Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions
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Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions
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Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions
#2A+ would read again!!
Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions
#3Is 2014 the year of Linux on desktop?
Joke aside, it makes me happy to see the transition from Microsoft to Linux has been a success. I remember reading the news headline when they first announced it. I wonder how many of the 22,000 government officers that use Ubuntu at work are now also using Ubuntu at home?
Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions
#4It reminds me http://xkcd.com/934/ for most simple users. What a government officer do at his/her workstation? They probably have every service through web pages, almost nobody builds native programs anymore. And for the most cases LibreOffice is not perfect, but adequate to do simple jobs. So it is very logical to use something free for these tasks, to replace Windows+Office and save money.
Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions
#5I'm very impressed with the scale of the project. I can definitely see both the short term and long term ramifications and huge huge huge potential savings.
I'm a bit curious to know what the shelf life on the OS choice is and how well it works. I believe redhat ran into this issue and adopted the "extended support" versions in order to address the concerns (the linux space tends to move _very_ quickly in directions and you can definitely be left out in the cold if you don't stay relatively current).
All in all I doubt it's worse than the microsoft "you need to upgrade _now_" philosphy and the lack of "we don't break compatability" that used to be enjoyed in the heyday of the "Full M$ Stack".
Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions
#6I'm very impressed with the scale of the project. I can definitely see both the short term and long term ramifications and huge huge huge potential savings. I'm a bit curious to know what the shelf life on the OS choice is and how well it works. I believe redhat ran into this issue and adopted the "extended support" versions in order to address the concerns (the linux space tends to move _very_ quickly in directions…
Back with windows 95 Microsoft actually took backwards compatability very very seriously:
An emphasis has been made by Microsoft on maintaining software backwards compatibility. To achieve this, when developing a new version of Windows, Microsoft sometimes had to implement workarounds to allow compatibility with third-party software that used the previous version's API in an undocumented or even (programmatically) illegal way. Raymond Chen, a Microsoft developer who works on the Windows API, has said: "I could probably write for months solely about bad things apps do and what we had to do to get them to work again (often in spite of themselves). Which is why I get particularly furious when people accuse Microsoft of maliciously breaking applications during OS upgrades. If any application failed to run on Windows 95, I took it as a personal failure."[19]
Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions
#7The numbers don't make sense to me. €34 million across 14,000 computers is about €2500 per computer. That seems a bit on the high side for the sort of computers a municipality requires. Particularly when an older computer provides suitable performance (otherwise the Linux boxes would need comparable upgrading).
I'll add that a better comparison might be to the cost of Windows machines running open source productivity software since the comparison is closer in terms of specification.
Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions
#8It reminds me http://xkcd.com/934/ for most simple users. What a government officer do at his/her workstation? They probably have every service through web pages, almost nobody builds native programs anymore. And for the most cases LibreOffice is not perfect, but adequate to do simple jobs. So it is very logical to use something free for these tasks, to replace Windows+Office and save money.
Heck, I'm impressed all the web software they use is compatible with something other than IE<8.
Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions
#9The numbers don't make sense to me. €34 million across 14,000 computers is about €2500 per computer. That seems a bit on the high side for the sort of computers a municipality requires. Particularly when an older computer provides suitable performance (otherwise the Linux boxes would need comparable upgrading). I'll add that a better comparison might be to the cost of Windows machines running open source productivity…
Except it isn't - you need to consider the costs of not just Windows, but all the software surrounding it. Photoshop licenses, Visual Studio licenses, Office licenses, etc. Even at business rates. Per workstation, $3000 can be an underestimate.
Meanwhile, using Gimp / Krita / LibreOffice / kdev etc and, at the scale of a city like Munich, just having a dev team to fix the localized problems the city has in the software, or having a fund to bounty bugs and features the city wants, would be cheaper in the long run, and leave the city in control of its own software infrastructure.
Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions
#10Is 2014 the year of Linux on desktop? Joke aside, it makes me happy to see the transition from Microsoft to Linux has been a success. I remember reading the news headline when they first announced it. I wonder how many of the 22,000 government officers that use Ubuntu at work are now also using Ubuntu at home?
They are not, unless there are Ubuntu computers available in stores. I actually know there are some German laws requiring computers be made available with varying or no OS, so it is much more likely than it is stateside to find an Ubuntu machine in store.