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Linux pioneer Munich poised to ditch open source and return to Windows

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Re: Linux pioneer Munich poised to ditch open source and return to Windows

#141

Post by tracker1 »

madez wrote: post #108
dukeluke wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. An industry with a high barrier to entry is prone to becoming a monopoly.

This is why I think governments should fund libre alternative projects substantially and long-term. It is a matter of national interest. LibreOffice Calc is missing features that are required by many users? The government should pay for it to be developed. The ironic thing is that it is not even expensive to break this monopoly. So many countries share this interest in breaking the monopoly. Why the EU spends billion…

The issue here, is that even as LO is firming up, the masses are moving to google docs and o365's online options... Which does reduce some barriers to switching, but introduces other development costs. MS is really good at making software, maybe not the best at UI/UX, but meeting needs in a relatively short period of time compared to competitors. o365 seems at first glance to be a bit better than google docs, and MS was pretty late to the party there.

Government can very rarely outpace private business in terms of getting things like this done.

Re: Linux pioneer Munich poised to ditch open source and return to Windows

#142

Post by tracker1 »

taspeotis wrote: post #48
jimnotgym wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better at what? Most users just write simple letters in Word and make simple lists in Excel. I am known as an Excel power user, and Excel is better at some things than calc, but not very much. Calc is better at exporting unicode CSV, which is big news for a developer. 365 starts at $99 a year, per user. That is quite a lot in my book when you have thousands of users

> 365 starts at $99 a year, per user. And at $150/yr it includes Exchange/SharePoint/Skype/Teams. The latter three aren't particularly exciting but not having to worry about email/calendaring is a big win.

Despite the quirkiness of eventually consistent email patterns, the calendar integration with exchange/outlook even on web is pretty damned nice. I'm getting used to the office gmail/docs/calendar, but the integration still isn't nearly as nice as outlook. The mail in gmail is much better though (as long as you stick to the web interface, go imap and prepare to be f'd up).

Re: Linux pioneer Munich poised to ditch open source and return to Windows

#143

Post by tracker1 »

ageofwant wrote: post #72
Sanddancer wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows is pretty inexpensive, and if you want something supported for more than a year or two, the options do tend to be somewhat costly. RedHat, for example, is $50/year for the equivalent of Windows Update. There are also a number of other advantages for windows in terms of things like remote management which RedHat doesn't have equivalents for.

Redhat has a vast array of remote management tools: Asible, puppet, cobbler, ssh etc. Most all of them are superior to Microsoft's offerings. It would make perfect sense to have a Linux host on machines if most applications are web based.

But then you have to maintain ansible/puppet etc scripts to keep things in order... and when one machine doesn't work right, you have to figure it all out, often searching through stack exchange sites/answers... let alone getting answers for other distros, or even other versions of your distro than no longer apply.

That doesn't even consider hardware variations and compatibility issues with drivers.

Re: Linux pioneer Munich poised to ditch open source and return to Windows

#144

Post by tracker1 »

gigatexal wrote: post #6

Don't be surprised if Microsoft made the windows licenses free or nearly so so that they could sell them office 365 licenses.

I'm half surprised they didn't try switching to o365 for their users, while keeping the linux desktop distro, and allowing for exceptions for specific use cases.

Re: Linux pioneer Munich poised to ditch open source and return to Windows

#145

Post by squarefoot »

frik wrote: post #128
zeeZ wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While someone being "geschmiert" does mean they were bribed, "läuft wie geschmiert" translates to things running smoothly (like a well-oiled machine).

If you know German, it's the double meaning of the word, it's sarcasm. If you just look at the Duden dictionary, your findings are technically true.

Must be an international thing. In my country as well the act of "oiling gears" means giving bribes in order to obtain something and/or speed up the process by having your papers put on top of the pile.

Re: Linux pioneer Munich poised to ditch open source and return to Windows

#146

Post by polotics »

pjmlp wrote: post #126
matt4077 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't take a willingness of many people to accuse someone of a crime as evidence of it. It's also counterproductive, furthering the believe that "all politicians are corrupt" without evidence. If that's the reaction you get for any decision that is mildly controversial, you may actually start considering it. There's also Occam's razor: less than 2% of people choose Linux on the desktop. Maybe it's just not that…

I rather have proprietary formats on my hard disk, than open formats stored on someone's else computer.

why? I fail to see the logic, both are bad.

Re: Linux pioneer Munich poised to ditch open source and return to Windows

#147

Post by bayesian_horse »

tracker1 wrote: post #141
madez wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I think governments should fund libre alternative projects substantially and long-term. It is a matter of national interest. LibreOffice Calc is missing features that are required by many users? The government should pay for it to be developed. The ironic thing is that it is not even expensive to break this monopoly. So many countries share this interest in breaking the monopoly. Why the EU spends billion…

The issue here, is that even as LO is firming up, the masses are moving to google docs and o365's online options... Which does reduce some barriers to switching, but introduces other development costs. MS is really good at making software, maybe not the best at UI/UX, but meeting needs in a relatively short period of time compared to competitors. o365 seems at first glance to be a bit better than google docs, and MS…

The government can fund private business developing free software to outpace another private business.

For example Continuum Analytics is partly funded by public sources to work on open data science, competing against commercial offerings from SAS, for example. The Blender Foundation has some public funding for developing new features for the Blender 3D software suite, partly through public film funding.

Re: Linux pioneer Munich poised to ditch open source and return to Windows

#148

Post by RandomOpinion »

Const-me wrote: post #106
_0ffh wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[This should be one level down, but last comment from Const-me has no reply button.] Well I also do some native code development. That's why I have been given a tool that grants me limited time local SU privileges, given I enter at least 3 words in the field for "reason", and a valid cost center ID. I kid you not: It seems that executing a piece of code that grants me time limited local SU privileges leads to some co…

Apparently, this message board gives commenters a couple of minutes to correct their comment. That’s why the “Reply” link only appears after some time. About your administrator tool, yeah, that sucks. I once worked in a company where the managers were paranoid about us leaking the source code of the game we developed. We all had 2 PCs, one for development, another one for the Internet, two physically-separate local n…

>I once worked in a company where the managers were paranoid about us leaking the source code of the game we developed.

Not necessarily unwarranted; I still remember the leak of the source code for Half-Life 2 making headlines back in 2003.

https://games.slashdot.org/story/03/10/02/1547218/half-life-...

(Good grief, has it really been that long since Half-Life 2? I feel old.)

Re: Linux pioneer Munich poised to ditch open source and return to Windows

#149

Post by nisa »

buovjaga wrote: post #82
nisa wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you can read about the topic in Germany is that the switch had a lot of ideology behind it and after more than 13 years people are still unhappy. You have to consider this is an administration of one of the largest cities in Germany with lot's of custom processes and tools. Also workers there vary from their IT background and I guess most are not power users. Their approach was basically eliminate Windows everyw…

Regarding the problems: http://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-flagship-munichs-u-turn-i... "According to Kirschner, Munich's IT problems are not so much down to the use of free software as they are the result of poor management and organizational structure, a view backed up by Accenture's study." Here is the full study (10MB PDF): https://www.ris-muenchen.de/RII/RII/DOK/SITZUNGSVORLAGE/4277...

Interesting read. Looks like Linux / Free Software is not the problem in itself but a lack of updates and bad drivers / hardware support and MS office file formats broke their neck.

But they have an organisational structure where demands from users get stuck between departments and improvements/testing does not work. Fixes and updates are not delivered on time and contain new problems. There is infighting between departments that have to account for their needs and this leads to local modifications that cause problems.

Issues they found are printing, software bugs and problems displaying documents. Quite a big percentage (30-40%) still running KDE 3.5 and Ubuntu 10.04 with OpenOffice 2? 3?

They had no Windows concept until 2012 and before that every department that wanted to use Windows had to roll their own and that led to installations without AD and updates. They still run XP and 2000 on 30% of Windows machines.

They can also only pay below average and Munich is expensive so it's probably not a first choice for IT guys. Additionally they don't have a budget for new hardware.

Re: Linux pioneer Munich poised to ditch open source and return to Windows

#150

Post by milesrout »

bayesian_horse wrote: post #91
milesrout wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that astounds me the most is that it's the single clearest example of a monopoly in history. There really is no better example of a monopoly in any industry ever. Microsoft had >95% of desktops running Windows, and the many various government organisations all over the world tasked with preventing and dealing with these sorts of monopolies did nothing .

In all fairness, there is hardly anything to be done about it. You just can't come up with a full MS Office replacement fast enough to be relevant. Short of completely dismantling Microsoft, or even seizing their assets by governments (two options I don't approve of), I don't see a way to break that monopoly as long as this kind of Office Software is relevant.

Dismantling Microsoft would absolutely be the correct response. That's what they did to Bell or AT&T or whatever they were called, and it was a good thing.

Break up Microsoft into a company that makes Office, a company that makes Windows and a company that does .NET.

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