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Additionally, the money they use will be channeled to local companies (which means more jobs, improvement of local skill pool, making it cheaper to repeat such transitions in other cities).

Definitely beats shoveling the money to american robber baron company by any stretch.

You say this as if it's necessarily a bad thing.

It's a good idea to get things done as quickly as possible, generally speaking, but you should also give them as much time as necessary to do them PROPERLY.

Munich, it seems, was under no particular pressure to rush the project through and meet and arbitrarily-set deadlines so that shareholders would be satisfied or so that a C*O would be able to collect his bonus. Isn't it better to take a few more years and actually do the job well, in a way that will ensure the resulting "ecosystem" and infrastructure is going to last, than to rush it and have it all fall apart in 5 or 10 or even 20 years?

Of course, this is Slashdot, so chances are you're the libertarian sort who hates anything that's been touched by the "government". Which is fair enough, but you shouldn't confuse cause and effect: if you want to hate the government, do so because the things it does are objectively bad. If you automatically view everything the government does as bad for no other reason than that it's the government (which you hate) that did it, then you've got it backwards - you've slipped from reason into more or less blind ideology.

No. They migrated the applications first. In addition they replaced bad, old applications for administrative processes with new ones, which are designed to work with modern administrative processes. That's what it taking so long. Also they are training their stuff.

And, they are doing a "soft migration" in which relevant open source applications are being installed on Windows to gear up the user base for the switch. Just pulling the rug out from under all the users quickly is stupid and will generate nothing but backlash.

From the article - this is a little more about the actual process:

To iron out the system's teething troubles, the project team first conducted pilot migrations in three departments that volunteered for the purpose. Before migrating a department, Matthias Braun and his colleagues in the migration support team take a close look at the particular situation in that section, and work out a solution with the local system administrators.

The LiMux migration itself begins only when the ground is thus prepared. Again, each department can choose which migration path it wants: either moving all services to the new operating system in one bold stroke, or a so-called soft migration in several stages.

During such a soft migration, the administrators first deploy OpenOffice, Firefox and Thunderbird on computers still running a version of Windows. In a second step, they switch to the new operating system. In order to minimise the impact of any problems that may occur, the first systems to be migrated are those that are not frequently used for contact with other sections of the city's administration, and do not have to exchange documents between different office program suites.

Until the end of 2008, each of the city's departments will have a "LiMux germ cell". These are groups of 30-50 workstations that will be migrated to the LiMux client. Even in departments that are sceptical towards the migration, this helps the IT staff to become familiar with the software. This approach also allows the LiMux project team to learn about the specific technical requirements of each department, and address them before the full-scale roll-out of the software.

Color me impressed. They've attempted to head virtually ever issue off at the pass. Migrating to Openoffice, Firefox and Thunderbird on XP was exactly what I did before migrating to Linux, and it's the only time I ever succeeded for more than say, a week or two. I think it's been nearly two years now for me since I began my own "soft migration" and no signs of going back. Another thing that impresses me is their "Linux Germ Cell" idea - get the IT departments up to speed slowly before rolling it out en-masse. Other people here have criticized the "only 10% rolled out" stat, but the last thing you want to do is roll out a mass linux migration without even understanding what the main bugs are or how to solve them, and you can guarantee that there will be a huge learning curve.

One thing I wonder about though - anyone with the ability to block something will do so if they perceive that their income stream is likely to be lessened somehow, either now or in the future. I hope this was anticipated. I can think of at least two solutions: make sure that these individuals are first identified and then either making sure they end up getting paid as much or more after the switch as they used to (and this is communicated to them earnestly)... or, they get purged right away, before they can block anything.