Be prepared to a subtle PR war from proprietary solutions vendors, not blatantly directed at software (eg. not like giving 10000 free copies of Windows + Office + this and that) but indirectly helping the city to gain public acceptance, say funding schools, hospitals, public infrastructures etc. then offering at the same time the option to local politicians to get their face associated with the events.
What politician would refuse the opportunity to address a speech during the inauguration of say a new library/hospital/mall/police station/parking lot etc. built with money that did not came from taxing people? That would make a hell of an argument during election time, so you can consider him technically sold to whoever the money comes from, even though he didn't get a single dime in the process, which of course will mean that once he is in power he will use whatever software solution the founder is "suggesting" to keep his seat.
It actually gives strength to what Munich did. They proved that it was possible to swap. So Barcelona doesn't have such a political tricky situation as there is a pre-existing example.
Let's hope that more follow Barcelona.
Barcelona is possibly taking an easier approach. That is, replace the easier things like Office and IE.
I've done similar things. So where as my software has to use IIS and Windows servers, I use Firefox, Thunderbird and Libre Office for everything with the odd exception. It means for me having a dual boot machine is fairly easy as all software usage is the same.
You occasionally do have compatibility issues with Office but it doesn't have to. The more using it the better.
I'm not sure how Munich "proved it was possible". The user community disliked it so much they are now switching back. They proved that it cost the city a lot of money in the transition (both times), and those costs have nothing to do with licensing. "Free" is only "free" so long as you and your user's time carries no value.
They switched over for 7 years, they got the initial political support required to switch over, they created their own distribution.
So I regard that as having shown that it is possible to switch.
This is purely showing that getting over the first hurdle is possible. They then showed what to what lengths MS will go to lobby against it, so Barcelona can be better prepared for the next hurdle.
Munich was pretty good. It's been deployed for 4+ years and won't be replaced until the end of 2020 (assuming everything goes to plan) so that will be at least 7 years of use. It seems that the reasons to move back to Windows weren't completely technical either.
It's hard to come up with technical reasons for picking one OS over another for general business use. All of the operating systems are good enough. They have been for a long time.
What drives OS choice is (and always has been) application support and cost. Despite Linux being free, it can be expensive to support or even an impossible choice if you need, for example, Microsoft Office or Final Cut.
More often than not, Linux wins on ideological grounds. There's nothing wrong with that, but you do need buy-in from your users.
You need to start in education - MS has had that locked down for decades. It'll be really interesting to see whether ChromeOS will have any impact in the future when an entire generation has been using it daily for schoolwork.
I don't think that a switch from mostly MS to mostly chromeos would be a good thing. Chromeos forces everyone into google products far more than windows forces everyone into ms products.
At my kids' school, they really don't care what hardware you use, as long as Google Docs works on it. If you don't have your own computer, the school will rent you a ThinkPad for $70 per year (including the summer) but they are really awful machines. A lot of people buy their own hardware.
That's precisely my point though (I could have made a better job of explaining I wasn't just talking about hardware/OS) - "as long as Google Docs works on it". Those kids will go into the world of work with knowledge of GDocs innately.
That position has been Office for the best part of 20 years, it's baked into syllabuses, exams, training materials. If that changes, it potentially has huge impact going forwards.
If they had chosen something more mainstream like say Ubuntu or Debian, I don't think there would've been as many complaints. You can't have each city develop or maintain its own custom version of a Linux distro, I think that should have been obvious from the start.
If anything, there should be an EU-version of Linux that's stripped of all American backdoors and constantly audited, because I think this is also a national security issue, not just an issue of vendor lock-in and long-term costs for taxpayers. But certainly it wouldn't make sense to have anything less than that, even a country-specific Linux distro doesn't make sense.
I do think ultimately it was Microsoft's politics that convinced the city to move away from LiMux, but I think the problems were also real, which pushed them over to Microsoft more easily. If it had been an EU-backed Linux distro, I don't think they would've switched nearly as easily.
Munich effectively had a parallel program for anyone that had to work with any external entities, and many used it also internally.
Munich never switched off Windows and MSFT Office at best it just abstracted or added additional layers of complexity.
The moment you need to digitally sign some stupid PDF with some “proprietary” signature scheme or open some excel spread sheet it’s pretty much back to Windows.
So much for a sovereign govt. I'd say that a gov't should be able to dictate what format is used, especially when replacing a patent-encumbered private format with an open one.
But heay, who still believes that gov'ts are on top of corps is living a fantasy I guess.
Bullshit. The people using MSOffice were an absolute minority. The City had 18k Clients and on Windows on standard libreoffice, too. only for interaction with a few other institutions microsoft was needed. most of the time, this was provided via virtualmachine or terminalserver
and for signature schemes there is for example masterpdfeditor.
Are you uninformed, shill or windows-fanboi? I'm amazed the last days who comes out on reddit and ycombinator and spreads uninformed opinions...
"Those supporting the move to Microsoft Office say staff using LibreOffice find it difficult to swap documents with external organizations, due to incompatibilities with Microsoft Office"
This happens all around the industry. Once you are locked in there is no easy way to change. This renders the capitalist concept of competition obsolete. Everything becomes a monopoly. Intel, Nvidia, Facebook, Microsoft, Google... they amount of 90% of the market on their products.
What was 20 years ago a dynamic fast changing industry, that feared anti-monopoly actions from the goverment, has become a short list of big companies with tight ties with politicians.
Such lack of diversity opens the risk that a vulnerability is going to send all our IT into chaos, as Intel issues have showed up. It also hampers innovation and contributes to a world with less opportunities for new entrepreneurs, that are more focused in created something to sell to a big company than a long term viable business.
So Munich decision is part of the problem, but just an small one. I hope that it works better for Barcelona.
I thought Munnich's decision was also in part because MSFT would consider Munnich as a location for an office based on their decision on using their product to do their work.
The old "we have to serve the corps (and their owners) or they leave" argument.
There's the Munich experience and the Extremadura experience, so there's mistakes Barcelona can avoid.
I hear they're using a popular distribution (Ubuntu) rather than trying to make and maintain a forked one. This is a very clever choice that will save a tremendous amount of pain.
Came here to say this. It is hard to fight the lobby power of big corps.
Though Spain has the case of Extremadura. I could not find a better article, I remember reading some that outlined then massive success that was achieved in Extremadura (one of the poorer regions of Spain).
