Munich Decides On Debian 59
RichiH writes "Notwithstanding the recent craze about Ubuntu and the negative effects this might have, the german city of Munich chose Debian as the base for its LiMux project. Gonicus and SoftCon are the companies who were chosen to achieve this feat. With 14,000 desktops, this is one of the largest Linux transistions ever, even prompting Microsoft's Steve Balmer to offer a rebate of 90%. Other /. coverage here here and here."
Long time planning. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ballmer can kiss my !@# (Score:3, Insightful)
Questions to be answered.
Why be surprised? (Score:2, Insightful)
I feel this is like comparing ROCK with Gentoo, if less extreem
Re:Long time planning. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not cheap enough (Score:1, Insightful)
Therein lies the flaw in Microsoft's business model. Sun and IBM can pay you $20 to give up Windows, because they live off of hardware and services.
Re:Looking forward to the know-how... (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, since they are using Debian, I would assume the use of apt/dpkg since that's Debian's package management software.
I am curious as to what you mean by "a uniform distribution of packages"? Are you discussing the bandwidth of updating 14,000 desktops from a Debian mirror, and thus want to setup your own mirror/repository? Or, are you asking about how someone would administer/roll out 14,000 workstations?
Re:Long time planning. (Score:3, Insightful)
Just like with computer hardware, the longer you wait for Linux the better the version you get.
By the time deployment comes it will probably have OpenOffice 2.2, Evolution 2.4, etc.
Success of the project will be measured by office workers shrugging as they get to work on the new systems and finding expected functionality has continued wondering what the big deal was all about.
Kind of like the Y2K non-event.
Re:Not cheap enough (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think this is the result, but what is happening is that software-only systems companies (Microsoft) are being undercut on their entire product lineup. That ain't good for business.
Look what Sun and IBM can do that Microsoft can't:
- give away the OS (OpenSolaris and Linux)
- give away the dev platform (Java & J2EE--rumors of open source JES from Sun, too)
- give away productivity apps (OpenOffice.org, GIMP, etc.)
What does that leave Microsoft with, the XBox? All the while, Sun and IBM are selling SPARC, POWER, and Opteron servers and selling support and services surrounding those servers.
IMO, in the long term, Microsoft will either have to be bought by a real systems company (HP? Dell?) and become a small figment of what they now are or inevitably become a teeny-tiny figment of what they now are.
90%? (Score:4, Insightful)
marginal costs (Score:1, Insightful)
you see, with a standard product, like a car, a large hunk of the cost comes from paying for the raw materials, paying to make them into the parts and paying for the assembly and testing.
Since microsoft has already written windows the cost per additional sale is mostly in actual cd production. We are looking a cents/copy. But if they were to sell these in a microeconomic free market (one without monopolies) they would only be able to charge slightly more than marginal costs. If microsoft only got cents/copy they would lose money and all incentive to produce a product.
This has the side effect that they can increase revenue by decreasing the prices of a FEW copies that they otherwise would not have sold almost without limit.