Not that bad

Secondly there are no chance of writing additional work hours when supporting GNU/Linux in Extremaduras schools or the city administration in Munich. The last three-four years Spain has been hit hard with an economical crisis with 37% unemployment rate by 18-25 year old people and 20% in general. There are no tax money to spare for additional consultants in Spanish public administrations. The same goes for Germany where the big tax money from the middle class is used to bail out Greece, Italy and other mostly South-European countries for irresponsible and straight out lies regarding financial management on state level the last 9-10 years.

Thirdly this cost of computer support in Extremadura and Munich is second to none taken into account the difference between school systems and public administration. As José Rodríguez point out, Extremadura got maximum 10 persons doing technical support on 120.000 computers, where as little as two persons are doing this work for most of the time. At peak "employment", one person supports 12.000 computers. Usually it's on person for 60.000 computers. And we are talking about a managed computer operation, not a home computer with no professional support. The 12.000 GNU/Linux computers out of 15.000 in Munich are supported by 8-9 persons, translated into one man-year for 1500 computers. You can go much further in schools regarding standardization, where a city administration may got 20-30 different types of departments (read: "use-cases") from firefighters to healthcare. And by the way, the GNU/Linux transition in Munich is on track:

https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/news/de-munichs-move-vendor-i...

What about the claim that consultants uses free and open source software to write more work hours for themselves then? I first heard a similar claim from a Microsoft consultant hired by a city council I was helping back in 2003. The consultant said free and open source software was cheap to acquire and expensive to maintain. Implying that customers should stick with Microsoft. I thought it was strange that a person who evidently was writing many work hours maintaining Microsoft products, took the luxury to complain on competing products. Especially where my short conversation with him was cut short by one of the municipality employees, because he was so expensive.

I asked the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) on the "expensive to maintain" claim. A claim which are constantly re-iterated by Microsoft consultants to customers and at online forums. The CTO said that the Microsoft consultant got it wrong. He and other proprietary consultants are invoicing them the most according to the accounting. The city council computer department preferred free and open source software wherever it was feasible, because it was extremely stable and they could do more of the upkeep them self, saving the trouble of hiring a proprietary consultant. The few times they needed a consultant on free and open source software, it was not difficult to get. They didn't pay more for each hour either.

I need to mention the GNU/Linux failure at German embassies. They got into trouble because of the old OpenOffice.org version they deployed didn't read newer Microsoft documents (OOXML). They didn't have a plan for backporting a newer OpenOffice version to their existing installation. Also they didn't got a proper plan for upgrading to a newer long term support GNU/Linux distro. Remember all software needs to be upgraded and updated periodically. Here is no difference between a free software distro or a proprietary platform.

Also an maintained enterprise deployed computer platforms needs configuration management and updates from time to time, independently if it's proprietary or free software. It's not like a home computer, where you might forget that such way of computer support cost more work hours a year, than a school computer in Extremadura or a office computer in Munich.

My grief regarding the German embassies, is that the computer staff in many ways approached free software maintained as they historically maintained Windows. For each Windows version, you start fresh, replacing 40-60% of the software. Repackaging every end user binary for enterprise deployment on the new OS version. Upstream mechanism don't exists, either does backports or free software configuration management. Using Windows upkeep methods on Linux is unwise. You should use the built in package management and configuration systems, including other enterprise features (which are all there). If there are something to learn from Extreamdura and Munich, is that upstream is what you should aim for, including proper backports for tackling newer Microsoft documents (OOXML) with Libre/OpenOffice. And you should have an upgrade plan for the next long term supported version of GNU/Linux distro you're deploying. This are lesson learned from Extremadura and Munich.

To my knowledge here in Germany nobody "reinvented the wheel". A lot of errors have been made, but "reinvention" was not among the errors. "Failed" is not really correct, because e.g. in the foreign office the backlash towards MS was at least partly a political decision, when the political leadership changed from the Green party Fischer to "neo-liberal" Westerwelle. As for Munich: Isn't the change towards Linux still ongoing? Sorry, as a Prussian, I'm not well-informed about those Bavarians :~)