FSFE: What happened in Munich
Since this decision was reached, the majority of media have reported that a final call was made to halt LiMux and switch back to Microsoft software. This is, however, not an accurate representation of the outcome of the city council meeting. We studied the available documentation and our impression is that the last word has not been spoken."
| From: | press-AT-fsfe.org | |
| To: | press-release-AT-lists.fsfe.org | |
| Subject: | [FSFE PR][EN] What happened in Munich | |
| Date: | Wed, 01 Mar 2017 13:58:37 +0100 | |
| Message-ID: | <20170302112804.79C2C63BAF8@mail.fsfe.org> |
= What happened in Munich = [ Read online: https://fsfe.org/news/2017/news-20170301-01.en.html ] On 15 February 2017, the city council of Munich, Germany convened to discuss the future of their LiMux project. In its public session, the plenary voted to have the city administration develop a strategy to unify client-side IT architecture, building atop a yet-to-be-developed "Windows-Basis-Client". A translation of the complete decision is included further down. The opposing parties were overruled, but the decision was amended such that the strategy document must specify which LiMux-applications will no longer be needed, the extent in which prior investments must be written off, and a rough calculation of the overall costs of the desired unification. Since this decision was reached, the majority of media have reported that a final call was made to halt LiMux and switch back to Microsoft software. This is, however, not an accurate representation of the outcome of the city council meeting. We studied the available documentation and our impression is that the last word has not been spoken. We succeeded thus far in forcing the mayor Dieter Reiter (SPD) to postpone the final decision, and this was possible through the unwavering pressure created by joint efforts between The Document Foundation, KDE, OSBA, and the FSFE together with all the individuals who wrote to city council members and took the issue to the media. Although the mandate is highly suggestive in that it suggests that the existing vendor-neutral approach is to be replaced with a proprietary solution, it leaves the door open; Or are you aware of a commonly-used software standard that ensures maximal compatibility in all directions? The new mandate buys us some time. And we will keep going. == Background information == What lead to this public hearing on 15 February? In 2014, Dieter Reiter was elected new mayor of Munich. He had referred to himself as "Microsoft fan" even before he took office. He prides himself with having played a major part in the decision to move the Microsoft Germany headquarters to downtown Munich. He started to question the LiMux strategy as soon as his term started, and asked Accenture, a Microsoft partner in the same building as Microsoft, to analyse Munich's IT infrastructure. The report can be found here [1] (German). It's noteworthy that in their report, the analysts identify primarily organisational issues at the root of the problems troubling LiMux uptake, rather than technical challenges. The coalition of SPD and CSU filed a surprise motion with minimal lead time before the city council, with the goal to put LiMux to rest once and for all. == Our reaction == Given the importance of this matter, an ad-hoc coalition of The Document Foundation, KDE, OSBA, and the FSFE collected questions about this motion [2] (German), as well as the processes that lead up to it. We reached out to all members of the city council prior to the public hearing. Additionally, we sent a call for action [3] (German) to all our supporters in Germany and Austria, asking them to get in contact with politicians on this issue. The reaction was phenomenal. During the public hearing, politicians quoted some of our question, and said that they had never received as much input from the public before. Thank you everyone who made this happen! We also generated quite a bit of press coverage this way, not only in Germany, but also in other parts of the world. An incomplete list of press coverage can be found here [4]. Please share with us any additional material you might know about. == Conclusion == LiMux suffered from organisational problems, including lack of clear structures and responsibilities, which the Accenture report also makes clear. These are independent from the software used on client machines, and switching operating systems will not solve them. LiMux as such is still one of the best examples of how to create a vendor-neutral administration based on Free Software. The project was started 13 years ago when the city had to replace their no longer supported Windows NT4 workstations. Since then, they migrated 15.000 workplaces to vendor-neutral Free Software solutions, and Open-Standard- based file formats, supported by local IT companies. Overall this initiative displays not only a successful move to more independence, but also serves as role model of how to strengthen the local IT industry. By solving the organisational problems only, Munich could continue to successfully foster not only an independent administration but also a strong and healthy IT landscape. == Our goal == We understand that LiMux has not solved all problems, but we maintain that the root of the problems are of organisational nature, and thus must not be confounded with the technical choices. Public infrastructure must stay independent of singular commercial interests, that are known to stifle innovation. Free Software provides the unique opportunity to invest into common assets and benefit from everyone else's contributions, while staying in control of what gets deployed, and when. Local service providers operating in healthy competition boost the local economy and ensure best use of tax payers' money. We also note that the trend moves away from client-side operation to more centralised infrastructures, which operating-system-independent use across multiple devices and users' browsers of choice. It may turn out best for LiMux to adjust its focus, while the vendor-neutral strategy must prevail. == The modified motion, as passed on 15 February == The following conclusion was reached (overruling the opposition by Die Grünen - rosa liste, BAYERNPARTEI Stadtratsfraktion, Freiheitsrechte, Transparenz und Bürgerbeteiligung, ÖDP, DIE LINKE, LKR und BIA): The motion filed before the plenum by SPD and CSU shall have its section 6b (new) extended, as shown between the *** markers: "The administration shall without delay propose a strategy how to unify the city's client-side IT architecture by 2020-12-31, building on a yet- to-be-developed 'Windows-Basis-Client'. Baseline functionality (word processing, spreadsheets, presentation software, PDF reading, e-mail client and Web browser) needs to be provided by commonly-used, standard products, which must guarantee maximal compatibility with existing internal and external processes, as well as other software infrastructure (such as SAP). *** The strategy must be clear on which applications on LiMux-Basis will no longer be needed. The city council is to be informed on the extent that this requires write-offs of prior investments. Furthermore, a rough budget to illustrate the costs associated with the unification is to be presented. The city council will then make a final decision. *** Throughout the transition, the various departments are free to deploy the new, unified solution building on the 'Windows-Basis-Client', or continue using their existing, multi-tier (Window/LiMux) solution, depending on technical status. Strategic goal must remain that administrative tools shall be usable independently of the client-side operating system (e.g. web apps, virtualisation, remote desktop services)." The original decision is only available in German and can be found here [5], augmenting the original motion [6]. 1: https://www.ris-muenchen.de/RII/RII/DOK/SITZUNGSVORLAGE/4... 2: https://blog.schiessle.org/2017/02/14/rolle-ruckwarts-in-... 3: https://wiki.fsfe.org/Activities/LiMux/CallForAction 4: https://wiki.fsfe.org/Activities/LiMux 5: https://www.ris-muenchen.de/RII/RII/DOK/TOP/4372059.pdf 6: https://www.ris-muenchen.de/RII/RII/DOK/SITZUNGSVORLAGE/4... == About the Free Software Foundation Europe == Free Software Foundation Europe is a charity that empowers users to control technology. Software is deeply involved in all aspects of our lives; and it is important that this technology empowers rather than restricts us. Free Software gives everybody the rights to use, understand, adapt and share software. These rights help support other fundamental freedoms like freedom of speech, press and privacy. The FSFE helps individuals and organisations to understand how Free Software contributes to freedom, transparency, and self-determination. It enhances users' rights by abolishing barriers to Free Software adoption, encourage people to use and develop Free Software, and provide resources to enable everyone to further promote Free Software in Europe. http://fsfe.org _______________________________________________ Press-release mailing list Press-release@lists.fsfe.org https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/press-release
Posted Mar 3, 2017 8:55 UTC (Fri)
by shiftee (subscriber, #110711)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Mar 3, 2017 12:21 UTC (Fri)
by pboddie (guest, #50784)
[Link]
One might think that such brand-led procurement would be illegal, but that would be to underestimate the ways in which everyone involved seeks to redefine things like standards and to normalise practices like bundling.
Posted Mar 4, 2017 9:54 UTC (Sat)
by t_norup (guest, #14071)
[Link] (2 responses)
I live in a northern community to Copenhagen, Denmark, to where Microsoft recently relocated their headquarters. The HQ has a fairly large workforce due to including the main Dynamics AX development centre and is therefore both a prestige and taxpayer boon to the community.
Some years ago, the community had an ingenious IT director (previously known for succesfully ditching a large hospital's non-functioning commercial IP telephony system in favour of a system based on Asterisk) who forced the public schools to switch to OpenOffice.org. Involves 7-10 k licenses. Big outcry among some of the older pupils follows, but no real arguments against switch ever presented. Then some quiet years pass and suddenly the IT director leaves for another public-sector job. Microsoft moves in to the new premises and shortly after, some minion from the community's pedagogical centre announces that the OOO switch is reversed and that all pupils should now use MS Office again.
Big money talks.
Posted Mar 5, 2017 4:33 UTC (Sun)
by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Mar 5, 2017 12:40 UTC (Sun)
by ghane (guest, #1805)
[Link]
Or the new guy could not find anyone to support training for new staff on OO.
Or the new guy confused LibreOffice with OpenOffice.
Or the new guy did not like being called a minion on a public news site.
Not everyone who does the wrong thing is evil; and it does not help us win converts to our cause by casting aspersions on those who disagree with us.
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken." -- Oliver Cromwell, Letter to the Synod of the Church of Scotland, 1650
Posted Mar 6, 2017 17:33 UTC (Mon)
by burki99 (subscriber, #17149)
[Link] (7 responses)
I'm not saying that the decision to switch back to Windows is the right one, but you get a good feeling for the pain they are feeling. She mentions computers taking twenty minutes to start in the beginning of the day, they have 2'000 different applications in the city for specific tasks, some of them working only on a single versions of a web browsers. Their Linux clients exists in a variety of configurations, some with LibreOffice, others with OpenOffice. And while they managed to switch 70% of clients to Linux, they kept 30% of there machines on various versions of Windows going back to XP in order to cope with domain specific solutions.
And then she observes that there was a very active generation of IT technicians 10 years ago eager to make a switch to Linux. But the younger people these days neither care too much about Windows or Linux; they are much more interested (and knowledgeable) in coding Android apps. So they can't fill the position for admins with good knowledge of Linux desktops but have to hire independent contractors costing € 1'500 a day (instead of € 4'500 per months if they were regular city employees). To sum it up, they have a variety of IT issues many of them probably typical for any large city that can't pay the salaries good staff would expect in a booming and relatively expensive city like Munich. And all of you pointing out that they would have similar issues with an aging Windows environment as well are probably spot on. But taking into consideration that being the only bigger city with a non-Microsoft client infrastructure in the area certainly doesn't make it easier getting experienced staff from other communities with first hand experience in a comparable environment, their wish of getting closer to the main stream in government ID seems understandable.
Posted Mar 6, 2017 18:22 UTC (Mon)
by oever (guest, #987)
[Link]
Another issue brought up in the interview with finding good workers is that the salaries are strictly tied to level of education. They are thinking of hiring a company to do IT services to hack around this restriction.
There is large fragmentation even between the Linux machines.
The vision of the city is to go to one system and one of those will be Windows.
Posted Mar 7, 2017 8:24 UTC (Tue)
by niner (subscriber, #26151)
[Link]
https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Muenchner-IT-Leit...
Posted Mar 7, 2017 13:59 UTC (Tue)
by pboddie (guest, #50784)
[Link] (4 responses)
So you'd think there would be a good economic case for hiring people, keeping them happy and up-to-date with their skills, giving them a nice working environment, and paying them well enough. But I imagine that as in so many places where various political parties make the case for slimming down the public sector, no-one wants to sign off on actually hiring people because it is committing money on a year-by-year basis. So, they spend ten times as much by spending on a day-by-day basis instead. (Prestige, vanity projects like fancy buildings, the Olympic Games, and so on somehow don't suffer from this, for reasons you can easily imagine.) Of course, being kept in a marginal cashflow situation that ends up costing you serious money is not just a public sector thing: that's why on mainstream television channels you see wall-to-wall advertising for gambling and consumer loans. How else would rich people make money from poor people?
Posted Mar 7, 2017 14:13 UTC (Tue)
by burki99 (subscriber, #17149)
[Link]
Posted Mar 7, 2017 14:30 UTC (Tue)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link] (2 responses)
This is a reasonable idea in principle. In practice, the remuneration structures in the German public sector are quite strict and based on factors like your education, age, and time in service; you can't just pay anyone whatever you think they're worth. People with a university diploma in engineering or computer science can usually earn a lot more in the private sector. In particular, the IT job market being what it is in Germany, anyone in municipal IT who does end up working with external consultant firms and seems competent will, very likely, eventually get lucrative job offers from those.
To be fair, the idea of Munich putting on the 2022 winter Olympic Games was clearly rejected by the population in a referendum. (It would have made Munich one of the few cities to have hosted both summer – in 1972 – and winter games.)
Posted Mar 7, 2017 15:28 UTC (Tue)
by pboddie (guest, #50784)
[Link] (1 responses)
As for vanity projects and the Winter Games, residents of Oslo also rejected the Games in 2022, but not before the municipality had spent a fair amount of money preparing their laughable bid (justifying it in terms of infrastructure improvements, some actually unwanted by the supposed stakeholders, that would have been the most inefficient way of delivering such things, many of which they wouldn't have wanted to deliver under normal circumstances, anyway), so it isn't even the case that the public can rein in such wasteful spending before it starts to pick up momentum. That said, the political parties involved lost power at the next elections, meaning that they must have annoyed even their own voters sufficiently about that and other matters for it to have had some cost.
Posted Mar 8, 2017 18:57 UTC (Wed)
by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
[Link]
At the risk of veering offtopic, oversight and audit is fundamentally reactive, not preventative. It can work as a preventative though if the people being overseen (by democracy in this case) are smart enough to make predictions and risk averse enough to avoid a bad outcome, but not if they are either stupid or risk takers, in that case then consequences become the mechanism of training.
FSFE: What happened in Munich
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http://www.br.de/radio/b5-aktuell/sendungen/computermagaz...
It is a 15 minutes talk with one of the members of the city parliaments responsible for this decision.
FSFE: What happened in Munich
FSFE: What happened in Munich
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So they can't fill the position for admins with good knowledge of Linux desktops but have to hire independent contractors costing € 1'500 a day (instead of € 4'500 per months if they were regular city employees).
FSFE: What happened in Munich
FSFE: What happened in Munich
So you'd think there would be a good economic case for hiring people, keeping them happy and up-to-date with their skills, giving them a nice working environment, and paying them well enough.
Prestige, vanity projects like fancy buildings, the Olympic Games, and so on somehow don't suffer from this, for reasons you can easily imagine.
FSFE: What happened in Munich
FSFE: What happened in Munich