City of Munich picks its Linux distro (ZDNet UK)
Munich's migration from Microsoft Windows NT to Linux on the desktop was given final approval in June last year, after a year-long pilot project run by SuSE Linux and IBM. The contract for the project was put out to tender in the summer and the City said it considered several alternatives before choosing Debian, which it said offered the best solution in terms of technical competence and price."
Posted Apr 15, 2005 22:51 UTC (Fri)
by error27 (subscriber, #8346)
[Link] (13 responses)
Posted Apr 15, 2005 23:57 UTC (Fri)
by jd (guest, #26381)
[Link] (8 responses)
Novell hasn't much hope in the US markets, as things stand, and their foothold in Europe is unhappy. Probably from everyone's standpoint, it would be better for Novell to "defect" to Europe and be seen as a wholly European organization. If it doesn't, I don't see how it can survive.
Posted Apr 16, 2005 0:29 UTC (Sat)
by jwb (guest, #15467)
[Link] (7 responses)
Posted Apr 16, 2005 4:54 UTC (Sat)
by b7j0c (guest, #27559)
[Link] (6 responses)
Posted Apr 16, 2005 22:07 UTC (Sat)
by vblum (guest, #1151)
[Link] (4 responses)
That said, Debian may be a risky move. Being able to fall back on trained support staff from the company which makes the product would have been a good insurance for the future. Let's hope Munich knows what they're doing.
Posted Apr 16, 2005 23:37 UTC (Sat)
by wookey (guest, #5501)
[Link] (2 responses)
When did you last see commercial support that was better than community support? If you are prepared to pay for people to spend time on a problem when necessary then I don't see that SuSE internal support people are any more reliable than any of the wide range of Debian Consultants/Userlinux support people. And on average I'd expect them to be less reliable/effective.
It does seem that there are people in the Muenchen Rathaus who 'get it'.
Posted Apr 17, 2005 11:17 UTC (Sun)
by zipdisk (guest, #8589)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Apr 18, 2005 13:47 UTC (Mon)
by XERC (guest, #14626)
[Link]
I, for instance, am not capable of imagining that I go to buy something with a thought like: "Oh what a great deal that is, as I have an option to sue them if they don't meet my expectations."
What kind of buying pleasure do that kind of relationships provide me? Why should I be that aggressive and go for the deal if I have a suspection that they are not capable of providing me everything I want?
Posted Apr 17, 2005 10:20 UTC (Sun)
by broonie (subscriber, #7078)
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Posted Apr 19, 2005 9:43 UTC (Tue)
by massimiliano (subscriber, #3048)
[Link]
Apart from the fact that the employees are still there, and happy!
Don't criticise what you don't know...
Posted Apr 16, 2005 0:40 UTC (Sat)
by mdekkers (guest, #85)
[Link] (2 responses)
They are like that.
Suse 9.3 simply isn't all that great, really not worth the hassle of redoing my box, and I decided to run Kubuntu after serveral years solid SuSE usage.
I personally think that SuSE/Novell has a very good chance to be another SCO in the making. Same people, Same path (buy distro, screw it up) same players, same hometown. Same Canopy Group.
Posted Apr 16, 2005 6:06 UTC (Sat)
by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501)
[Link]
Posted Apr 16, 2005 7:45 UTC (Sat)
by rqosa (subscriber, #24136)
[Link]
Posted Apr 17, 2005 12:42 UTC (Sun)
by tarjei (guest, #29357)
[Link]
It could be that Munich chose them because of this. I would guess that the GOSA management consept is more lightweight than a fullblown Novel solution.
Posted Apr 15, 2005 22:55 UTC (Fri)
by azhrei_fje (guest, #26148)
[Link] (2 responses)
Debian is an interesting choice. And concerning the two contractors:
It has awarded a contract to two German consultancies,
Gonicus and Softcon, to help with the migration.
If anyone can give some background on the
German companies that'll be supporting the migration, I'd like to hear it.
How big are they - both employees and revenue? Do they only do Linux
work? Any personal experiences with them re: will they do a good job and
make both the City of Munich look good as well as Linux?
Posted Apr 16, 2005 7:09 UTC (Sat)
by xoddam (guest, #2322)
[Link] (1 responses)
I bet they would have used SuSE if SuSE hadn't been purchased by Novell.City of Munich picks its Linux distro (ZDNet UK)
Very likely. You notice that they're only looking at German companies to help with the migration process? I'll bet you a virtual beer that SuSE is now seen as "tainted" by America. Whether it has been or not is not the point - Europe seems to have reached the point where it is no longer willing to "play dead". Debian, by being seen to be origin-neutral, is going to be seen as the safer bet.
City of Munich picks its Linux distro (ZDNet UK)
Utah is the furthest point in the universe from Europe. Anyone able to transplant that organization from Utah to Germany would be a genius of business management.City of Munich picks its Linux distro (ZDNet UK)
You buy the Suse name, support contracts, and copyrights and turf the employees. As a token of appreciation for history you leave two staffers in a "sales office" in the former home.Its easy
Last time I checked, SUSE was firmly rooted in northern Bavaria, and their employees too. To assume that Debian won because of protectionism is to downplay their nice success in this matter, and unfairly so. Let's hope D won on technical grounds, not folkloristic considerations.Huh?
Being able to fall back on trained support staff from the company which makes the product would have been a good insurance for the future. Let's hope Munich knows what they're doing.
Huh?
>When did you last see commercial support that was better than community Huh?
>support? If you are prepared to pay for people to spend time on a problem
>when necessary then I don't see that SuSE internal support people are any
>more reliable than any of the wide range of Debian Consultants/Userlinux
>support people. And on average I'd expect them to be less
>reliable/effective.
Having a commercial support contract gives you the right to sue them if
they don't fulfill the requirements. That's a very valuable thing when you
are the one in charge of taking decisions (not a very valuable thing if
you just need something usable and not some explanations...)
There is a cultural difference: in 2005 Europeans don't like to sueHuh?
eachother that easily.
That's what they've bought: a paid support package. The fact that the people providing the support aren't called Debian doesn't matter all that much: it's not much different to the people packaging rebranded versions of RedHat Enterprise.Huh?
Its easy
I bet they would have stayed with SuSe if Novell was not totally screwing up what was once a great company and distro. 99% of SuSE employees are still german. On the other hand, I have been in linux deals with Novell here in europe several times now, and it simply hurts to do business with them. I'm willing to bet some free drinks at the octoberfest that Novell simply screwed up the deal with bad behaviour and worse management. City of Munich picks its Linux distro (ZDNet UK)
It was Caldera that bought SCO, not the other way around. And SCO weren't doing very well.City of Munich picks its Linux distro (ZDNet UK)
OTOH, they did change the license of YaST (and Evolution Connector) to
the GPL.
City of Munich picks its Linux distro (ZDNet UK)
I think it is far to easy to attribute this to a US vs Europe issue. Actually one of the companies (Gonicus) has a very interesting administration and setup consept based around ldap.Maybe a choice between management consepts?
City of Munich picks its Linux distro (ZDNet UK)
City of Munich picks its Linux distro (ZDNet UK)
Gonicus don't seem to give many commercial details; they're based in Arnsberg on the Ruhr.
Softcon is a local Munich company. Its website gives figures at 98 employees and a turnover of €9.2m.
Posted Apr 16, 2005 11:46 UTC (Sat)
by danielthaler (guest, #24764)
[Link]
Its website gives figures at 98 employees and a turnover of 9.2m. Gonicus has 15 employees. Softcon has been around for 20 years, Gonicus was founded in 2001. Softcon appears to do other things beside linux: Project management and development of custom software.
Posted Apr 15, 2005 23:19 UTC (Fri)
by dang (guest, #310)
[Link]
Posted Apr 16, 2005 4:58 UTC (Sat)
by b7j0c (guest, #27559)
[Link] (4 responses)
Done right, and assuming a viable marketplace of competent Debian support firms, this could be a huge gain for the city in terms of keeping contract fees down and keeping the option open of switching to another organization on short term notice. On the other hand these support firms may not be able to inject code upstream quickly to get changes made...but presuming they are using Debian in the first place I doubt there would be much need due to its focus on stability.
I have often wondered what would happen if you install RHEL but find over time you do not like their support...seems your only choice is to live with it or do a mass reinstall.
Posted Apr 16, 2005 8:38 UTC (Sat)
by ordonnateur (guest, #6652)
[Link]
Posted Apr 16, 2005 15:02 UTC (Sat)
by hazelsct (guest, #3659)
[Link] (2 responses)
Even if not the maintainers of the relevant packages, anyone can set up their own repository, add that to the apt sources, and submit patches via the BTS; in that case Debian maintainership just adds credibility to the bug report. But is such a thing possible with RHEL or SUSE?
Posted Apr 16, 2005 21:12 UTC (Sat)
by mbanck (subscriber, #9035)
[Link]
Posted Apr 17, 2005 0:16 UTC (Sun)
by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458)
[Link]
Have you ever looked at the extensive third-party repositories for everything Red Hat (or more generally, RPMish)? Sure, you won't find much for RHEL (or SLES for that matter), presumably installing non-official packages voids (some part of) the maintenance contract, and what would be the point anyway. That doesn't mean that you can't build your own RPMs and add them to the distribution lists.
Posted Apr 16, 2005 10:07 UTC (Sat)
by mnummeli (guest, #8374)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Apr 16, 2005 10:39 UTC (Sat)
by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501)
[Link]
Posted Apr 16, 2005 11:45 UTC (Sat)
by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
[Link] (4 responses)
Looks like they're in control now :-)
Posted Apr 16, 2005 20:18 UTC (Sat)
by dennisk (guest, #12308)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Apr 16, 2005 22:00 UTC (Sat)
by vblum (guest, #1151)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Apr 18, 2005 14:03 UTC (Mon)
by XERC (guest, #14626)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Apr 18, 2005 23:16 UTC (Mon)
by sbergman27 (guest, #10767)
[Link]
Don't feel too bad, though. I think I just lost, too. I think there is another corrollary that penalizes people who explicitly point out that it is considered bad form to explicitly invoke Godwin's Law. ;-)
Posted Apr 19, 2005 13:24 UTC (Tue)
by utoddl (guest, #1232)
[Link]
[Sorry; crawling back into my cave now.]
City of Munich picks its Linux distro (ZDNet UK)
In 2003. Elsewhere they say they have 120 employees.
BTW the companys name comes from the Latin description for the king penguin (aptenodytes patagonicus)
Gonicus seems to be pretty specialized in "migration to open source" type of projects.
Ah..but which Debian? Will they be going so stable that it hurts or wild and wooley?City of Munich picks its Linux distro (ZDNet UK)
At first I found their choice admirable but slightly odd, but perhaps their angle was to get a distro independent of a single support entity in order to be able to put support out to bid on a regular basis (every year, two years, etc).Might be helpful for negotiating support
A Debian derivative, Knoppix, Ubuntu or, more likely Kubuntu? That would still be a free distro but with a lot of refinement for the desktopMight be helpful for negotiating support
Might be helpful for negotiating support
Please explain. Debian is easily the most open major distro organization to adding new members, who can inject code directly into the distribution. I don't know for sure, but would guess that one or both of these probably have multiple such Debian maintainers.
Gonicus has at least one Debian Developer (cajus at debian.org), as can be seen by googling for "site:debian.org gonicus" (interestingly, this brings up more hits than "site:debian.org linspire")Might be helpful for negotiating support
Might be helpful for negotiating support
When talking about Debian they will probably choose testing (sarge) City of Munich picks its Linux distro (ZDNet UK)
distribution. Woody has too much antiquated software even in critical
places to be considered seriously. This is true especially for its DHCP
client (dhcp instead of dhcpcd) and KDE desktop.
It is, however, most probable that they will customise it heavily,
whatever the distribution is. This could even mean some kind of LFS (Linux
from scratch)-project.
Woody has pump, dhclient and dhclient3. (and udhcpc, if you insist).City of Munich picks its Linux distro (ZDNet UK)
...is, of course, that they GET TO CHOSE! If they picked Windows, they would have had a great choice of Windows or Windows. And they could have gotten it from Microsoft or Microsoft.Main point here...
Debian: Wir bauen für den Sieg!City of Munich picks its Linux distro (ZDNet UK)
Do people think that it is adequate to quote the rhetoric of the Nazis? [unless I am very much mistaken, in which case I apologize] Quoting some of the worst murderers in history in connection with Debian seems extremely poor taste at best. City of Munich picks its Linux distro (ZDNet UK)
And that ends this thread: Nazis were mentioned.City of Munich picks its Linux distro (ZDNet UK)
And you lost, because you explicitly invoked Godwin's law. (It is considered bad form to do so, and is covered by a corollary to the law.)City of Munich picks its Linux distro (ZDNet UK)
Maybe somebody could rebrand their distro a "Munix".City of Munich picks its Linux distro (ZDNet UK)