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Open source infiltrates government IT worldwide (LinuxWorld)

[Posted January 4, 2008 by corbet]

LinuxWorld talks with the directors of a couple of organizations dedicated to promoting open source in governments. "The Munich migration is the largest public sector complete migration in Europe. Approximate size is 16,000 users, 14,000 desktops, 300 pieces of software including 170 business applications. It is a complete migration, both server-side and desktop side. The server-side is built around Open LDAP and Samba. The desktop, around Debian and KDE. The migration has now reached the halfway stage, and is due to complete in 2009. 5000 workstations are running Open Source on top of Microsoft Windows, 660 have taken the next step to Linux, and almost a third of all users are now trained to use Open Source."
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Open source infiltrates government IT worldwide (LinuxWorld)

Posted Jan 4, 2008 17:20 UTC (Fri) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link] (8 responses) 

"""
The migration has now reached the halfway stage, and is due to complete in 2009. 5000
workstations are running Open Source on top of Microsoft Windows, 660 have taken the next step
to Linux, and almost a third of all users are now trained to use Open Source.
"""

They've been working on this since 2003.  They have 4.7% of the desktops converted to Linux.
And they are at the halfway point?  Must be the new math, because I didn't think that 4.7%  was
all that close to 50%.  And it's a pretty good bet that those 660 desktops were the low
hanging fruit.

Munich really should have gone with Suse and accepted Novell's and IBM's help, rather than
letting them pay for the pilot study and then telling them to get lost.  I thought it was a
mistake back at the time, and have seen nothing to make me change my mind.  To my eye, the
LiMux project looks more like a fiasco than a success.

Open source infiltrates government IT worldwide (LinuxWorld)

Posted Jan 4, 2008 17:47 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (6 responses) 

> They've been working on this since 2003.  They have 4.7% of the desktops converted to Linux.
And they are at the halfway point?  Must be the new math, because I didn't think that 4.7%
was all that close to 50%.  And it's a pretty good bet that those 660 desktops were the low
hanging fruit.

There's a lot more going on than merely installing Debian on users' computers.

To quote from TFA:

>...300 pieces of software including 170 business applications.

The apps are the key here; the OS merely exists to run these apps.  It would appear that
Munich is going one step further and switching to F/OSS software wherever possible, as well as
rewriting the (undoubtedly many) apps that were developed specifically for the City of Munich
so that they will work with Linux clients.

I imagine the main reason the migration is due to take so long is because of those
applications.  Once all of the apps are ready (and tested!) then switching the desktop OS is
actually a pretty straightforward (and relatively painless) process.

Open source infiltrates government IT worldwide (LinuxWorld)

Posted Jan 4, 2008 18:44 UTC (Fri) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link] (2 responses) 

You are likely correct.  The message that the other governments of the world see is:  95+% of
your desktops need Windows.  If you want to switch to Linux, expect to spend at least 6 years
pouring money into the project and to rewrite everything you have.

I'm similarly depressed about Novell's internal conversion.  Last I looked, they had been
working for years on it and even the majority of their *servers* were still Windows.  Pretty
sad progress for the company that built itself selling Netware and now pushes Linux. (How did
all those Windows servers get in there in the *first* place?!) And the desktop situation was
even more dismal.

Open source infiltrates government IT worldwide (LinuxWorld)

Posted Jan 4, 2008 19:16 UTC (Fri) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link] 

>If you want to switch to Linux, expect to spend at least 6 years
pouring money into the project and to rewrite everything you have.

Staying true to the licensing, the rest of Germany, at least, shouldn't take as long.
As the admins want to promote and spread their wings, won't they take jobs elsewhere and
spread the knowledge?

Open source infiltrates government IT worldwide (LinuxWorld)

Posted Jan 4, 2008 21:14 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] 

> The message that the other governments of the world see is:  95+% of your desktops need
Windows.  If you want to switch to Linux, expect to spend at least 6 years pouring money into
the project and to rewrite everything you have.

The pessimist in me agrees with you to some extent, but there is a flip side.

One thing I'd like to see is the cost of that migration, and how it compares to just renewing
the licenses for all of the software they're currently using.  (Don't forget the inevitable
upgrades and retraining...)

Add to this the fact that this one-off migration cost frees them from future licensing fees,
forced upgrades, and vendor lock-ins (at least for the F/OSS composnents; custom software
tends to be the same no matter what platform it's built on..) and the long-tern savings start
to accrue.  

Again, Munich is doing a lot more than simply migrating to Linux; they're
reworking/modernizing a considerable chunk of their IT infrastructure in the process.  One
could very well argue the latter is the point of this endeavor, and their choice of Linux is a
happy consequence.

Open source infiltrates government IT worldwide (LinuxWorld)

Posted Jan 5, 2008 6:00 UTC (Sat) by jordanb (guest, #45668) [Link] (2 responses) 


> The apps are the key here; the OS merely exists to run these apps.  It would 
> appear that Munich is going one step further and switching to F/OSS software 
> wherever possible, as well as rewriting the (undoubtedly many) apps that 
> were developed specifically for the City of Munich so that they will work 
> with Linux clients.

The types of custom "applications" a city government would have would be on the order of VBA
scripts for Microsoft Access. MAYBE they're using some custom built COBOL systems from 1987
that users have to get into, but that wouldn't impact Linux adoption, you can get 3270
emulators for X11 more easily than you can for Windows.

I suspect that the biggest issue is training. All these people need to be trained on Open
Office and Evolution and all that. This is something every big company IT department has to
deal with, and they have to deal with it *every* time they change to new software, free or
not. I'm sure they've done software transitions before and knew exactly what they were getting
into. 

When they say it's halfway done, that probably means half of the staff is trained on half of
the software they have to use, or something like that. The slow transition of actual software
is just representative of a sensible 'one application at a time' conversion for the staff. The
small number of people using Linux are those who are fully trained. If they have most of the
city running OOo on Windows then I'd say they're a huge part of the way there.

Open source infiltrates government IT worldwide (LinuxWorld)

Posted Jan 5, 2008 8:39 UTC (Sat) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (1 responses) 

I don't know about the situation in Germany, but in the Netherlands, 
where I have worked for a long time in a software company supplying city 
governments, there was rather more than a few vba scripts and an old 
cobol application. (Although I did replace some cobol apps in 
Vlaardingen).

We did Oracly applications for taxation, land registration, property 
value appraisal, snail-mail handling, social security administration and 
lots more. Right now I work for a company that sells traffic modelling 
applications to city governments (amongst others), environmental 
simulation software and traffic control software. There will likely be a 
couple of workflow systems to route dossiers in the various departments. 
A custom-build cms isn't rare to find. And there will be hundreds of 
small custom applications in any department, of any age from thirty years 
old, some of which only run on old MS-DOS boxes, some of them indeed 
written on top of Access.

Open source infiltrates government IT worldwide (LinuxWorld)

Posted Jan 5, 2008 22:06 UTC (Sat) by oak (guest, #2786) [Link] 

MS-DOS shouldn't be a problem, Linux has pretty good emulators for it 
(both Dosemu and DosBox and have their own strengths).  Imagine running 
DOS program where the OS can actually use the memory in the system 
sensibly! :-)

Open source infiltrates government IT worldwide (LinuxWorld)

Posted Jan 10, 2008 14:44 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link] 

> Munich really should have gone with Suse and accepted Novell's and IBM's
> help, rather than letting them pay for the pilot study and then telling
> them to get lost.

Since I know the manager of the folks who did the migration study quite well, I can assert
that neither Novell nor IBM paid for this study.


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