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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: 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.