

Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions - arunc
https://insights.ubuntu.com/2014/07/07/ubuntu-and-open-source-help-the-city-of-munich-save-millions/

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alkonaut
The 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 that it is an
amount "saved" until thurough research is made in the productivity of the
users.

~~~
spodek
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.

~~~
alkonaut
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.

~~~
scholia
I'd expect a loss of productivity from using OpenOffice that far exceeds the
cost of Microsoft Office, plus ongoing losses in productivity as staff try to
cope with its incompatibilities with complex Office documents that probably
arrive on a daily basis.

However, staff productivity is not generally a major concern in local
government offices, as far as I can tell. Maybe Munich is different, but I
doubt it...

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chrisBob
I am not at all surprised that this worked. The biggest problem for mainstream
linux is poor advertising. People with limited computer knowledge are just
scared of change, and honestly, if no one knows how to pronounce Ubuntu then
they are probably not going to pick a computer based on it.

I mostly use Windows 7 and OS X, but I have worked with Debian/Ubuntu as a
casual user. Linux was much easier to work with than Windows 8.1, but 90% of
the population doesn't know that. Most people would be as happy, or happier
with Linux if there was just one big advertising campaign.

~~~
Alupis
Well, Linux is now the most commonly used general purpose OS/kernel in the
world. Every Android device, every Chromebook device (plus all the regular
desktops and servers).

I can't help but feel that part of Android and Chromebook's success is in part
due to the users not understanding/having-to-know they're running Linux.
Android and Chromebook don't even mention Linux anywhere, and users are
content. I think regular Joe's have a stigma about Linux, and just abstracting
that aspect away has helped adoption.

~~~
chrisBob
Android may _technically_ be Linux, but I am not sure I would count it as a
step towards changing the desktop computer people get for their home.
Chromebook is similar- as far as I can tell it just runs one browser window.
This makes it more like a video game system than a PC.

~~~
Alupis
In industrializing parts of the world, mobile devices are often the only
access to the internet and software (and sometimes the first experience with a
computing device).

Chromebook/ChromeOS is much more capable now than it used to be, with multi-
tasking and multiple "apps" can be on-screen at the same time.

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aagd
What 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

~~~
mcb3k
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.

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CSDude
It reminds me [http://xkcd.com/934/](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.

~~~
brusch64
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.

~~~
waps
I think this is really sad. As someone who went through university when the
last wave of centralized unix died off, then the move to decentralized
windows, and to decentralized linux (because they couldn't really figure it
out mostly).

I found that move to decentralization and the availability of compilers and
tools and dev. environments and easy ways to get admin privileges, well I
credit that with my learning how to code/admin/... and to my succes later in
life. These computers, I've heard from a friend, are LOCKED down. As in, try
to compile anything against a GUI library is a complete non-starter. Compiling
anything under linux without root is almost impossible.

Add to that that even the development environments that do exist on linux are
... well sorry to say but let's be honest here ... far inferior for learning
to code and to writing simple games than the ones available on windows.

Nobody's going to learn how to use computers, how to program and how to
improve their situation on these linux machines. And that sucks.

But hey, easier on the admins !

(not that it's anywhere near as bad as SAAS though)

~~~
pjc50
_Compiling anything under linux without root is almost impossible_

This is bizarre, and very much not true. If you have a C compiler and
sufficient disk space you can build whatever you want in your home directory.
It might take a while, but most things that use autoconf will accept
`--prefix=/home/user/stuff/` and target that location.

Not having a C compiler is rare as it tends to be deep in the requirements
chain of other packages. For other languages, I believe Python is mandatory on
Redhat and Perl on Debian, if you don't mind old versions.

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yoran
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?

~~~
velodrome
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.

~~~
eru
> 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.

~~~
freehunter
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.

~~~
level
I'm currently running Chrome 35.0.1916.153 on Ubuntu 14.04 with XFCE and
clicking once in the address bar highlights everything all. Don't know why
mine is acting different than yours, maybe they changed that since you last
tried it.

~~~
freehunter
I last tried it years ago, so it's possible they changed it since then. When I
read that response on their forum, I completely gave up on Chrome and haven't
touched it since then. I don't care if "it's not the Linux way" [1], it's _my_
way and who is Google to tell me otherwise?

Sorry, I'll end my rant now.

[1]
[https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=26140#c1...](https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=26140#c14)

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brudgers
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 software since the comparison is closer in
terms of specification.

~~~
zanny
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.

~~~
ams6110
Not to mention the big kahunas, Exchange, Sharepoint, AD, SQL Server licenses.

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velodrome
Is there an opensource alternative for Sharepoint?

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stefanve
SharePoint is a Jack of all trades, master of none so based on you
requirements you have to choose the right tool most of which are OSS or at the
very least non depended on Windows

~~~
velodrome
Could you name few? Anything would be helpful.

~~~
stefanve
It really depends on your requirements. What is it that you need? Like any
software SP is a tool, just like home improvement you don't go out buy a tool
and than try to use it for what ever task is in front of you (you might end up
with a screw driver while you really needed a hammer). So I could make a list
of Document Management, Content Management, Intranet, etc software but the
correct answer depends on your needs since there are lots of choose and all
(some) have there own strong and weak points.

SP is a mesh up of several software suits slowly coming to getter, it is
getting better every release. SP could also be the right choice depending in
your needs. Mainly work group portals but those tend to fail (as in not being
used) since most of the time there is no proper business case nor business
processes in place to support the grand idea

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virtue3
I'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".

~~~
virtue3
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]

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ausjke
I hope Munich somehow paid Canonical for its professional support or whatever
to sustain a nice product in the long run.

~~~
mschuster91
IIRC lots of stuff was done by IBM.

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brudgers
Discussion two months ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7720219#up_7720418](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7720219#up_7720418)

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davidjgraph
I'd love to see some detailed architecture docs for this or similar high-level
Linux based rollout.

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gtf21
I want to know a bit more about how they solved the MS-specific problems like
VB macros that are often quite vital to a company's infrastructure.

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jonathanriddell
This uses Kubuntu rather than Ubuntu Unity

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strykekyte
They should totally have called it Munix.

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Chronic29
A+ would read again!!

