Munich Votes for Linux Migration Plan 396
JoScherl writes "The German news site Heise reports (German, Babelfish version) that the city council of Munich (3rd biggest city in Germany, 1.3 million inhabitants) has voted for the detailed concept of the LiMux - Linux for Munich (German, Babelfish version) project with votes from all parties except the CSU (Christlich Soziale Union, christion social union). With this decision the 13,000 Desktops and Servers of the city administration will be migrated to Linux. CSU, which has just won the European elections, said they won't support Linux since its Feierabendprogrammierer ('leisure-time coders') would destroy Munich's IT-landscape (Microsoft Germany and other big companies are located in and around Munich) and they also fear that the personnel would have problems with learning how to use OpenOffice and other migrated systems. The migration plan has the following steps: This year the Windows NT desktops get OpenOffice and Mozilla as their default office and browsing suite. In 2005 and 2006 the systems will be migrated to Linux, with some applications running on Windows application servers. In 2008 all applications should run native on Linux."
google does better (Score:3, Informative)
google seems to do a better tranlation [216.239.39.104]
Resident of Munich town councillor segnet concept for Linux migration off
30 million euro the expensive project LiMux can start: The town councillor Muenchen adopted the stage plan on today's Wednesday for the conversion of the entire computer landscape for those approximately 16,000 coworkers of the city administration officially. For the Linux migration tuned the red-green coalition governing in the city hall together with representatives of FDP, OEDP and the Party of Democratic Socialism. Alone the CSU governing in Bavaria votierte against the introduction of the penguin into the offices. Conservative politicians expressed doubts that the "end of workday programmers" would destroy the IT economy of Munich from the open SOURCE corner. They were afraid also risks for the persons employed, who must learn now above all handling a new text processing. Announcement
With LiMux the migration of approximately 13,000 Desktop computers and the pertinent servers lines up. First the project responsible persons in the city hall want to select concrete open SOURCE products in the framework of bidding procedures. IBM and the Novell daughter Suse are not only to come to the course, even if the original LiMux Design of the two sizes comes in the Linux market. One of the main goals of the migration is it however to create jobs directly in the residents of Munich IT economy and to receive a competitive market. "we must now watch out that we some monopolist loose will want by we the next global giant to use up", explained themselves the green town councillor Jens Muehlhaus already first under allusion on Microsoft and Big Blue. It wants to bring the small and medium-size IT companies into and around Munich particularly with the necessary specialized technical and special solutions in the play. Opposite heise on-line regretted Muehlhaus the decision of the CSU, which did not understand yet that at free software money is made main with services.
In detail the migration is to take place in three steps: First in this year all computers in the administration, which run so far still on Windows NT, are equipped with open Office and Mozilla as Browser. "first the transformation lines up to that approximately 7000 Office macros for forms such as vacation requests or travel expenses accounts, which can be finally centralized thereby ", are pleased Muehlhaus. 2005 and 2006 go it then to the migration of all office PCS to the new operating system Linux, which is to finally work completely with free software. Until 2008 then the difficult adjustment of specialized's applications lines up, for which according to Muehlhaus creativity and a good co-operation between the administration and open SOURCE developers are necessary. The know-how developed thereby might be internationally in demand however and "also exported themselves and sell to let", is safe itself of Muehlhaus.
The migration motivation is not only to be reported for this reason with the coworkers concerned in the meantime again risen, white the green town councillor. In January from individual city hall departments warning voices had to be heard that the problems with the conversion could grow the residents of Munich over the head. "in the meantime we have the full support for LiMux", get straight Muehlhaus. All involved ones would regard the project as feasible and meaningfully. The timetable for the Green has a who courage drop still: The residents of Munich schools are to be reequipped only in two years on Linux, so that the training grow up up to then still with the Windows world. Microsoft offers very cheap licenses for the education sector "on". There it falls heavily, which political will for rapid migration to bundle ( Stefan Krempl )/( jk
The irony of your comment (Score:1, Informative)
Religious Conservatives != Christianity (Score:4, Informative)
Re:christian socialists (Score:3, Informative)
Re:christian socialists (Score:1, Informative)
the CSU does NOT have won the EU elections (Score:5, Informative)
sorry, but that's wrong. the party-system in germany is transparent and clear, except for the cdu (christian democratic union) / csu issue. the cdu is a big german party and the csu is a pure bavarian party. and in bavaria there is no cdu. but when it comes to nationwide elections these two parties run as one. they have different programms and different campaigns, but you can only vote for cdu/csu.
it is a major flaw in germany's democratic system bacause one can't elect one party without electing the other. the reason for this (there maybe are historical reasons, but that's no excuse): both parties are very conservative, but bavaria is an ultraconservative state (the csu gets always around 50-60% in bavaria) and so there is an ultraconservative christian union especially for them and no one else.
btw, i don't even understand why there are religious parties in a democracy.
Re:Christian Beliefs - Nothing to take seriously? (Score:1, Informative)
Groups like the CSU aren't really Christian or Socialist. Well, I mean, they are, but that's not their focus. In the US, you have well-defined seperation of Church and State and so with a political party having a name like this, one would assume that it is a "left wing religious group" (socialist, christian).
In Germany, there *is* state-sponsored religion. I'm not sure which are ok these days, but when I used to live there one had a choice between Catholic, Protestant and Jewish IIRC. Furthermore, all government buildings had a cross hanging somewhere (granted, this was in Bayern, the Texas of Germany) as was apparently required by some law or other. This is what keeps the Church of Scientology out of Germany, incidentally. They have every right to ban religions that are not state recognized, it's not like the US.
However, Europeans in general are culturally much less religious than Americans. The television evangelist, right wing nuts you get in the states are few and far between out here, and Europeans in general are somewhat embarassed by very religious people. Which means that in practice, groups like the CSU aren't really Christian in any real way other than historically. They were founded because the religious were oppressed in Nazi Germany; they have religious roots and still cling to what they call "Christian values", but what that means other than "respect each other" and other such common sense stuff these days, who knows.
Bloomberg article in english (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Christian Beliefs - Nothing to take seriously? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:the CSU does NOT have won the EU elections (Score:3, Informative)
because there can be.
don't like it? make up your own party. convince people to join and vote for it.
It's commonplace to see 'election alliances'(the proper english word eludes me right now) between parties in just about any multi party system. if you don't like the allegiances the parties have made, tactically to get more of their own folk elected, then vote some other party's members. those two parties are obviously co-operating wanted you it or not.
It doesn't seem like a flaw in the system, just more like 'flaw' in their election tactics(or if it gets them large amount of vote points then it's not even a flaw, it's a succesful tactic).
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Re:christian socialists (Score:5, Informative)
In Germany, at least, the term 'socialist' has never really had a negative connotation like in the US. In fact, it seems to be thrown around all over the place like we throw 'democratic' around.
Migrations are extremely painful. (Score:3, Informative)
Sure it's okay if you migrate it. But it has to work exactly as the current one does. Same input, same output, same format.
And it's a mess of spaghetti code from 20 years and 50 programmers. All undocumented.
And he needs a specific boot disk to make it work.
Moving 95% of the apps for 95% of the people is easy.
It's those one-of-a-kind yet mission-critical apps that take so long and cost so much that your project over runs on cost and time.
I just spent 2 whole days moving ONE user's workstation from NT to Win2K and it was practically perfect...... except ONE thing she prints doesn't print the same way now.
And THAT is the thing that will be remembered.
Re:Are They In? Or Out? (Score:5, Informative)
First of all, the CSU is a political artefact. It only exists in Bavaria and not in all of Germany. It is sort of the Bavarian complement of CDU, which is the nationwide right-wing party and not present in Bavaria.
The party is on the right side (somewhat) of the CDU and of course they believe they are at least as important as the CDU. But in reality they are a small, local party with an inflated sense of importance.
The CSU did not win the European elections. There is no such thing as winning the European elections. The seats in the European parliament are distributed roughly according to the votes each party got. In fact the larger countries have more seats and smaller have less, and the seats per country are distributed accordingly to the vote distribution in that country. But for example, I cannot vote for a German party, since I am Austrian. I have to vote for an Austrian party.
Anyway, by "winning the elections" they mean sort of a moral win. i.e. they got more votes that the parties in power. Since CSU is Bavaria only, it actually means they got more votes in Bavaria than the parties in power in Germany got in Bavaria. On an European scale the CSU has no importance whatsoever. On a German scale they are nuisance-level.
Re:$30mil EURO? (Score:1, Informative)
currently one euro is roughy $1.25, so that would sum up to ~$2900/machine not $2300
German 101 (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Are They In? Or Out? (Score:5, Informative)
The German polical system in 1 minute:
-There are four main politcal parties in Germany
-The two largest ones (about 30-45% of the vote each) are the SPD (Social Democrats) and the CDU/CSU (Christian Democrats)
-The two smaller national parties are the FDP (Free Democrats) andf the Green Party. Both get between 3-10%, depending on the individual election.
-In the former East Germany, the PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism) a successor to the former socialist party that ran the GDR until reunification is getting about 15-25% of the vote in local and state elections.
-Seats in the Bundestag, the more powerful lower house are awarded by the total number of votes a party gets, as long as they get more than 5% of the total vote, or win three electorial districts outright. So there are usually 4-5 parties in the lower house and they have to form coalitions to get a majority.
-Currently, the majority in the lower house is a coalition of the Social Democrats and the Green Party. The chancellor is a Social Democrat, the foreign secretary and vice chancellor is from the Green Party
-Most state governments are either Christian Democrats or coalitions of the Christian Democrats and Free Democrats.
-Since the members of the upper house are nominated by the state governments, the above also have a majority in the upper house.
-The Social Democrats got basically vaporized by the Christian Democrats in the European elections last week.
-There are some more fringe and single issue parties, but none that has any influence on the state or federal level.
-All of the parties above are well to the left of the US Republican Party, the Christian Democrats are the most conservative, along the lines of the more centrist wing of the US Democrats, the Social Democrats are best compared to the left wing of the US Democtatic Party, the Free Democrats are more free market, which would put them closer to Republican positions, but more liberal socially. The Green Party is a green party, but less nuts than Nader, and the PDS are unabashed socialists.
What does this have to do with this decision in Munich? Nothing whatsoever. This decision was made by the city government, which is domianted by Social Democrats and the Green Party. The Christian Democrats have an overwhelming majority in the Bavarian state government, but it is purely up to the city government what software their employeers use.
Its christian SOCIAL union NOT socialists (Score:3, Informative)
The social in social security referring to
society.
Timeline wrt Novell/Suse (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Are They In? Or Out? (Score:5, Informative)
The CSU has always been winning in Bavaria, it's a local party to the state. Some also joke it's the national party because "Bavaria is not Germany". This view is also the reason it doesn't get good results everywhere else, who'd want to have a "foreigner" as their chancellor?
Re:Christian Beliefs - Nothing to take seriously? (Score:3, Informative)
"Christian Democrats" and variants thereon is a common party name in Europe. It may have meant something like 50 years ago, but now it's basically just a synonym for "center-right".
Re:the CSU does NOT have won the EU elections (Score:1, Informative)
the cdu is a big german party and the csu is a pure bavarian party. and in bavaria there is no cdu. but when it comes to nationwide elections these two parties run as one. they have different programms and different campaigns, but you can only vote for cdu/csu.
We kinda have a similar thing here in the U.S. The Democrat-Farmer-Labor party [wikipedia.org] only exists in the state of Minnesota. Technically it is part of the national Democratic party and not just an affiliated state party, although that was the case in the early part of the 20th century. Then there's the North Dakota Democratic-NPL Party [wikipedia.org] in the state of North Dakota, which is similarly affiliated with the national Democratic party.
i don't even understand why there are religious parties in a democracy
It's called "freedom." Religious people are allowed to associate with each other, and to vote for candidates who reflect their beliefs. Having a religious party makes it easier to identify them. Sometimes.
Re:More Clarifications (Score:3, Informative)
Now, why would you do such a thing?
Anyway, for good measure I think to imply that the CSU is to the right of Bush is rather exaggerated. I certainly can not stand Stoiber, but at least he seems to have some brains. The CSU has also by far not such a catastrophic track record in environmental issues as Bush. His administration has been working hard on undoing every environmental safe-guard in the USA since it took over. For instance: I can not recall any CSU politician denying the existence of global warming.
Re:Are They In? Or Out? (Score:4, Informative)
Then again if for instance Siemens would get onto the Linux bandwagon the CSU will probably overcome their reservations pretty quickly.
But given the inertia of German management that may take a long time.
Re:A plea to Munich... (Score:3, Informative)
Bergen, Norway (Score:3, Informative)
Translation (Score:4, Informative)
Munich's Town Council blesses Concept for Linux Migration
The 30-million-Euro-project LiMux can start: On Wednesday, the town council of Munich has officially agreed to the step-by-step plan for transitioning the entire computer landscape of the about 16,000 workers in the city's administration. The governing red-green coalition, along with representatives from FDP, OeDP, and PDS voted in favour of the migration. The CSU, ruling with absolute majority in Bavaria, voted against the Penguin moving into the offices. Conservative politicians expressed concerns that leisure-time programmers ("Feierabendprogrammierer") from the Open-Source camp would destroy the IT economy of Munich. They feared risks also for the employees, who mainly must learn how to use a new word processor now.
LiMux means the migration of about 13,000 desktop computers and the corresponding servers. Initially, the project leaders in the town council want to make bid invitations to select concrete open source products. Not only IBM and Novell's subsidiary Suse should be involved here, although the original LiMux design was done by those two major players in the Linux market. One of the main goals of the migration is, however, to create jobs right in Munich's IT economy and to maintain a competitive market. "We must be careful now not to get rid of the one monopolist by making ourselves dependent on the next global giant," said green councellor Jens Muehlhaus up front, alluding to Microsoft and Big Blue. He wants to involve the small and medium-sized IT companies in and around Munich, especially for the non-standard programs (Fachanwendungen) and special solutions that are needed. Talking to heise online, Muehlhaus regretted the decision of the CSU, who still hadn't understood that with free software, money is mainly being made through services.
Re:Sounds cool to me. (Score:2, Informative)
Well, they already the first step. [slashdot.org] They ran into some difficulties [slashdot.org], but had plans to overcome some of them [slashdot.org] already prepared.
Regards, Ulli
Re:christian socialists (Score:3, Informative)
That's a misrepresentation. In day-to-day business nobody cares about Scientology here.
So much so that they demanded Microsoft provide them with instructions to remove "Disk Defragmenter", because it was developed by a company whose CEO was a scientologist.
The logic behind this decision is quite simple. Scientology applied to be recognized as religion in Germany and was put down, because it didn't met the requirements the law sets forth for acknowledging a religion. Scientology didn't like that and there was quite some fuss afterwards.
Overall, soon afterwards it's been officially considered a cult, IIRC. Not only by the law, but also by a lot of independend observers.
Now, with that presumption, that Scientology is a cult -- some of their (alleged) questionable goals known -- that has shown open hostility against the current legal system. If you take that as given, it's quite sound for a government to look for software other than one which (allegedly) has known influence of Scientology.
Re:the CSU does NOT have won the EU elections (Score:1, Informative)
the republicans are way more to the right than that.
Re:the CSU does NOT have won the EU elections (Score:2, Informative)
Well, this is for historic reasons. And actually it is an achievement in the political landscape of Germany after WWII.
Please note that Germany was divided along denominational borders for a very long time.
When general elections where introduced in Germany in the 19th century, there were political parties with a strong denominational background. I. e. there where different parties for catholic and protestant 'commons'. This divisions survived WWI and was part of the weakness of the Weimarer Republik - helping Hitler to power. After WWII CDU was founded as union of both protestant and catholic commons or bourgeois, closing this gap and today the 'C' in their name is a mere hint.
And if it comes to Bavaria, well it's sort of the german equivalent to Texas. With the difference, that the bavarians never fully wanted to be part of Germany. It went so far that the bavarian king Ludwig did not sign personally the Founding Treaty for the Deutsches Reich 1871 - instead he made secretary/chancellor/whatever fake his signature! chess
Re:christian socialists (Score:2, Informative)
There were actually two chancellors from the SPD: Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt.
Re:christian socialists (Score:3, Informative)
They don't, that's simply a wrong translation. Their name is "Christlich-soziale Union", which means "Christian Social Union". "Christian Socialist Union" would translate to "Christlich Sozialistische Union". There is a big difference between "social" and "socialist". "Social" sounds positive, basically every political party in Germany would like to claim that they make social (=something like fair and balanced) politics. The governing party in Germany is called the Social-Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschland, SPD). There is only one party (at least from the well known parties) that carries "socialistic" in their name, the PDS (Partei des demokratischen Sozialismus, Party of the democratic socialism), which is the successor of the former East German communists. They are basically the political antipode to the CSU.
Umbrella scheme (Score:2, Informative)
The Munich migration is a part of an EU-funded umbrella scheme called COSPA (Consortium for Open Source in Public Administration) -- http://www.cospa-project.org [cospa-project.org] -- for assisting and monitoring migration of public bodies to FLOSS and ODS. (Another such migration that has made some progress is a large hospital in Dublin, Beaumont Hospital [beaumont.ie] -- although their main web server still seems to be ASP.) See COSPA's web site for a fuller list. (It will later have a knowledge-base for sharing tips and experiences of switching to FLOSS in this context.)
Re:Are They In? Or Out? (Score:1, Informative)
The CSU cannot get any good or bad results outside of Bavaria, because it does not candidate anywhere else
The CDU does not candidate in Bavaria, where the CSU candidates, and the CSU does not candidate in the rest of Germany, where you have the CDU.
CDU and CSU are also one and the same fraction in parliament (both in the German parliament and in the European Parliament). SPD and Greens are not.
Also note that in Munich (the city), the SPD is traditionally stronger than the CSU, unlike in the rest of Bavaria.
The OS migration falls within the competence of the city government, not the Bavarian state government or the German federal government. A success of CDU/CSU on the state level or the federal level is not going to change anything about the migration.