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-- OriginalOwner_ [tinyurl.com] writes:

from the it's-anybody's-guess dept.

Nick Heath reports [techrepublic.com] via TechRepublic

Munich city council spent years migrating more than 15,000 staff to LiMux, a custom-version of Ubuntu and other open-source software--a move the city said had saved it more than €10M ($11M).

[...]After his election, the new mayor of Munich, Dieter Reiter, announced he would commission a report to evaluate how IT should be run at council in [the] future--including whether the authority should continue to run LiMux.

Now, an interim release of this report [ris-muenchen.de][PDF, Deutsch] by consultants Accenture has highlighted user dissatisfaction with outdated and unreliable software. However, when detailing the problems with desktop PCs, the draft report fails to specify whether it's Linux-based machines that are affected or the minority Windows PCs retained at Munich.

[...]Problems stem from the variety of PC clients being used, and the use of old operating systems, office software, browsers, and infrastructure, according to the report. The report cites evidence of these IT problems causing intermittent, rather than persistent problems for staff. When employees at Munich were surveyed last year, 85 percent said software problems interfered with their work at least once per month, with 55 percent blaming hardware problems. The council has previously stated the bulk of users had no issue with the move to LiMux [techrepublic.com], outside of a couple of councillors [techrepublic.com].

For my part, I wonder how objective the report will be. From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:

Avanade Inc. was founded in 2000 as a joint venture between Accenture and
Microsoft

Additionally, Munich declared the conversion "complete" at 94 percent (though they have continued to inch forward away from non-open software). A major reason for starting the switch in the first place was because they had a mix of software that was unnecessarily difficult to manage.

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