Sonu Kapoor's WebLog

# re: German city picks Linux over Microsoft@ Thursday, June 17, 2004 11:15 AM

It might even be good for business generating lots of work porting lots of small important applications to the new platform :)

# re: German city picks Linux over Microsoft@ Thursday, June 17, 2004 11:27 AM

When will these fools learn

# re: German city picks Linux over Microsoft@ Thursday, June 17, 2004 11:28 AM

What OmegaSupreme?

# City of Nuremberg will not emulate Munich's migration to Linux desktop @ Thursday, June 17, 2004 2:36 PM

We are working in the e-Government sector in Europe. Everyone is looking very curios to what happens in Munich, it is far from beeing a successful project (right now).

Other german cities already have learned from the problems in Munich and back off from Linux. See for example:
http://europa.eu.int/ISPO/ida/jsps/index.jsp?fuseAction=showDocument&documentID=2576&parent=chapter&preChapterID=0-452-469

# re: German city picks Linux over Microsoft@ Thursday, June 17, 2004 2:42 PM

Christian is right, Munich made this choice couple years ago and look where they're now. It truns out to be pretty bad for the Linux crowd (they just underestimated the cost and work needed to introduce a completely new system, the price of the software is such a small portion of that it makes no difference).

# re: German city picks Linux over Microsoft@ Thursday, June 17, 2004 3:15 PM

It seems that Munich didnt made a good choice. Well, lets see what happens!

# re: German city picks Linux over Microsoft@ Thursday, June 17, 2004 3:17 PM

Sonu, I mean't when will the decision makers learn that they're wasting their time with that hippy penguin rubish. It will cost them in the long term.

# re: German city picks Linux over Microsoft@ Thursday, June 17, 2004 3:19 PM

ah...sorry OmegaSupreme!

# re: German city picks Linux over Microsoft@ Friday, June 18, 2004 3:31 AM

Christian and Jerry, I think the biggest problem is the small *critical* bespoke apps that they probably have on their network that can't be ported easily (because they are proprietary/closed source rather than too sophisticated for Linux).

The funny thing is that if the Linux project is not 100% successful I am sure it will be blamed on Microsoft lock-in (which I honestly do believe exists), although that wouldn't necessarily be my opinion/belief.


OmegaSupreme wrote "hippy penguin rubish"

Bad argument. Poor spelling. Blunt pencil.
Hope it was a joke.

# re: German city picks Linux over Microsoft@ Friday, June 18, 2004 4:59 AM

A few facts and comments on LiMux:

1) Last year, the political descision to move to Linux was approved and some feasibility studies, basic analysis were started.

2) This decision was against economic facts (costs). It was a political decision. This fact was openly proclaimed by the social democtrativ and green party (Munich is governed by those left winge parties). Expected investment: 30 Mio EURO. 16.000 clerks with 13.000 Desktops.

3) The move to Linux was co-sponsered by IBM and Novell/Suse (free services, test installations etc).

4) In January 2004, the IT Manager of Munich complained in a press conference, that the fundings and support of the different offices are critical for the progress - high efforts, lower than expected enthusiasm in the organization.

5) This week, the city council of Munich started the process of public tendering. Information in German on that: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/48313 Their goals is, to have solely Open Source products installed on Desktops.

Some comments: Don't expect LiMux to be one project: it will be a many years process, moving the desktops, training the people (16.000!) and migrating the applications of the offices in the administrations. This will be the touch-stone of the project: every large public administration has got a bunch of very special applications, either available as standard software or written over the last decades as individual software.

Since those applications represent the fullfillment of laws binded to organizational processes between the citizen, economy and the administration and laws are mostly built in a complex to bizare sphere of influence between the laws in the EU, the country, the federal state and the city, you can expect to rewrite virtually every Windows application available. Or you use a Windows Emulator running on Linux ;-))

Doesn't it makes more sense to accept the facts that today's IT is complex, heterogenous and multi-vendored? We have already got the technology available to combine those systems in an open and scalable manner.

6) Political goal 1: More commercial IT services in Munich through Open Source.
My comment: using old technical strategies/plattforms (basically Unix), implementing a complex stack of different softwares from different sourcs with an uncertain future vs. using commercial software from successful vendorts who are liable for their products - which would you choose? Using .NET, Java, PL/SQL - what makes the difference regarding the political goal to support local IT service companies? Customers in the public sector demand reliable suppliers with a certain size and reputation - will the public sector now change this attitude just because the use Open Source? Will the supplieres of standard software sell their products with an Open Source license model to the city of Munich? Probably not. I guess the city of Munich wants to create a myth, that those all poor two-people development shops who now suffer from a bad economy in Germany will be contracted by the city - I don't believe that.

7) Political goal 2: Vendor independence.
My comment: Yes, some large vendors are arrogant. Some large customers, too ;-) Using SUSE or Red Hat in an enterprise environment just means, you contract - now or then - with IBM and Novell. They are as much gentlemen as Oracle of Microsoft, I'm sure ;-). A popular argumentation is, that you can easily switch your application server and reach vendor indepencse through that flexibility. The right term then is, vendor changeability. Correct, as long as you strictly apply J2EE standards. As far as I know the ability of (any) organization to "strictly apply" something, this vendor changability will be a) not be possible due to bogues implementations of standards and b) not proactivly driven by the - commercial vendors - of Open Source platforms. They will do anything they can to gain the maximum customer retention (to express it political correctly ;-))

Wouldn't it be smarter for Munich, to concentrate on their citizen and economy, rather than pushing political goals without a creation of value for their voters? Wouldn't it be smarted to concentrate on E-Government and set up standards how to communicate inside and with the administration?

Wouldn't it be smart for any public organization to concentrate on their organizational output usefull for the people rather than implementing the same, but just using "Open Source"?

The bottom line: Public authorities should be in dialog with their suppliers. Public tendors shouldn't discriminate vendors of commercial software - at the end, this is the econmic system, our society is build on and relies on. Using the administration to fulfill political goals seems not to be appropriate, if the majority of suppliers are disadvantaged.

# re: German city picks Linux over Microsoft@ Friday, June 18, 2004 5:04 AM

Andreas wrote "Don't expect LiMux to be one project: it will be a many years process, moving the desktops, training the people (16.000!) and migrating the applications of the offices in the administrations."

Does it worry no-one that one company can completely tie you in so tight that it takes *years* to move to another platform ? I haven't seem a jump of this scale before and it looks truly terrifying - but surely they've the right to use whatever platform they wish.

# re: German city picks Linux over Microsoft@ Friday, June 18, 2004 7:05 AM

Anon, I think the source of the efforts to migrate is not the existing platform - it's the nature and history of IT. Like changing furnitre. If you want a new kitchen, it's not the problem of the old kitchen's technology, that you have to remove it and potentially change the publing to fit the new kitchen ;-))

To be serious: If you rewrite applications today using a service oriented architecture, a future switch will be easier. If you have a look on the history of this technology you will see, that those possibilites are only available for a short time and I think we can't blame a single supplier for that. On the other hand, Munich is migrating from Windows NT 4.0 (!) - which shows, that they haven't invested continously in their IT too much.

Your car, your house or your private relationsships - if you don't invest steadily in improvements and maintanance, the price one day will be higher, if they break (in Munich's case the price is the ending support of NT 4 I think).

Still new systems mean user training, projectmanagement & development effort. This is not a problem binded to a specific technolgy.

One final sentence on the training effort: Windows and Office is the de-facto standard, everybody knows the basics now, either from school or from private usage and previous jobs. That should be taken into considerations when migrating to a platform which is partly uncommon to it's users. We can't blame Microsoft on the fact, that they offer a successfull product everybody knows, can we?

# re: German city picks Linux over Microsoft@ Friday, June 18, 2004 7:06 AM

read pulbing as plumbing please ;-)

# re: German city picks Linux over Microsoft@ Friday, June 18, 2004 8:18 AM

Andreas,

Switching to an SOA sounds like a sensible idea, it's not the first time that SOAs have been popular however and they didn't stick last time although that might be just that there were no big companies behind it. It does mean however that you can't change the architecture doesn't it - it assumes that SOA is the appropriate solution - remember, there is no silver bullet.

Also using an SOA does not count Linux (or any other *n*x) out of the equation there is no reason why some/all of the services cannot be on different platforms. They didn't have an SOA for the very reason you suggest - investment. If by investment you mean upgrade to Microsoft's latest and greatest each time, I don't think that is viable - purely in terms of cost - but you know a lot of people are still running big systems on Linux 2.2 kernels and are quite happy with them.

I also don't believe the training will be as complicated as you imply. OpenOffice is not a million miles from MS Office, and in general users are not as stupid as we in IT like to make out (okay okay some are).

I have to disagree with your kitchen analogy (or is it metaphor? I can never remember). If I buy a kitchen and all of the plumbing uses special widgets (I know zilch about plumbing) that nobody else's kitchen furniture uses then when I get a new kitchen with the universal connector I'll be upset with the *people who sold me* the original kitchen. I don't want to be forced to go to the same supplier just because I can't afford to have the widgets changed. Ironically enough this did happen to me recently with my central heating boiler (we need these in the UK) ... I wasn't happy.

Your last comment about not blaming Microsoft for producing successful products also does not ring true. I seem to recall tactics that involved threatening hardware suppliers if they tried to ship any non-windows product with their hardware - and I believe the remnants of Be Inc (wipes tear from corner of eye) are currently in court with Microsoft about this very issue.

I'm not anti-Microsoft at all btw but I like Linux, it gives me the freedom to learn things about Operating Systems (as does using OSX) that I just can't from Microsoft (without NDAs that will likely affect what I can work on in future).

So not anti-Microsoft - pro choice.

# re: German city picks Linux over Microsoft@ Friday, June 18, 2004 8:47 AM

Here is an another interesting article about that topic:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,1110809,00.asp

# re: German city picks Linux over Microsoft@ Friday, June 18, 2004 9:11 AM

Anon, I like the way the dialog between us runs, because it's not dogmatic.

In short, because I'm a little in hurry:

You are right, using everything new is no solution, we all have to balance cost/results. But still using NT 4.0 is something different, regarding typical IT life time cycles - driven by technological progress, not a single large company. And after all, IT in general (and this progress) should save money through different factors. Otherwise no one would upgrade to anything.

In general I don't like metaphors, too, because they mostly doesn't fit and are used to simplify coherences which are not simple at all (and mostly from an angled view). So please excuse the kitchen thing, it was just too nice ;-) What I meant with the kitchen thing was, that kitchen technology might change over the years. Trying to compare the life cycles of kitchens to software, a kitchen might be replaced every twenty years or so I guess. What I wanted to express is, that the original manufacturer can't be blamed, if there are new - and improved - standards, many years afterwards.

The training thing implies user productivity for me, the learning curve. I'm with you - understanding OpenOffice will not be too complicated (funny enough it can be considered as a clone of Office - if people don't like Office and commercial software - why do they copy their stuff? But that might be another discussion). Considering a complete new set of tools (printing, office, applications, groupware etc) I think there is an impact of the overall productivity of the organization. And I don't think, that the system will be 100% support, error- and question free for all users. Like with every new software thing, but the learning for Microsoft products is already done.

Just that I put something right here, that you don't get a wrong impression: I'm very, very uncertain, if you need Microsoft Office on every desktop. If you make a blue print of a new set up, it might be interesting to force Microsoft to deliver "basic versions" of some products, which are cheaper, easier and have a lighter footprint.

And there is still some work to do for Microsoft, to improve their office products to make them more convenient. But I don't have a MS paranoia here. The more the software delivers you functionality-wise, the more it can be improved ;-) So I think once OpenOffice is successfull, they will turn into those topics, too.

I don't know too much on the business tactics of Microsoft and don't want to comment that because I'm unsure if these are arguments of unsuccessfull companies. After all, it's the customer who decides what's good or not. Remember OS/2? They had all chances. But I'm too much certain, that econmy is driven by customers and people - which might be wrong.

And a final thought which crossed my mind a few minutes ago: these kind of discussions we have are still mixing different things heavily: Open Source, Open Standards and Linux. I think each of the topics is worth it's own discussion ;-)

Hmm, my post was not short anyway now; let me please express that I'm happy to get such constructive and mind-stimulating thoughts from you - thank you.

# re: German city picks Linux over Microsoft@ Friday, June 18, 2004 9:18 AM

Hmmm

The "$42 million migration" puzzles me. isn't Linux free of cost?

Nish

# re: German city picks Linux over Microsoft@ Friday, June 18, 2004 9:26 AM

Nish, Linux is free to download but if you want a good documentation and a package then you will have to buy it. But I dont think that they are going to spend 42$ million dollar to buy the software, instead this is the rate to migrate it. Just imagine that each PC has to be changed from windows to linux. Somebody will have to do this and ofcouse he will not do that for free. Furthermore there are planning costs etc.

# Linux, Munich, and Sonu Kapoor@ Friday, June 18, 2004 9:37 AM

# Linux, Munich, and Sonu Kapoor@ Friday, June 18, 2004 9:53 AM

# re: German city picks Linux over Microsoft@ Friday, June 18, 2004 9:59 AM

Ah, got it. Thx Sonu :-)

# re: German city picks Linux over Microsoft@ Monday, June 21, 2004 3:31 AM

Andreas, if you can find a forum that's not full of zealots I'd love to discuss these things with you. I was about to write quite a long response but you're right I don't want to drag this too much off topic.

It's my one criticism of blogs - it's really hard to have a proper discussion unless you have a blog of your own and use talkbacks :(

# re: German city picks Linux over Microsoft@ Monday, June 21, 2004 3:39 AM

I forgot to mention, France is considering OSS too ...

http://weblogs.asp.net/edaniel/archive/2004/06/21/160833.aspx

# re: German city picks Linux over Microsoft@ Monday, June 21, 2004 6:24 AM

Anon, I dont have any prob with your discussions on my blog. Feel free to discuss this topic further.

# More European governments move to open source@ Monday, June 21, 2004 6:35 AM

# More European governments move to open source@ Monday, June 21, 2004 6:37 AM

# Go Nuremberg@ Tuesday, June 22, 2004 9:16 AM

# re: German city picks Linux over Microsoft@ Tuesday, June 29, 2004 10:28 AM

Imagine if Toyota was the only car company in the world...u'd be ripped off....

go linux...and there i say..go linux..go linux....

# re: German city picks Linux over Microsoft@ Friday, July 16, 2004 10:39 AM

MUST. NOT. FEED. TROLL.....

And if Microsoft were to disappear today wouldn't that make Linux == Toyota??

# re: German city picks Linux over Microsoft@ Thursday, August 05, 2004 5:56 AM

can you answer to me , please?

why France or German country Governments organization choose linux development IT platform?