How Munich Abandoned Microsoft for Open Source 294
An anonymous reader writes "TechRepublic has the story behind Munich City Council's decision to ditch Microsoft Windows and Office in favor of open source software. The project leader talks about why the shift was primarily about freedom, in this case freeing itself from being tied into Microsoft's infrastructure and having control over the software it uses. He talks about how the council managed to keep such a large project on track, despite affecting 15,000 people and spanning nine years. He also warns against organizations justifying the shift to open source software on the grounds that it will save money, arguing this approach is always likely to fail."
Re:Let me guess (Score:4, Informative)
There were patches scattered throughout the Windows 2000 source code leak [slashdot.org], all with comments along the lines of "Putting this in for the Office team". That was one of the big discussions around here back in the day when that story broke.
The GP is probably taking it to far saying they were doing it for deliberate competitive advantage -- all of the comments that I read sounded like standard bug-fixes -- but it's hard to dispute that Microsoft obviously has an advantage over Libre Office when trying to track down bugs in the O/S that cause problems with the office suite.
Re:"always likely to fail" (Score:5, Informative)
Or, instead of attempting grammar pedantry, we can realize that he's saying there is no case in which this approach has a probable outcome of success. That is, all cases are likely to fail - this approach always likely to fail, no matter the situation.
Whether you agree with this assessment is another issue.
Re:bribery (Score:2, Informative)
The question is, how they managed to do this despite of Microsoft Economical Power. How they avoided bribery of the involved politicians?
You're looking at a cultural decision, not a political decision. RTFA.
"If you are only doing a migration because you think it saves you money there's always somebody who tells you afterwards that you didn't calculate it properly," he said.
and a little further down:
Munich is used to forging its own path. The city runs its own schools and is one of the few socialist, rather than conservative governments, in Bavaria.
Peter Hofmann speaks about Munich's open source migration at the Linux Tag conference in Berlin. Becoming independent meant Munich freeing itself from closed, proprietary software, more specifically the Microsoft Windows NT operating system and the Microsoft Office suite, and a host of other locked-down technologies the city relied on in 2002
Even Ballmer took time from his Winter chair-throwing training to go speak with gov officials. Knowing that the words "do not lose to Linux" were said, you can be damn sure he tried everything from price cuts to hookers and drugs*. (*hookers and drugs not available in all areas, some restrictions may apply)
Re:Let me guess (Score:5, Informative)
The webmail interface is far Superior to Exchange web.
Re:Long-term costs (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Let me guess (Score:5, Informative)
Exchange may, to the end user, do what it does well, but i can tell you right now the Exchange 2010 server I just installed is likely to be the last one. What a fucking nightmare. I'm so tired of installing groupware that is nothing more than a badly stitched together bunch of spare parts where every solution to a problem seems to involve uninstalling and reinstalling IIS, and praying to the Web Server Gods that your partially malfunctioning mail server doesn't completely crap out. Everything about Exchange is fucking awful, and if there are any Redmond engineers or programmers reading this, all I can say to you is that I hope you die of awful awful diseases.
It's fucking ludicrous how bad Exchange is, how resource hungry it can be, and how simple fucking things like setting up a fucking mailing list or putting in some decent anti-spam tech (which doesn't amount to a rolled up version of SpamAssassin with some proprietary web pages and costs a bazillion dollars a seat) turns into a fucking nightmare. Fuck I hate Exchange. Hate it... hate it... hate it... hate it.
Re:Long-term costs (Score:5, Informative)
1) You don't think this happens with propreitary software? The end-users still have to learn the software, whether you train them or you require them to come "pre-trained."
2) This is bullshit. I don't think you realize how much FOSS is written/maintained with no expectation or want of compensation. These people do it because they like doing it - and generally they feed themselves doing something else.
Re:bribery (Score:5, Informative)
Bribery is illegal
Many forms of bribery are legal, Gerhard Schröder (former Chancellor of Germany) retired to a managing position at Gazprom after ensuring it would be the main provider of gas for Europe for the near future and the whole FDP received millions in donations for supporting tax reductions favouring the hotel and gastronomic industries. Both lost a lot of political trust and nothing else, Gerhard Schröder pulled it before retiring so he does not care, the FDP already thin on substance got voted out of parliament on the last election, which means they got to stay in power for years after pulling that stunt and only barely missed the 5% requirement for participation. No punishments where handed out by the government and what could it have punished with everything being "legal"? Politicians write the laws and the laws regarding politicians tend to favour them and their alternative money sources, you are not a career politician in Germany unless you have at least one lucrative non descriptive position in the industry.
Re:bribery (Score:5, Informative)
I had dealings with the LHM back then and I do fully believe they haven't saved a single cent on the transition. There were hordes of IBM and SuSE consultants stampeding through the halls and they hired a bunch of permanent employees for this. In fact MS made them a couple of offers which as it turned out they could refuse. They hadn't planned on saving money so special deals by MS were not that juicy.
The frustration of the MS sales reps(there were even rumors monkey boy himself traveled to Munich) must have been immense. Munich back then was still running NT and a lot of their servers were Suns. In short it must have been the big cahuna back then.
Re:Wishful thinking. (Score:3, Informative)
And the fees to the customer have risen by 15%-50%.
Think they will continue to tolerate such crap?
Re:Breaking the chains (Score:4, Informative)
Totally secure? That's a bit strong. It is, however, fair to say that subversive code in Linux is far more likely to be spotted by someone not employed by an NSA collaborator than in MS.
Re:Let me guess (Score:2, Informative)
I cannot speak to the specific issue you mention for at least three reasons
1) i'm not authorized to talk about it
2) I am not technically familiar with those parts of those products
3) I wasn't at MS yet back in 95/96
That said, what I can tell you _now_ is that product engineering groups spend effort on complying with previous court rulings that limit our usage of APIs that aren't publicly disclosed. The specifics depend on the products and product versions in question.
As far as how my product (Visual Studio LightSwitch) is impacted directly; as part of our release process we run some tooling that makes sure our code isn't calling APIs its not supposed to be calling.
Re:reasons... (Score:4, Informative)
As they grow, some of the warts behind Quickbooks start to show up. You've started using it for your payroll, but Quickbook phases out payroll support after two years, forcing you to replace your perfectly functional version of QB with an expensive new version if you want your payroll to still work. The new version is frequently bloated enough that you also need to buy a new computer to run it. Eventually you say "Screw them, I'm just going to replace my accounting software." Then you discover that there is no way to extract your past accounting data from QB to import it into new software. It's your data, but you do not control it. QB does. They've trapped you in their ecosystem with forced bi-annual upgrades.
Re:Long-term costs (Score:5, Informative)
The point is that in advanced, well-run countries like Germany, the government (at different levels, this is about a city government) actually does this in an effective and sensible manner, which is why Munich was able to successfully switch to open-source software and save a lot of money. In crappy, corrupt countries like the USA, we get expensive debacles like the current Healthcare.gov disaster where big projects are given to political cronies and provided vastly inflated budgets, and disaster ensues.