I hope Munich somehow paid Canonical for its professional support or whatever to sustain a nice product in the long run.
IIRC lots of stuff was done by IBM.
Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions
61–70 of 109 posts
Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use LibreOffice in an environment where almost every other user uses Microsoft Office tools. I've had difficulty with some documents in the docx format. Most of the documents will turn out to be ok but when certain types of formatting are included problems start to appear. Most of the problems come from, I think, unnecessary features. For example a footer for the author's name on each page.
Really? A footer with a value from variable is "unnecessary" feature?
In this case, yes. It was definitely unnecessary to remind me of the author's name on each page.
Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions
#63The costs seem to mention training and support, but not comparing productivity makes it useless. It's like arguing that you can use the Gimp rather than photoshop, which is only true until you try. The whole point of software is that it increases productivity (word processor rather than typewriter). While it may be the case that Linux and open source alternatives saves a bunch on licenses, I don't buy the argument th…
One might as well expect productivity to increase switching away from proprietary software. I would, at least.
Taking your example of Gimp, I expect institutional adoption of free software would result in some people having it who didn't have Photoshop at all before. They can now become more productive and take less of other people's time.
Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions
#64The costs seem to mention training and support, but not comparing productivity makes it useless. It's like arguing that you can use the Gimp rather than photoshop, which is only true until you try. The whole point of software is that it increases productivity (word processor rather than typewriter). While it may be the case that Linux and open source alternatives saves a bunch on licenses, I don't buy the argument th…
One might as well expect productivity to increase switching away from proprietary software. I would, at least. Taking your example of Gimp, I expect institutional adoption of free software would result in some people having it who didn't have Photoshop at all before. They can now become more productive and take less of other people's time.
>One might as well expect productivity to increase switching away from proprietary software. I would, at least.
That doesn't make any sense. What is inherent about closed-source that makes it hard to use and what is inherent about open-source that makes it easy to use?
I think the important phrase here is switching away. That implies there's been a change, which brings increased training (either formal or learn-as-you-go) to learn the new system. If they need Word for their job and now they have OpenOffice, that's not a productivity gain, that's a loss at least until they get up and running (and then it's an ongoing loss every time they need to convert a docx with custom formatting that OpenOffice doesn't understand.)
Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions
#65The costs seem to mention training and support, but not comparing productivity makes it useless. It's like arguing that you can use the Gimp rather than photoshop, which is only true until you try. The whole point of software is that it increases productivity (word processor rather than typewriter). While it may be the case that Linux and open source alternatives saves a bunch on licenses, I don't buy the argument th…
One might as well expect productivity to increase switching away from proprietary software. I would, at least. Taking your example of Gimp, I expect institutional adoption of free software would result in some people having it who didn't have Photoshop at all before. They can now become more productive and take less of other people's time.
Well, it could work either way I suppose, but in my experience, usability/productivity of desktop software is severely lacking in OSS software (unlike e.g server software). Perhaps due to problems attracting non-developers to work on them. Polish is expensive, but polish is productivity.
The potential upside like you mention would be more licenses at lower cost. Whether that was a bottleneck depends on the organization in question. Either way I don't think it's possible to make any conclusions without research.
Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions
#66The costs seem to mention training and support, but not comparing productivity makes it useless. It's like arguing that you can use the Gimp rather than photoshop, which is only true until you try. The whole point of software is that it increases productivity (word processor rather than typewriter). While it may be the case that Linux and open source alternatives saves a bunch on licenses, I don't buy the argument th…
The LiMux wiki page mentions a timeline of how the migration happened, so it looks like their phased rollout helped them 'convert' to Linux smoothly.
Quoting from the wiki.. September 6, 2005 - It is decided that the project needs an additional one year pilot test, and migration slips one year.[19]
September 22, 2006 - The "soft" migration begins, one year behind original schedule.[20]
November 2008: 1200 out of 14,000 have migrated to the LiMux environment (9%; March 2008: 1000=7%), in addition 12000 workstations use OpenOffice.org 2 installed on Windows (March 2008: 6000) and more 100% use Mozilla Firefox 1.5 and Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5 (March 2008: 90%). 18000 of 21000 macros, templates and forms are changed into Linux-enabled[21]
Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ha…
> Chrome is horrible on linux, --disable-gpu --audio-buffer-size what user is going to bother with that? Really? Chrome is a first class citizen on ChromeOS, so I'd expected other linuxes to be well served, too.
My biggest gripe with Chrome on Linux is you can't change the default behavior of clicking in the address bar. In Firefox I can make it so clicking once selects everything. In Chrome, it drops a cursor and I have to click two or three times to get it to select everything. I understand some people want that behavior, but I don't. The Chrome team's response is that this is the Linux default and Chrome is a native Linux application, so that's how it behaves and it can't be changed.
No thanks.
Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
One might as well expect productivity to increase switching away from proprietary software. I would, at least. Taking your example of Gimp, I expect institutional adoption of free software would result in some people having it who didn't have Photoshop at all before. They can now become more productive and take less of other people's time.
>One might as well expect productivity to increase switching away from proprietary software. I would, at least. That doesn't make any sense. What is inherent about closed-source that makes it hard to use and what is inherent about open-source that makes it easy to use? I think the important phrase here is switching away . That implies there's been a change, which brings increased training (either formal or learn-as-y…
There is such a thing as inherent productivity in the software though. Switching from one piece of software to another has a fixed cost, but switching to software that makes you more productive will help offset that cost.
I agree on OO. The risk in my eyes here is that OSS (desktop) software is almost invariably less productive than proprietary software for some reason. Switching that way can make sense if you save a lot on licenses, administration etc., but if you have to pay once for a switch AND then pay continuously by using less productive software you are taking a much higher risk. It may give a warm fluffy feeling to be using open standards, but the problem is that the only standard that exists is a de-facto proprietary standard set by Microsoft. It may be noble to try to change that, but I certainly wouldn't want to spend tax money being the first major city to do so.
Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately this is not the case. I only new 2 Online-Stores in Germany that sell Ubuntu maschines - one is my own: http://rockiger.com/ On the other hand, System76 computers are not available in Germany. Best bet is probably is Sputnik from Dell, although their Ubuntu configuration is not that good.
The initial Dell sputnik was lacking (notably small screen resolution, price, etc.). The second rev is decent: 4th Generation Intel® Core™ i5-4210U processor (3M Cache, up to 2.7 GHz) UBUNTU Linux 12.04 LTS (64-bit) 13.3 inch LED Backlit Touch Display with Truelife and FHD resolution (1920 x 1080) 8GB1 DDR3L at 1600MHz 128GB Solid State Drive Intel® HD Graphics 4400 3.02 lbs Dell Price $1199.99
I don't understand why you'd get this and not the cheaper exact model with windows.
Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions
#70What about long-term compatibility of Microsoft (or Apple) products? How can proprietary, maybe even binary file-formats be accessed in 100 years from now? Cities usually keep their books forever. I have so many files from the nineties that are already very difficult to restore. I could imagine that open source formats have a huge advantage here?! #LongtermCosts
When a document stops being a document and becomes a record, it should be saved in a format such as PDF/A for longevity, and not a binary format. That would be regardless of if it was created in libreOffice or Microsoft Office.