @11:43AM
Part of the previous FUD/clickbait item that circulated (see Related Stories, above) was the claim that the city employees didn't like FOSS because it wasn't exactly like the ancient apps they were used to.[1]
Oddly enough, newer M$ software wouldn't have been identical either.
...and, as the UK gov't is demonstrating, once you get rid of proprietary protocols/formats and adopt open standards, the transition becomes much easier. [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [techrepublic.com]
[1] The reason it took Munich so damned long to convert was all the hand-holding the IT staff did with every single user.
They converted all their old macros and templates and made sure everything was hunky-dory before moving on to the next employee.
-- gewg_
(Score: 3, Interesting) by choose another one on Friday October 17 2014, @01:03PM
Interesting link: "the council is now conducting a study to see which operating systems and software packages - both proprietary and open source - best fit its needs"
The way that is written (my highlighting) implies that they did not do such an assessment before starting the FOSS / Linux migration, if so, no wonder it took them so long.
Er, what should they have done then (apart from maybe properly assess their needs before embarking on the project) ? Presumably if that step took a lot of time and effort, then there were a lot of genuine incompatibilities, so should the end users simply have been left with documents / templates / macros / whatever that did not open or work correctly ? Would that have improved the acceptance rate ?
PS: your "ancient apps" comment is interesting because we are now getting to the stage where Open/LibreOffice looks and behaves ancient, it is most like Office 2003 which is now over ten years old. Run Office 2003 these days and you may need to retrain younger new employees onto it, if they have used Office in school they will likely have used only 2007+. I get this with my kids, they'll happily find their way round current iOS, OS X, Windows, Android etc. but put them on an old XP / Office 2003 box and you get "what is this ancient ****" "how do you find anything in all these menus" and "how do I do X" - where X turns out to be an Office 2007+ feature that you've never used, but the kids expect it. These are kids who will be coming through into the workplace soon. In similar vein, it's getting to be impossible to stop them jabbing fingers into older non-touch laptop screens (to be fair, using a range of devices I suffer from that too sometimes) to the extent that I may actively avoid buying non-touch laptops in future, just for that reason (not because I find touch is better). Progress eh ?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 17 2014, @09:18PM
implies that they did not do such an assessment before starting
No, this nonsense is just politics:
A new deputy mayor is trying to make waves, hoping that one day he might become mayor.
You should find some video of a male lion killing the cubs sired by the previous dominant male after the old guy got defeated in a hostile takeover.
(With the females no longer nursing, that brings them back into estrus.)
Elsewhere in Germany, they have reverted back after a new political party gained control.
Money spent once then spent again.
It's just wasteful politicians engaging in dick measuring contents.
It appears that you don't know that Ballmer interrupted his skiing vacation to rush to Munich to try to avert the switch.
Even though M$'s initial fire-sale prices would have been lower, the city fathers told Sweaty to pound sand. [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [techrepublic.com]
(You'll notice that if you want good coverage of this topic, Nick Heath is the guy.)
The politicians and the IT folks had worked together--not specifically to lower the cost (not their main goal)--but to figured out a way to gain FREEDOM.
The goal was always to make sure they had the source code for everything they ran.
This contains one of my all-time favorite quotes from the (previous) mayor. It's at about the 45 percent mark.
"Freedom from you, Mr. Gates." [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [europa.eu]
At the time of the decision to switch, Munich was running TWENTY-ONE versions of Windoze.
They were also paying for licensing on numerous redundant apps.
Keeping track of licenses was a mess.
They consolidated most of that jumble with their own spin of Linux and ($0) FOSS apps.
As of May 2013, Munich was 94 percent FOSS and the (previous) mayor declared the conversion a success.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Saturday October 18 2014, @10:04PM
I am aware. Maybe you don't know that assessing the price is not the same as assessing which solution "-best fit its needs".
So, the goal explicitly wasn't to make sure the council had the software that "-best fit its needs". QED.
Personally, if I see a procurement with a single all-overriding requirement like that it's a massive red flag that it's being done wrong. Source code may be _a_ requirement, assessed scored and balanced against all the others, but it should not ever be the only one. Nor does it require FOSS, or exclude proprietary - I have worked with and purchased plenty of proprietary software that came with source.
Does not make sense either, or at least I don't see how it correlates with free software. Freedom from Gates has always been available, and has never required FOSS. Apple, for one, has always been there as an alternative supplier and in fact pre-dates MS. At a price, of course - but remember money was apparently not the issue for this project...
For 2003, I thought that was impossible, but I have looked it up and yes, provided they were still running Windows 2.x and had bought some Itaniums (so you can include XP 64bit), 21 would have been just possible, but very very stupid.
So, they were hopeless at IT management and didn't have a clue what they had let alone what they required. Not the first public sector (or corporate) IT department with that problem, and won't be the last. FOSS doesn't magically fix bad management though, and it doesn't get rid of the need to track licenses either, just changes what you need to track. FOSS doesn't magically exempt you from copyright (or patents), and many FOSS licences are incompatible with each other (and different GPL versions are even incompatible with themselves after RMS had a Vader moment). All that needs to be properly tracked especially if you are distributing or are building custom stuff (with the access to code to copy) to interface with FOSS or integrate bits together (which they are).
Wonder how much of the claimed savings are from consolidation then, and how much from FOSS ? Looking at a slightly smaller council example - £2M per year savings from desktop standardisation and consolidation: http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Hampshire-Council-saves-2m-a-year-by-standardising-its-8000-desktops [computerweekly.com] - didn't take them 10rys either. So if Munich was that chaotic before, and larger, it should therefore have saved of the order of 2M per year from consolidation. So if they saved less than that per year from consolidation _and_ FOSS then maybe ($0) FOSS is a negative saving.
I really wanted Munich to be a success, it was announce not long after I was involved in a failed OpenOffice migration (much much smaller, failed on compatibility with existing documents), I really wanted it to be proven that it wouldn't really have been that much work for us to have fixed our issues... but as the years ticked past I have come to view it as another public sector big-IT screw up.
Taking ten year over a desktop refresh is crazy, what else have they missed in all that time? Apparently the mayor's lack of mobile access to his email was not anything to do with FOSS, but was down to infrastructure - "because all of this goes back to pre-mobile phone days". So WTF have Munich IT been doing for the last 10+ years to get so far behind that their infrastructure is "pre mobile" ? Well now we know: rewriting Word macros.
(Score: 1) by mathinker on Saturday October 18 2014, @06:07PM
Au contraire, my recollection is that at least 50% of the time it took was taken by re-assessment after re-assessment. I think the original assessment didn't take into consideration the fact that all of the MS Office macros would have to be converted "by-hand". But even after taking this into consideration, the conversion became worthwhile in the long term, because of exactly those issues discussed in this assessment.