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Munich Reveals Preliminary Costs for a 'Return' to Windows

posted by azrael on Friday October 17 2014, @05:46AM   Printer-friendly
from the only-after-empire-strikes-back dept.

gewg_ writes:

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

 
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  • (Score: 1) by mathinker on Saturday October 18 2014, @06:07PM

    by mathinker (3463) on Saturday October 18 2014, @06:07PM (#107356)

    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.

    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.