The State of Munich's Ongoing Linux Migration 203
christian.einfeldt writes "The Munich decision to move its 14,000 desktops to Free Open Source Software created a big splash back in 2003 as news circulated of the third-largest German city's defection from Microsoft. When it was announced in 2003, the story garnered coverage even in the US, such as an extensive article in USA Today on-line. Currently, about 60% of desktops are using OpenOffice, with the remaining 40% to be completed by the end of 2009. Firefox and Thunderbird are being used in all of the city's desktop machines. Ten percent of desktops are running the LiMux Debian-based distro, and 80% will be running LiMux by 2012 at the latest. Autonomy was generally considered more important than cost savings, although the LiMux initiative is increasing competition in the IT industry in Munich already. The program has succeeded because the city administration has been careful to reach out to all stakeholders, from managers down to simple end users."
Re:A success? Some people disagree... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Both sides of the story (Score:5, Informative)
It's supposed to save money in the long run, of course MS will be cheaper at first because you don't have to cope with defeating the vendor lock-in if you stay with Windows but it matters what happens a few years down the line.
Re:Both sides of the story (Score:2, Informative)
It's 2009 and only 10% migration?
The migration started in 2005 and it is a two step migration:
1) migrate to openoffice, thunderbird and firefox (almost done)
2) migrate to linux (just started, 10%)
they are gradually migrating to linux, applications first, then the OS.
Re:A success? Some people disagree... (Score:3, Informative)
NT4 is normally used on servers (it's a bit expensive for the desktop
NT4 came in Server and Workstation versions (and some other big-server versions, I think). The Workstation version was not much more expensive than Windows 95, especially with a corporate site-license and had a lot of features that make sense in a corporate environment (e.g. login that you can't bypass by pressing 'escape'). It was a bit expensive for home users (I ran it because I got a free copy and bought a computer which came with no OS), but a lot of students ran it because the student license OS bundle included both '95 and NT4 for around £40. NT4 was a bit more RAM-intensive than '95, but if you had 32MB it ran nicely (my desktop at the time was a P166 with 32MB of RAM). If you wanted a corporate MS network before 2000 was released, and didn't want to pay a lot to Novell, you bought NT4 Server for the servers and NT4 Workstation for the desktops.
Re:A success? Some people disagree... (Score:1, Informative)
Lorenzo,
Really ?
I work in a 4200 employee firm. We run XP SP2 & a small percentage of Vista ( some server guys run Win08 on their desktops but that is the wayyy minority )
I run Fedora.
To read my email I can use webmail or Groupwise on Linux. ( same software I would use on windows )
To web surf I can use FireFox ( I like Chrome on windows but 2nd choice is FF )
To do spreadsheets or document I can use OpenOffice - I do have Office 2007 on my windows laptop and I can see zero difference between the documents I create/edit on OO versus Office.
Their is one tool I do not have on Linux - Visio. I am a network guy and my visio diagrams are legendary - I connect every single connection to the right port.
Now on the the other 4100 employees. They use Citrix. The ICA client runs just fine on Linux.
I think Linux - especially for "thin client" use ... no brainer.
Re:A success? Some people disagree... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Both sides of the story (Score:5, Informative)
From the article - this is a little more about the actual process:
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.
Re:Digg, Dug, Buried: How Linux news disappears (Score:4, Informative)
Re:A success? Some people disagree... (Score:5, Informative)
From the article at http://www.osor.eu/case_studies/declaration-of-independence-the-limux-project-in-munich#section-12/ [www.osor.eu]
Notice it was delayed by patent FUD. Software patents are not valid in the EU.
Notice also that they are implementing it in stages, using Open Source on top of Windows and only some departments installing Linux at a given time. It has a time line going to 2012 for completion. Incremental migration is pretty normal on large projects.
Outlook not so good (Score:2, Informative)
P.S. - Because it is a Gnome project the page makes it sound like you need to use the Gnome Window Manager. You don't. It works great with KDE 3.x and KDE 4.x. I suspect it works with most or all other WMs as well, so long as the gnome libs are on the system.
Re:A success? Some people disagree... (Score:5, Informative)
As much as I like to bash Microsoft, that doesn't completely answer his question. Even if there are more pro-Microsoft posters on Slashdot, does it mean that those posters are shills? Maybe their claims are justified.
You're right, he did not document it well, but take a look at "uassholes" reply for some nice commentary by one of the people running Digg about how there is definitely an astroturf program in place to bury articles critical of Microsoft there. Personally on Slashdot I've made a lot comments about MS's antitrust abuses in various articles and I noticed in such articles there are often dozens of comments from a handful of users whose posting history shows they only post in articles discussing Microsoft or Linux and always expressing the same view. I don't have any proof that these posters are in fact astroturfers, but if not they have a lot of time and very, very limited interest here. They generally only reply to highly modded posts ignoring everything else including replies to their comments. Further, I notice that comments I have which can be construed as critical of MS's practices are often modded to +5 for several days, then modded down significantly afterwards once the article is off the main page. Maybe it is simply normal behavior I don't understand, but I'm highly suspicious.
slow migration (Score:4, Informative)
Bearing in mind that the have migrated only 10% of desktops in 6 years
One reason the migrations has been slow is because in 2004 [www.osor.eu] they decided they wanted to do a study, the "study was conducted to clear up legal insecurities related to software patents. The actual migration has been running since 2005." Still it has been a long tyme.
Falcon