

City of Munich disagrees with HP's Linux migration study - sasvari
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/City-of-Munich-disagrees-with-HP-s-Linux-migration-study-1797232.html

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tehwalrus
HP (and Microsoft) clearly aren't happy that old Windows hardware can be
reused performantly on Linux, vastly reducing upgrade costs. They simply
_ignored_ this factor in their study. What else did they conveniently choose
to ignore?

    
    
        TUCKER: My expert would totally disprove that.
    
        LANGHAM: Who is your expert?
    
        TUCKER: I don’t know, but I can get one by this afternoon. The thing is, you’ve
        been listening to the wrong expert. You need to listen to the right expert. And
        you need to know what an expert is going to advise you before he advises
        you.

~~~
mhurron
> old Windows hardware can be reused performantly on Linux

By and large this doesn't happen in Enterprise-level organizations. Old, out
of warranty hardware is removed in favour of warrantied hardware.

~~~
tehwalrus
sure it doesn't happen everywhere, but it does in Munich's city hall at least,
and it is _possible_.

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binarymax
Microsoft licensing is so incredibly complex, that I would not be surprised in
the least bit if one study resulted in a 17MM quote and another in a 34MM
quote. I recently did a licensing cost estimation for a SQL Server 2012
cluster, and my numbers were an order of magnitude different from that of my
colleague's.

~~~
jpkeisala
I recently found out that every workstation in AD needs extra license called
CAL, so if you add Windows to AD or even into a shared printer you need to pay
for CAL that is yearly fee. Really annoying and confusing.

~~~
amalag
I gotta hope Samba 4 makes big progress, if nothing than to force Microsoft to
be more competitive with their stupid licensing.

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nextparadigms
HP/Microsoft's study didn't include migration to a newer version of Windows.
Considering Microsoft will stop supporting Windows XP as early as next year,
not including the upgrade cost for a Windows migration makes no sense, unless
they were deliberately trying to be misleading.

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TazeTSchnitzel
There would be huge hardware costs for such a migration, which is key here.

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jules
City of Munich has a big incentive to make the migration seem successful and
HP has a big incentive to make the migration seem unsuccessful. Two wildly
different conclusions result. Where the truth lies we will probably never
know.

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luckystarr
The leadership of the City of Munich has the incentive to not mislead in their
publications, lest they'll be bashed by the opposition. They can't afford that
because 2013 there will be an election in Bavaria and the Mayor of Munich
(Ude) wants to be the next minister-president of Bavaria.

~~~
vor_
I'd think that if there was an incentive to mislead to avoid criticism from
the opposition, it would be to make things seem better than they are.

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pwthornton
I'd be very interested in hearing how much training they had to do for people
to learn to use Linux and OpenOffice. If German office workers are like the
ones I've met in the U.S., any slight change to their computers will result in
a lot of questions.

Having tried to use OpenOffice for my office needs, I'd be curious to see how
this works out for them. Needless to say, I haven't used OpenOffice in years
and have no desire to try again. If I were going with a Linux solution, I'd
try to get as many workers using cloud-based apps as possible.

Not every worker could do this, but from my experience with ChromeOS, the
majority of general office workers could get their work done with it, and it's
a cheap, secure and stable solution. But a lot of governments may not want to
touch cloud services and may not know how to develop their own.

~~~
marekmroz
>>> I haven't used OpenOffice in years

That's like eons in actively developed software. I believe giving LibreOffice
a spin may change your notion of the quality of the OS alternative. As an
anecdote, Excel 2003 has 65K row limit. In current LO it's ~ 1M rows if I
remember correctly. I will admit that it is a bit apples to oranges, since
Excel 2003 was created way back, but in practical terms, that is what I get on
my office desktop. Being able to run LO as an alternative can be a life
saver...

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annasaru
Microsoft FUD. HP doesn't have any opinions of its own. If it was sponsored or
conducted by Microsoft, why do we even bother ? That company is still
hallucinating, pretending its still in a Windows world

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akadien
Maybe it's just me, but HP should re-focus on development of innovative
products and away from political consultancy.

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Uchikoma
The HP study is not a study of the Munich situation. HP takes very different
assumptions without any inside or detailed knowledge than the Munich IT stuff
(who should know).

It's more a hypothetical case study than some real study based on facts (or
even the same facts).

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mariuolo
How can they disagree with something that's secret?

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nextparadigms
They published a part of it about 2 weeks ago.

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ajasmin
As much as I love Linux, I feel sorry for the functionaries that will have to
migrate 20 years old Word templates and Excel macros to LibreOffice. These
things don't always go smoothly.

Being forced into using new software because it's cheaper may end up giving
that software a bad rep.

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martinced
_"Munich's City Council has objected to HP's study in which the company
analysed Munich's Linux migration on behalf of Microsoft."_

A study by HP on behalf of Microsoft? How is this even allowed? There's a
conflict of interest here and it's not a small one. I'd seek a competent court
(either at the national or supra-national level) to fill a complaint.

