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New Munich city government agrees to use open source software where possible

zdnet.com

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Re: New Munich city government agrees to use open source software where possible

#61

Post by mschuster91 »

bitL wrote: post #36
mschuster91 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From my personal experience most times the hardest part is to convince the users. Former actual LiMux team member here, so I can speak from experience (almost a decade ago though). The hardest part was convince users to be happy on utterly inadequate and aged hardware . No, 1 GB of RAM won't cut it when you have to have Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice and some fucking Java crap open at the same time, and 1024x768…

Yeah, that must have been a huge problem. These days however an OKayish notebook can be had for $400 or an i3 NUC with 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD with an IPS 1080p monitor for $500, and those would run any Linux well for foreseeable future without killing city's budget.

Unfortunately that isn't easy with the way government procuring works. Basically, you make a specsheet what you want (e.g. spare components must be available for a duration of X years) and then have to publish tenders, and usually the vendors offering bids have to fulfill certain conditions (e.g. must have a reliable history working with governments).

The last part alone excludes many cheap vendors as they don't have government contracting experience, and the spare parts requirements kills the rest as they can only be so cheap because they don't have to build much of a spare parts infrastructure. (Note: this is not specifically relating to LiMux in any way, I have no knowledge about the contracts/tender process that happened back then)

Also, the scale matters: 15.500 PCs are even at 500$ apiece 7.75 million €.

Re: New Munich city government agrees to use open source software where possible

#63

Post by ivanche »

user5994461 wrote: post #30
buran77 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my personal experience most times the hardest part is to convince the users. You can throw a lot of resources at the migration, money, good technical experts, and get it done right. But making the regular users happy? That's a whole different subject. Truth is most users still run Windows at home and are familiar with it. Getting used to something else will meet some resistance. Then you have the minor compatibi…

>>> Getting used to something else will meet some resistance. It's too gentle to say that users are struggling or resisting. The fact on the ground is that a significant part of users are simply incapable of learning new computer software, they can't even use effectively the software they've been working on for years. This is glaring in a giant government organization with tens of thousands of employees. Thus any att…

IMO this is UX fail. If the question starts with "Do you...", only reasonable button choices should be "Yes" and "No", not "Save", "Quit" and "Cancel".

Re: New Munich city government agrees to use open source software where possible

#64

Post by Zhyl »

gryzzly wrote: post #60

In case of government spend it is hard for me to comprehend why almost no place in the world has fully open source gov technology. Governments everywhere spend these insane amounts on really bad software :/

The sad reality is that there just isn't enough awareness or understanding of technology within Government to make it onto the agenda. The exceptions of this are little pockets of like-minded individuals such as GDS [1] who have done some exemplary work on open sourcing tech.

The downside is that much of the 'trunk' of IT (workstations, Business Software, internal systems) are still contracted out to monolithic, old-school contractors who have no incentive to innovate by non-technical procurement teams. This leads to a culture of proprietary software where the established/expensive solutions are seen as the most trustworthy and there isn't any cost to vendor lock-in or non-interoperability of systems until the next tranche of officials have taken over and all of those issues can be written off as 'legacy' and as a sunk cost.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Digital_Service

Re: New Munich city government agrees to use open source software where possible

#65

Post by imchillyb »

...Until they're voted out and replaced with those who are against 'hacker software'.

This is the same ol' carousel we've been going round and round on now for more than 2 decades.

Some people 'get' free and open software, the other people run our world.

Re: New Munich city government agrees to use open source software where possible

#66

Post by skinkestek »

computerfriend wrote: post #52
yorwba wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's open source but you can't talk about it? How does that even work?

It depends on the motives. E.g. they hire Palentir but don't want to have those bad associations, so NDA the Palentir contractors working on it.

I'm not working for Palantir, what we work on is linked to one of:

- capacity planning for renewables (hydro power)

- streamlining mass transit

- large scale collection and recycling of bottles

- search and rescue operations in the North Sea

- education

as for why the NDA, my best guess is because "they could". Someone should tell them they are losing out on some great publisity and goodwill.

Re: New Munich city government agrees to use open source software where possible

#67

Post by mikhailt »

gryzzly wrote: post #60

In case of government spend it is hard for me to comprehend why almost no place in the world has fully open source gov technology. Governments everywhere spend these insane amounts on really bad software :/

Well, in US, that probably is because of several reasons:

1. Lack of central organization, it's easier to work with and pay a single private company or a contractor than hiring folks and working with open source projects that usually has no legal body, no billing, etc. Hiring and working with various companies to update, maintain, and so on with many projects isn't as easy as it sounds. (True, you could hire a single company to maintain a single distro for the whole gov't to use but is it cheaper than a private solution that 80% of the market already uses?).

2. Lobbyists, they'll explain it's cheaper to hire private companies to produce and cheaper maintenance over time especially since ^.

3. A share of citizens that doesn't believe in a bigger federal govt.

4. States want to do it their own ways instead of trusting the fed govt.

5. Distrust in govt in general on all fronts.

Re: New Munich city government agrees to use open source software where possible

#68

Post by vharuck »

Zhyl wrote: post #64
gryzzly wrote: post #60

In case of government spend it is hard for me to comprehend why almost no place in the world has fully open source gov technology. Governments everywhere spend these insane amounts on really bad software :/

The sad reality is that there just isn't enough awareness or understanding of technology within Government to make it onto the agenda. The exceptions of this are little pockets of like-minded individuals such as GDS [1] who have done some exemplary work on open sourcing tech. The downside is that much of the 'trunk' of IT (workstations, Business Software, internal systems) are still contracted out to monolithic, old-…

As a state government worker, this jives with my experience. The ultimate beneficiaries of any budget savings or improved processes are citizens who have no idea, let alone input, about what we're doing behind the scenes. It's very hard to convince public employees to work with those people in mind. You're right, the people buying the software are even harder to convince. With no good measures of effect, they rely on what's easiest for them. So Microsoft and PDFs everywhere.

Our software licenses are paid through a grant from the federal government. If we replace them with open source software, we don't get to keep the difference. So now I have licensed software like SAS and ArcGIS gathering dust on my machine while I use R and Python.

And sharing software we develop is even harder. I've pushed to release code for my statistical reports. When I said researchers and other states could benefit by reusing parts, my supervisors only saw it as a liability with no benefit to us. I might try to slip it in as part of the technical notes.

Re: New Munich city government agrees to use open source software where possible

#69

Post by cxr »

acd wrote: post #22

Governments should develop and run opensource systems. That way different governments can collaborate to build better systems through open innovation. Not wasting tax payers money on closed source. I bet tax and pension systems have the same basic requirements cross countries with some local specifics.

This is the basis of https://publiccode.eu/

Re: New Munich city government agrees to use open source software where possible

#70

Post by partiallypro »

acd wrote: post #22

Governments should develop and run opensource systems. That way different governments can collaborate to build better systems through open innovation. Not wasting tax payers money on closed source. I bet tax and pension systems have the same basic requirements cross countries with some local specifics.

Is there evidence that governments are saving that much more with open source? You'd still have to pay developers...and some cities are going to freeload off others to avoid overhead costs.
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