
Former Mayor of Munich Explains How Microsoft Undermined Linux - virtualritz
http://techrights.org/2019/11/09/christian-ude-on-microsoft/
======
mschuster91
> “The decision to convert (14.000 PC clients) back to Microsoft from Limux
> [some time] until 2020 was a purely political one. Christian Ude: “There
> wasn’t a single unsolvable technical problem.”

I have worked on the Limux team during university. There were a couple of
problems that led to resentments:

\- fossilized, underpowered computers (1G RAM!) combined with fossilized
software versions (Firefox/Thunderbird/Openoffice) thanks to
testing/conformity requirements. This was what drove the majority of customer
complaints.

\- underpowered Internet uplinks of the dozens of government offices - you
would think each had a gigabit fiber uplink, which is far from reality

\- lack of manpower in the dev department, mostly caused by abysmal pay
compared to the free market

\- special IT software was mostly Windows-only or, if it was available for
Linux, compiled for rpm-based distros while Limux was Ubuntu-based leading to
all sorts of issues

\- city staff being used to MS and not to Linux, requiring extensive training

\- infighting among departments of the city, not everyone was a friend of
centralization in IT

Technically all of this would be solvable but the budget was too low. People,
especially key deciders, blamed it on "Linux" instead on their failure to
provide adequate resources. The colleagues were the best people I have had the
pleasure to learn from and work with, even to this day, but the best work is
moot against idiots or bought-off morons in politics

~~~
jbaiter
> \- lack of manpower in the dev department, mostly caused by abysmal pay
> compared to the free market

Abso-fucking-lutely. IMO this is _the_ main factor why most government IT in
Germany is in such a disastrous state. Not just abysmal pay, but also coupled
with:

a) Limited-term contracts (usually 2 years)

b) Ludicrous academic requirements: You only get pay grade E13 (which is
~40k€/year) with a Diplom or a Master's Degree, so there's no way to hire
motivated talent that the rest of the market is more likely to ignore

c) In the case of Limux, Munich has one of the highest costs of living in all
of Germany. You earn the same amount of money for a position, no matter if you
live in Munich or somewhere in the middle of nowhere with half the cost of
living.

d) Since this year there's now also a requirement that a candidate must not
have worked under a limited-term contract for the government before. You can
imagine how that works out, when most government jobs of the last decade were
mostly limited-term.

~~~
bonoboTP
> Ludicrous academic requirements: You only get pay grade E13 (which is
> ~40k€/year) with a Diplom or a Master's Degree, so there's no way to hire
> motivated talent that the rest of the market is more likely to ignore

Surely 40k EUR seems very little from an American perspective, but in Germany
you cannot really expect much more than maybe 50-60K straight out of uni (as a
normal, average student). 40k is surely less (I think E13 is more than 40k
though), but the difference isn't that huge.

------
BuckRogers
You either pay with licensing or hire a team to support. There’s no free as in
beer, anywhere. At least once you get beyond some guy’s single Linux Mint
install on his personal laptop, but not at any complex scale. Active
Directory, development support, these things are needed. Hiring and
maintaining a competent team is most often more expensive and importantly, far
more difficult to competently do than licensing. Microsoft has a complete,
vertically aligned stack that they’ve spent decades building and refining,
there’s a lot of value there. Ubuntu is setup to compete here, and they’re a
fine choice, but you do lose some things over going with Microsoft.

The wish upon a star for free beer is strong.

~~~
baybal2
Support? I urge you to try run your IT on Microsoft, with a support contract.
Their phone support was useless, is useless, and will be useless.

I worked in BestBuy once, their IT gave up on fixing Windows and defaulted to
re-imagining disks upon first issues with Win/Office despite having a support
contract.

~~~
BuckRogers
That's not the sort of support that I'm talking about. That's trivial, and
those Best Buy employees are most likely just incompetent, kids off the street
that enjoy computers. It's true you might get better desktop support out of a
Redhat engineer (for Windows, desktop Linux, or otherwise), if you could
afford to pay him. The same would apply if people had a direct line to a
Microsoft engineer.

I'm talking about ensuring some script you wrote in VB6 in 1998 still works on
machines in 2019. Take that scenario times 100. It's not advertised but they
do fix (or break, then fix) enterprise issues better than any entity I've
seen, and definitely at that scale.

------
mikece
“We assume our readers are wise enough to understand that Microsoft is the
same old corrupt company, with new lies and PR.”

I assume Microsoft still wants to make as much money from Windows and Office
as they can but the trend has been to get users onto Azure and that’s not
incompatible with Linux desktops and LibreOffice. That said, it’s possible
that Microsoft Germany is doing things of which Redmond wouldn’t approve if it
were fully know back at HQ. This isn’t Ballmer’s MSFT anymore.

~~~
freehunter
I thought the same thing on azure but I recently stood up an environment there
and found there are a lot of cool tools available that are greyed out with a
message saying “not available on Linux hosts”. Maybe it’s just temporary until
they add those features and Linux stuff deploys just fine, but I did feel like
Linux was a second class citizen. It doesn’t help that most of the selection
boxes I ran into had Windows as the default option.

~~~
topkai22
It depends on the service, and a lot is the legacy of Azure actually being
windows first or only for the first 5 or 6 years. I'm betting the area you
were playing around in was web apps or VMs. If you look at the various
container based offerings or the newer dev tools they are clearly Linux first.
I'm pretty sure the new Visual Studio online offering doesn't even have a
windows configuration.

~~~
freehunter
You’re right, it was with App Services.

------
rapsey
I would prefer a translation instead of this editorializing.

~~~
ce4
Here's the original 4-page interview of former mayor Christian Ude, it's very
readable and should translate well with Google Translate:

[https://www.linux-
magazin.de/ausgaben/2019/10/interview-2/](https://www.linux-
magazin.de/ausgaben/2019/10/interview-2/)

~~~
justinclift
Hmmm, it's not a very good translation:

Page 1:

[https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.linux-
magazin.de%2Fausgaben%2F2019%2F10%2Finterview-2%2F)

Page 2:

[https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.linux-
magazin.de%2Fausgaben%2F2019%2F10%2Finterview-2%2F2%2F)

Page 3:

[https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.linux-
magazin.de%2Fausgaben%2F2019%2F10%2Finterview-2%2F3%2F)

Page 4:

[https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.linux-
magazin.de%2Fausgaben%2F2019%2F10%2Finterview-2%2F4%2F)

~~~
ndzig
Try DeepL
[https://www.deepl.com/en/translator](https://www.deepl.com/en/translator) —
unfortunately it can't translate webpages, so you would have to copypaste the
contents

