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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

#11

Post by ams6110 »

CSDude wrote: post #4

It 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.

If (most) everyone is using LibreOffice that probably causes much fewer issues than a mixture of MS Office and LibreOffice.

Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions

#12

Post by ams6110 »

zanny wrote: post #9
brudgers wrote: post #7

The 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 softwa…

Not to mention the big kahunas, Exchange, Sharepoint, AD, SQL Server licenses.

Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions

#13

Post by jonalmeida »

yoran wrote: post #3

Is 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?

I believe it's been well documented by many writers that Linux on desktop (LOD) won't be a thing in the foreseeable future.

If you think about it, Android's problems with open source allowing manufacturers to have their own flavours of Android, is one of the reasons why the average user might think TouchWiz (or other skins) is Android and that's why it sucks.

Note that this is just _one_ reason I believe LOD won't be a thing, there surely are more.

Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions

#14

Post by Titanous »

ams6110 wrote: post #12
zanny wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 softwa…

Not to mention the big kahunas, Exchange, Sharepoint, AD, SQL Server licenses.

And don't forget the humans that support everything.

Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions

#15

Post by brudgers »

zanny wrote: post #9
brudgers wrote: post #7

The 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 softwa…

As I mentioned common open source productivity software runs on Windows. That includes Gimp, Emacs etc. - not that I believe that Munich is rolling out 14000 development/graphics boxes. The comparison does not appear to be between equivalent specifications. It's assuming that Windows requires Office. That's simply false.

Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions

#17

Post by PyErr_SetString »

jonalmeida wrote: post #13
yoran wrote: post #3

Is 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?

I believe it's been well documented by many writers that Linux on desktop (LOD) won't be a thing in the foreseeable future. If you think about it, Android's problems with open source allowing manufacturers to have their own flavours of Android, is one of the reasons why the average user might think TouchWiz (or other skins) is Android and that's why it sucks. Note that this is just _one_ reason I believe LOD won't be…

"If you think about it, Android's problems with open source allowing manufacturers to have their own flavours of Android..."

One is not really dependent on the other. You could use open source and not allow modifications or you could use closed source software and allow endless customization.

I also don't consider it an "android problem" that manufacturers do this. Most of the good stuff ends up in standard android after a while, which wouldn't have happened if no one was allowed to make the changes in the first place.

Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions

#18

Post by velodrome »

ams6110 wrote: post #12
zanny wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 softwa…

Not to mention the big kahunas, Exchange, Sharepoint, AD, SQL Server licenses.

Is there an opensource alternative for Sharepoint?

Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions

#19

Post by brusch64 »

CSDude wrote: post #4

It 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.

I really wonder if LibreOffice is not totally adequate for the users in the city of Munich.

I know that it has its problems if you want to use it with Word generated documents, and it obviously has problems with add-ons developed for Word.

But I could really think that it works quite nice, if all your documents are generated for LibreOffice.

I am using Open / LibreOffice since nearly 10 years exclusively at home and I don't have any problems using it - but my needs are VERY modest. Basically I am using it as an WYSIWYG typewriter.

Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions

#20

Post by velodrome »

yoran wrote: post #3

Is 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?

Honestly, it is going to take a while.

The display drivers needs a lot of work (intel seems solid). Also, desktop itself needs to be super stable.

Also, the software (from companies) is treated like a second-class citizen. Chrome is horrible on linux, --disable-gpu --audio-buffer-size what user is going to bother with that?

I have to do all these tweaks and workarounds to get things to work. Regular users will not have the patience do this.

The year of LOD will only happen when everything is stable and works. Imagine if CentOS, Debian, or Ubuntu on a server were this flaky? Would you use it? This is why people jump ship to Mac.

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