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The rise and fall of Limux

By Jake Edge
November 8, 2017
OSS Europe

The LiMux (or Limux) initiative in Munich has been heralded as an example of both the good and bad in moving a public administration away from proprietary systems. Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) President Matthias Kirschner reviewed the history of the initiative—and its recent apparent downfall—in a talk at Open Source Summit Europe in Prague. He also looked at the broader implications of the project as well as asking some questions that free-software advocates should consider moving forward.

History

He began by revisiting the year 2000; we had just survived the Y2K scare and public administrations (cities and other governmental organizations) were realizing that Windows NT 4.0 was about to reach its end of life. So some of them started evaluating the possibility of moving to Linux. One of those administrations was the city of Munich. There was a lot of media attention focused on the idea that Munich might move away from proprietary software. Microsoft CEO (at the time), Steve Ballmer, famously left his ski vacation to talk to the mayor, but that didn't dissuade the city from starting a project to move to Linux.

[Matthias Kirschner]

A few weeks later, though, the project did stop because the city was worried about patents. That problem was studied and the city came to the conclusion that the patent risk was no worse for free software than it was for proprietary software. Still, over the years, there were repeatedly rumors about the demise of the project and that Limux, Munich's Linux distribution, would be dropped.

One of the questions that Munich wanted to answer was if switching would save it money. An IT committee estimated it would save €20 million by using Linux clients for the desktop. There were other studies, including a Microsoft-funded one by HP that said it would cost €43 million more; that study was not published, though its conclusions were featured in the news.

The rumors that Munich would drop Limux often cited cost as a reason for doing so but, even now, it is difficult to estimate what the cost of switching was. There was more to the switch than simply desktop clients as the city also centralized much of its IT infrastructure at the same time. It is hard to separate the organizational and technical costs to really determine the bottom line, Kirschner said.

Along the way, it was reported that 20% of the users of Limux were not happy or satisfied with it; other reports had the number at 40%. In most cases, it was not at all clear what they were unhappy with—was it the client or something else? Those reports never said anything about how happy the city workers in "Hamburg or Paris or wherever" were. He noted that one of the changes moved the support staff to a centralized facility, rather than it "being the guy in the next room". He wondered if that may have impacted users' happiness with their desktops.

Another thing that was often reported was that it was difficult to exchange documents with other administrations in Germany. There was a German policy that documents were supposed to be delivered in an open format, but Munich regularly got documents in proprietary formats.

Despite all of the reports of the imminent downfall of Limux, by 2013, 15,000 computers had been migrated. In addition, 18,000 LibreOffice templates had been created for documents. Previously, each office had its own templates, but the new ones were shared across the city administration. The mayor who had started the project was "always supporting it", Kirschner said. He continuously backed the team behind Limux.

That all ended in 2014. The old mayor did not run for reelection, so a new mayor, Dieter Reiter, from the same party was elected. Reiter did not like Limux and was quoted in some articles as being a Microsoft fan. He ran partly on the idea of switching away from Limux.

The cause of all evil

From then on, Kirschner said, "Limux was the cause of all evil in Munich". For example, iPhones did not work with the city's infrastructure, which was blamed on Limux though it had nothing to do with the desktop client. A mail server outage was also unfairly blamed on Limux.

All of that led people around Europe to believe that Munich had already switched away from Limux, but that was not the case. The new mayor was making a lot of noise about it, which made things hard for the IT staff. Effectively, the boss was not supporting their work.

The city government paid for a study to look at the IT problems that the city was having. It was done by Accenture, which is a Microsoft partner, so the FSFE and others expected the worst. It turned out not to be what they expected, he said. The study identified several problems, one of which was about an old version of Windows that was still in use, but the biggest problems were organizational rather than technical.

It turned out that there were fifteen different operating system versions in use throughout the city administration. Upgrades could be blocked by departments if they didn't like the update or didn't have time to do them. That meant there were users who were dealing with bugs that had been long fixed in LibreOffice (or OpenOffice before it). The study recommended that those problems be fixed.

The Munich city council decided to do a reorganization of the IT department, which was similar to some of the study's recommendations, but not the same. A city council meeting was held with a late, surprising, addition to the agenda: to vote on moving to an integrated (proprietary) client. There were no costs or justifications associated with that agenda item, it was just an attempt to have a decision made about that question.

The FSFE wrote to all of the city council members (and the press) to ask about the effects, costs, which services would not be available after a switch, and so on. That led to multiple press inquiries to the city council and a television crew showing up at the meeting. Many of the questions the FSFE had asked were brought up in the meeting and the council wanted "real answers"; they had never gotten so many requests from the public about any other issue, Kirschner said.

In the meeting, the mayor said that the agenda item was not actually about making a decision, but was instead about examining options. It was agreed that, before a decision could be reached, clarity on costs, service disruptions, and the like would be needed. A decision would be made by the council at some later date.

In that meeting, though, it became quite clear that a lot of parties had already made up their mind, Kirschner said. There would be a move to a unified desktop client over the next few years. In fact, without waiting for a decision from the city council, some services were stopped and email started to be migrated to Microsoft Exchange. The "pattern is quite clear", but the public is being told that the city is still examining options. That is "harming not only free software, but also democracy", he said.

Moving forward

The "lighthouse we had seen before will not be there anymore". Limux will be replaced with Microsoft clients. It doesn't make sense, he said, because the city already had a strategy to move away from desktops to "bring your own device" and other desktop alternatives. He wondered if this is all really Munich's fault or whether the free-software community also unwittingly helped Limux fail. It is something we need to understand and learn from for other migrations that may happen in the future.

To that end, Kirschner had a few different questions that he thought the community should think about. "Do we suck at the desktop?" We are dominant in everything from supercomputers to embedded devices, but have never made any real gains in the desktop space. Many in the community use other operating systems as their main desktop. Is our desktop client bad or is it applications that are needed, especially for public administrations?

Was there too much focus on the cost savings? People in the community promised that Munich would save money and he is confident that in the long run that is true, but a switch always has costs. If the budget is tight, switching to save money may well not be the right plan. He also wondered if the community should do more to support companies and individuals who charge for free software.

"Do we sometimes harm these migrations by volunteering?" Migrations to free software are generally driven by individuals, either inside a public administration or by a parent for a school. Those individuals start bringing free software in and do lots of work (for free) to make it all work. Problems arise and there is no budget to bring in others to help out; people burn out and then everything fails. Instead of coming to the conclusion that not having a budget led to free software failing, the organizations often decide to "get a budget and do it right". He thought it might make more sense to try to get the budget for the free-software project, instead of volunteering.

It may be better to focus on applications, rather than on the operating system. Public administrations have applications for all sorts of different tasks, such as passport programs or marriage license applications. Those need to work right away as part of any migration. Maybe a path forward is to make the argument that those applications should be free software, so that they aren't so closely tied to a particular platform.

There was a tendency in the community to point to Munich whenever the topic of free software in public administrations would come up. That may have been too much focus on one migration. As seen in Munich, decisions about migrations are not always made for technical reasons, but since that migration was always touted, it means that Munich failing equates to free software failing in some minds. There are other examples of migrations in public administrations, he said; we should research those and point out multiple different migrations instead of concentrating on one.

Public money, public code

The FSFE has started a new campaign, called Public Money, Public Code, that seeks to make all code developed for the public be released as free software. He quoted the Director-General of the European Commission's IT directorate who said: "Sharing and reuse should become the default approach in the public sector". He showed a short video [YouTube] from the campaign web site that highlighted the absurdity of proprietary restrictions on software by analogy to public infrastructure like roads and buildings. If the owners of public buildings could force complete replacement in order to upgrade or restrict the kinds of votes that could be taken in legislative building, it would obviously be completely unacceptable, but that is often what is required for our public code infrastructure.

There is a open letter that Europeans can sign to demand that lawmakers "implement legislation requiring that publicly financed software developed for the public sector be made publicly available under a Free and Open Source Software licence.". Organizations can also join the campaign and donations are accepted to further the work. He concluded with a quote: "Many small people, in many small places, do many small things, that can alter the face of the world."

In the Q&A, Kirschner noted that, unlike companies, which often don't want to share with their competitors, public administrations are not in competition with each other. It should be easy for them to understand the advantages of sharing and reusing the software they procure. He also said that part of the campaign's work is in trying to convince lawmakers to support the effort. For the German elections, FSFE contacted all of the candidates and asked for their support; the same will be done for elections in other countries and for the EU Parliament.

[I would like to thank LWN's travel sponsor, the Linux Foundation, for supporting my travel to Prague for OSS Europe.]

Index entries for this article
ConferenceOpen Source Summit Europe/2017

to post comments

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 8, 2017 20:22 UTC (Wed) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] (19 responses)

> In the Q&A, Kirschner noted that, unlike companies, which
> often don't want to share with their competitors, public
> administrations are not in competition with each other.
> It should be easy for them to understand the advantages
> of sharing and reusing the software they procure.

I don't know how anyone who works in public administrations for any time gets that idea. Public admistrations are ALWAYS in competition with each other.. be it from who is getting funding, who is getting power, who is getting recognition. The competition can be anything from <city X> vs <city Y> going back hundreds of years when someone from X brought a pig in and ate a prize flower to the fact that Y's football team keeps losing to X. Inside of an administration it can be petty feuds to long standing grudges where everyone hates Parking but also cowtows to them.

This isn't any different from being in a corporation or a country.. it is just how humans act when they get in groups. Assuming that people don't act that way because they shouldn't gets you in places where you get constantly surprised when people act like people. [This isn't meant as a pessimistic look at humanity.. it is meant more that in knowing how humans act in a group regardless of stated intentions you can make better informed choices on how they may act over long periods of time.]

In other parts, he is correct that in volunteering to help out etc.. we do more harm than good in things. People burn out, go on extended vacations, find Nirvana, etc and that is where having a budget for work to cover when that happens helps.

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 9, 2017 10:39 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (16 responses)

I think the point was that public administrations do not have to compete for customers. With many things, if you're not happy with brand A it is simple to buy brands B or C instead, but the only way to get out from under a public administration you don't like is to move. This may be OK if you don't like your small-town municipal administration but the higher your dissatisfaction goes (county, state, federal) the less feasible this may be.

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 9, 2017 14:13 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] (14 responses)

Thank you for that explanation and clarification. I am still not sure how that lack of competition as explained matches the idea that they should be more open to trade information.

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 9, 2017 18:28 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (11 responses)

People don't choose their hometown based on what tools are used to map out garbage collection routes, so why not collaborate on one tool with neighboring municipalities and save money for residents of all of them? Same for most (all?) other tools which are used in the service of running a government.

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 9, 2017 19:48 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] (10 responses)

Yes that would make sense except people don't think that way.. they tend to think that those people in that town should move to our town (or all the malcontents in our town should move to that town). If those people we want to move here because of our better garbage collection, our tax base will be better, our schools will be better, etc etc.

The counter point is "why would we want to work with that town.. they say their garbage collection is better? bah when has anything good come out of that town"

It is again not how people should act, but it is the way they tend to act without outside forces because of tribal nature of humans 'trying to protect' what makes it feel comfortable.

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 9, 2017 21:16 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (5 responses)

This isn't a prisoner's dilemma where cooperating and defecting are best when you agree with the other. Cooperating here is a net benefit for both sides and defecting means that both end up wasting resources they could have put other places. Yes, there are differences between areas, but they tend to be *how* the tools (and the now-available resources) are used, not *which* tools are used. For example, now that both have some extra room in the budget, one town could pour it into local businesses while the other improves homeless shelters.

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 9, 2017 21:39 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] (4 responses)

If it were that easy, humanity would have done this generations ago. The world is an extremely complicated place and humans are not smart enough to deal with that complexity. Our brains have all kinds of hard-wired responses which will trump 'reason' unless forced not to. The brain also has a very complicated 'sub-conscious' of multiple other deciding parts which will 'gut decisions'. Our rational parts are mainly used to "explain" why we made some decision with our gut after we made it... versus the opposite way.

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 10, 2017 16:38 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (2 responses)

While tribalism is a thing, I don't see it as a reason to not make these arguments at your local government meetings (assuming you attend).

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 10, 2017 17:31 UTC (Fri) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] (1 responses)

I believe you think I am arguing with you about something I am not. I never said not to make those arguments. I said that you need to understand that the arguments may not work without extra work because tribalism and other factors can be a default decision path.

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 26, 2017 4:06 UTC (Sun) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648) [Link]

Dude ... no. The people running governmental organizations don't have the emotional maturity of 2 year olds, with the obvious exception of the current US president.

UT Texas and Texas A&M used to have a huge football rivalry. It didn't stop their researchers from collaborating, because normal people are able to see fun rivalries like that for what they are: just for fun.

Neighboring cities are used to cooperating with each other on public transit and many other things. Why would they see software any differently?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlibrary_loan

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 22, 2017 16:56 UTC (Wed) by ghane (guest, #1805) [Link]

> If it were that easy, humanity would have done this generations ago.

+1

The problems we face today are hard, in general, because the easy ones have been solved over the last few millennia.

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 10, 2017 8:18 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (2 responses)

Since even kids have smartphones nowadays, everyone has some basic idea of what software is. The basic education about software actually started long ago that when people copied music illegally.

Any citizen who sees a NIH, usually crappy application that was developed specifically for his or her town for no good reason immediately wonders why his taxes were wasted for such a custom development when every town could use the same (open _or_ closed source) software. This is very simple and super typical taxpayer behavior. Not everything requires complex psychological theories and explanations.

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 10, 2017 8:36 UTC (Fri) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link] (1 responses)

> Any citizen who sees a NIH, usually crappy application that was developed specifically for

I thought for a moment that you were talking about smartphone apps - description fits perfectly.

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 11, 2017 16:30 UTC (Sat) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

I was but certainly not exclusively.

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 16, 2017 18:05 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

In some or even most countries there are organisations that bring together different municipalities or other public sector institutions for collaboration around the things they all have to do. Maybe you are not based in such a country or are not aware of the existence of such organisations.

It is certainly true that everyone thinks they are special and have particular needs that others do not have or understand. But while an urban municipality, for example, may accuse a rural municipality of not understanding their own requirements within a particular field of activity (traffic management or waste collection, say), it would be ignorant for such a municipality to reject the notion that other urban municipalities have very similar needs or requirements.

And there are also situations where everyone is bound by exactly the same laws and rules. One example I can think of immediately is the way electoral materials seem to be independently prepared by municipalities in the United Kingdom, meaning that you end up with some document or other, prepared locally (perhaps involving a template, one would hope), with the same grammatical error present over a period of a decade or longer, presumably because someone in the local bureaucracy came along and told someone else to get it done. At no point did anyone think that this might be done just once: we're not talking about the voting forms which are specific to a locality, after all.

Multiply such poorly-executed duplication of effort by a few hundred and you have an example of considerable, needless waste that cannot be really be explained, let alone justified, in a professional context by idiotic town rivalries.

my take is they can be easily *directed* to cooperate, contrary to industry

Posted Nov 12, 2017 7:46 UTC (Sun) by Herve5 (guest, #115399) [Link] (1 responses)

In the industry, the people in my factory are directed very clearly to maintain maximum secrecy against our archrival company Y, in order to beat them.
In my administration, even if most of my colleagues are pissed off by their loss at football or even their racism agains the neigbors from city Y, it's just a simple n+1 boss-level decision to annouce next week's meeting is dedicated to what'd be better done together.
Administrations can be *directed* to collaborate, we only need to decide so. Private companies are *designed* to compete.

my take is they can be easily *directed* to cooperate, contrary to industry

Posted Nov 16, 2017 8:46 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> Administrations can be *directed* to collaborate, we only need to decide so. Private companies are *designed* to compete.

And Smoogen's point is that no matter what you are *supposed* to do, individuals can *scupper* that intent.

How many directives have failed, not because the directive was bad, but because the people who were told to do it didn't want to? FAR TOO MANY!

Cheers,
Wol

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 22, 2017 3:44 UTC (Wed) by ThinkRob (guest, #64513) [Link]

I think the point was that public administrations do not have to compete for customers.
Yes, but that sort of doesn't matter does it? I mean, aside from Silicon Valley startups, most businesses care less about customer head-count and more about the money that the customers bring. And in that regard (competing for dollars), factions in city/state/national governments can indeed act very similar to commercial concerns. Just... it's grant/budget dollars that they're competing for rather than customer dollars. Same difference in my book.

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 17, 2017 9:31 UTC (Fri) by oldtomas (guest, #72579) [Link] (1 responses)

I think what you're saying is far too general. "Groups of people are always in competition" is as true as "groups of people are always in cooperation".

To get an idea on what all this is about it makes more sense to look at illustrative examples (just to map where chances -- and difficulties may lie). One of those examples is FixMyStreet: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FixMyStreet>. What at first sight looks like a little trivial web app is by now saving millions in accumulated expenses for lots of cities (I'm talking about the millions needed to implement a similar app, not about the effects of the app itself!).

I think this is the way to go (and the way many desperate local admins are taking, as their budgets are squeezed more and more "from above". Perhaps a good collateral of neo-liberalism, who knows.

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 19, 2017 4:21 UTC (Sun) by metasequoia (guest, #119065) [Link]

FixMyStreet looks great. The problem though is that the developed countries have been hyping and the developing world is allegedly looking to a massive infusion of cash that they claimed has been promised to them in the form of market access to work for the services of the developed countries. Services are 80% of the jobs. People need to understand that a scheme was hatched up 20 years ago and its been in negotiations since then, first in the Uruguay Round and later in the Doha Development Agenda and most recently in TiSA and the recently proposed Indian TFS. This scheme has tentacles that go everywhere and its behind things as diverse as the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (see and the US health care mess. (the ACA is actually being rolled back because of a freeze on financial service regulation laid out in a WTO document called the Understanding on Committments in Financial Services, read it, scroll down to "Standstill" US Social Security is also under attack. See WTO | Services: Annex on Financial Services) this paper by noted forensic accountancy expert Patricia Arnold, https://www.citizen.org/documents/GATS-financial-dereg.pdf ) and the Indian proposals to the WTO concerning the "Trade Facilitation Agreement on Services" which you can read on the WTO site. They hope to attack the existence of the public sector, privatize it, foreclose the possibility of ever implementing public healthcare by turning it into an entitlement of foreign firms to services, potentially leading to both the loss of millions of jobs and the exclusion from health insurance eligibility of millions of Americans who will become, as they were before, 'uninsurable' or only insurable if they agree to leave the country for care. (This may be required by the provisions that all subsidies be limited to their least "trade restrictive" form when government spending is involved. For an idea of the difficulty self employed people with any health condition had with insurers, see the series on health insurance rescission by Lisa Girion in the LA Times, 2008-2009- Also writing on so called 'patient mobility') Additionally GATS and TiSA continue the bad policies of irreversible deregulation which caused the 2008 crash. Proof can be found in this sentence in the 1998 WTO filing by the US, document SC90 Supplement03 " filed february 26, 1998, the effective date of the Understanding. "The Administration has expressed its support for Glass-Steagall reform on a national treatment basis and will work with Congress to achieve an appropriate framework to accomplish this objective." Also in that same document you can see that the US is attempting to entice foreign insurers int the US to permanently block public healthcare from being possibble b y creating permanent entitlements for foreign firms to treat patients receiving subsidies, either elsewhere or here, as a means of distinguising various spending levels. See also: Skala at http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.4... and Maine CTPC report at http://www.maine.gov/legis/opla/ctpchlthcaresub.pdf Also https://www.policyalternatives.ca/publications/reports/ti... and a half dozen other excellent reports over a 15 year timespan by the CCPA (archived at the same site) Facing Facts and Putting Health First are particularly informative as their recent work on TiSA and CETA.

Basically large numbers of already powerful groups have been planning for decades for huge "efficiency gains" . supposed to come from large scale privatizations of quasi public services in the developed countries and then competitive bidding which awards those jobs to the low bidders. These changes are intended to bring about a race to the bottom on wages and standards of all kinds. See CIEL.org's work on this issue. GATS, TiSA, TTIP, and CETA are just the most visible of a web of similar backroom deals intended to trap the entire planet. The experience of the Slovak Republic with health care recently is a case in point. (See http://www.italaw.com/sites/default/files/case-documents/... starting at Page 13) I think the push on services poses a hge existential threat to FOSS because it will be posed as a barrier to maximizing the value in huge multinationals supply chain by creating increased value whenever people add to software. Municipal governments are particularly important because of the push to privatize administration of sub-federal government functions and outsource it on a massive level. This is already happening in the UK where administration of many local councils has been outsourced to the opposite side of the world. This was the cause of much consternation during the recent Grenfell Towers disaster when phone calls to the local council went unanswered and emails were returned by people who obviously were unaware this huge disaster had even occurred several days after it had happened.

We need to understand that the secrecy is intentional and being maintained because nobody anywhere would agree to have democracy taken away. therefore it is an issue the entire world apart from these corrupt governments should unite behind. Its a war on families and on all of our security mounted by a cabal of oligarchs who all know each other and feel themselves to be above internatioal law. They are also pushing for a massive increase in cross border web business and services outsourcing in order to create huge profits and confound attempts at determining accountability.

Its effectuated by massive changes in government procurement (For example the WTO GPA, GATS and TISA) that give countries and in some of them corporations special rights at a supranational level within which FOSS doesn't exist. which is in a sense rigged because they get to pay workforces - even in other countries, wages which might be a fraction of the amounts they are making now. Its really a syetem comparable to modern day slavery. The privatization is either opt in or positive list (GATS) or negative list (everything in by default to prevent discussion) (started with NAFTA and all the US FTAS are negative list. Thats basically a standstill/freeze on all new regulation at their signing date and then subsequent regulation can be rolled back to that date . the privatization scope is a mix of scheduled exclusions and autopilot that seems designed to keep discussion of this system (which really essentially does away with democracy) out of the media. The scope is extremely wide, based on the two prong definition that is described here. Multiple FTAs import this definition. http://www.iatp.org/files/GATS_and_Public_Service_Systems... You may also want to read a paper entitled "Rising powers' venue - shopping on international mobility" which is about the international power dynamics of these schemes. Also look for stuff on "Labour Mobility" and GATS' "Mode Four" for context. I am terrified that FOSS may find itself in the crossfire over this huge international - scam/con job (but its very likely both groups are collaborating over it to pretend they are fighting, (its a means to strip away the premium paid to workers in developed countries for the same work as workers in developing countries will do for a tenth as much, without it being too obviously the work of their own elites.) What needs to happen is people need to stand up for equal pay upward for people in developing countries when they are resident in the developed countries. It shouldn't be okay to pay them what they get paid back home. Thats setting up the stage for a global slavery like system ("Mode Four" see https://web.archive.org/web/20080313195303/http://www.afs... ) where worker/voters are disenfranchised in large numbers by forcing them to leave their own countries and work under these guest worker programs to get jobs, where they will be non-persons, second class citizens. Corporations should not be allowed to hijack international migration for their bottom lines. Similar plans are being coked up for US health care and other, non-IT services but the professions which are supposed to come up with "Disciplines on Domestic Regulation" have been dragging their feet for over a decade. This may be why the US came up with TiSA which hoped to renew this whole scheme but minus India, China and a number of other countries.(see the maine document linked elsewhere for proof that the talks for TiSA actually began in 2006, it also describes how GATS could lock us in to bad health care models forever with escape so costly it might become impossible as the rest of the economy crashes) In response, India has floated a proposal for a Trade Facilitation Agreement on Services which proposes to use the WTO to force countries to open up. They have also filed a case with the WTO contesting a number of US limits on their workers, and services export firms, a limit on visas which they claim violates the GATS agreement. It was filed in March of 2016 so a decision is expected soon. A win for them could mean massive increases in Mode Four work in developed countries, until it reached some natural equilibrium which likely would be accomplished by wages falling a lot. The reason why this poses a threat to FOSS is I think that the numbers of workers who would be employed is probably based on optimistic estimates of tech employment which are not realistic considering the rapid improvements in automation, also both sides expect the other side to be more generous to their own people than in fact I think they will be, so instead of a boom, there will be an economic crash as laid off workers stop buying and the country goes into shock. This will lead to a lot of finger pointing and blaming and I could see FOSS being labeled as a trade barrier. Also rules in the GATS require that when tendering contracts for work internationally, work qualifications must be based on what they claim are objective criteria and basically that is college degrees, it seems to me, at least masters level college degrees. Its a system that set up to favor the large numbers of workers in developing countries who have advanced degrees but no jobs locally. Its an attempt to prop up the least equal countries authoritarian governments by giving them patronage jobs to give away. (See also https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/india-wto.pdf ) It wont be just the FOSS communities in the West that lose out, the FOSS communities in Asia may also find themselves excluded. Nobody should be forced into a human trafficking situation where they cannot make a living wage. Living wages are a concept thats anathema to neoliberalism, but trade agreements cannot to do an end run around democracy and hard won gains for workers by such a dishonest method. It should be said that the ideology behind this entire scheme is one which is attempting to wipe out all public services and open government What needs to happen is advocates of free software around the world need to see that even though we don't see this, a lot of corrupt institutions have failing business models they are desperate to lock in which are unpopular and far too burdensome on the planet as they exist today and they are not only resistant to change they are attempting to mount a preemptive strike on democracy via trade and investment agreements. See the work of Markus Krajewski on the clash between public services and the GATS and other US style negative list FTAs. Jane kelsey's writing on the services agreements is also perceptive. Here is a recent essay by her on how big parts of TPP have quietly been moved to TISA. http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/38/04.html

The 1994 WTO GATS which was part of the first wave of these bad deals and most Americans remain unaware of it. It, was and remains a disaster, it actually was responsible for the 2008 crash. The FOSS model should also be advanced as a new way to govern and make laws, cooperatively. In a sense what the world needs is real free trade of ideas where the best ideas can be implemented. Instead the FTAs which true to form are arguably captured trade agreements, are the exact opposite of everything they claim to be. People around the world need to get together to discuss what to do about this. It would really advance the cause of humanity to rise to this challenge and call the schemers out. Especially negative list and the concepts of standstill, ratchet, rollback and indirect expropriation/ISDS are thefts of the future policy space and need to be exposed as they otherwise will literally leave the entire planet literally with nothing by a system set up to nullify all that is good, replacing it with greed, dishonesty and evil. We need to make it clear to people what FOSS is- its a gift to everybody. But in the new supranational level of institutions, FOSS has no standing. We need to create a new right for people and gifts to every human - NOT phony juridicial people- create a standing for flesh and blood people or expose this horrid moral system to the world and show the planet what it is trying to do, take everything by stealth.
With corruption. No elected government should be able to sell its country's future jobs away by making a behind the scenes deal to trade them away. Likewise, deals are being made to lock down bad business models in a way they cannot be reversed. This must be brought out into the open. Soon. Buenos Aires is in just a few weeks - and our future is on the table.

Please excuse the spelling and gramattical errors in this comment, its late and I'm tired and bed is calling, but I really want people to understand the entire world is at stake, not just the positive things we have tried to do for it. Peace.

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 8, 2017 20:30 UTC (Wed) by jhoblitt (subscriber, #77733) [Link]

Creating native desktop apps for what are essentially boutique data entry/query tasks seems like the "wrong way" to be doing it since the "rise of javascript". The solves version roll out issues and is generally cross-platform, the later is a concern for BYOD. I would expect the typical office worker doesn't need much in the way of locally installed apps beyond a modern browser and office suite.

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 8, 2017 21:41 UTC (Wed) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (22 responses)

This article does not mention what is probably the main cause of the fall of Limux, which is Microsoft last year moved its German company headquarters to Munich:
<https://www.techrepublic.com/article/linux-champion-munic...>
<https://news.microsoft.com/de-de/microsoft-deutschland-be...>

This is quite possibly a huge economic boon for the city, so by that standard, Limux was a huge
success.

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 9, 2017 10:56 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (21 responses)

To be fair, the German Microsoft headquarters previously used to be in Unterschleißheim, which is right outside Munich, so it's not a huge step, geographically, as far as Microsoft is concerned. When it moved to its new premises in Munich, Microsoft also closed three other German offices in different cities. All of this was apparently decided in 2013, when abolishing Limux wasn't a current issue yet.

This is not to say that whether Microsoft pays corporate taxes to the city of Munich rather than the town of Unterschleißheim isn't something the Munich municipal government is concerned about, but it's probably not the deciding factor. Microsoft will probably give the city a nice discount on the thousands of Windows licenses they will require, though – way back when the Limux thing was new, the rumour mill said that Ballmer was willing to give them Windows for virtually free but they still didn't want it. Those were the days.

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 9, 2017 14:51 UTC (Thu) by cpanceac (guest, #80967) [Link] (18 responses)

From my limited public administration experience, what i was never able to offer was a decent Microsoft Exchange client (full featured calendar included) alternative. And please don't say Evolution was or even is such a good client, because is full of bugs after all these years. Everything else was in place: Office suite, Browsers, Email clients, Multimedia apps, etc. Of course also at the time an Active Directory alternative was difficult to set up and also limited in features, but that was not a real blocker.

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 10, 2017 2:01 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

I know several Linux shops that run Exchange for mail, with people using OWA or the real Oulook in Wine. And I can’t really blame them.

It’s that bad.

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 16, 2017 17:22 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (16 responses)

Having seen Exchange introduced under dubious circumstances in another kind of institution (expect Munich to migrate everyone to Office 365 next, if it isn't already happening), it is important to evaluate where Free Software could be better in order to provide a much more robust response to the threat of proprietary software "comparison shopping". For calendar-related solutions, this means evaluating both the client and server (or, rather, scheduling) components and seeing what more could be done to develop and promote the Free Software offerings.

This means that developers of the different offerings have to exhibit a degree of solidarity. They should help each other out to be able to offer a decent end-to-end Free Software solution rather than, say, client developers thinking that an acceptable goal is to offer a Free Software Exchange (or random cloud service) client, or server developers thinking that their goal is to offer something that "replaces Exchange" and that supporting Outlook is enough. Neither of these "selfish" goals is sustainable, either for the individual projects (whose software will be readily replaced by Microsoft's "complete" solution when a drive to simplify or "harmonise" the technology stack is initiated) or for the Free Software ecosystem in general.

Another thing that needs to change is the "we got it covered" attitude. For years, people thought that a combination of Kontact and Kolab covered this need, when Kontact (and its constituent parts) apparently suffered from the KDE 3-to-4 transition (but mostly recovered) and Kolab apparently didn't get much further development (and has since been rewritten but is effectively a single-company effort). That Evolution is still often mentioned as the "go to" program for groupware can arguably be interpreted a symptom of this attitude, too, hinting that its developers managed to cover the need ages ago and that no-one ever needs to revisit that assumption.

There are plenty of projects out there in this space: lots of calendar servers (some possibly supporting scheduling functions to the level people might demand), some more extensive server solutions (that usually seem to integrate the mail server functionality and do things like user administration), and various clients in differing states (some Web-based, some traditional GUI). Given that all this software is supposed to promote collaboration, it shouldn't be too much to ask that its developers collaborate a bit more, or that people with an interest in Free Software viability try and promote and sustain such software rather than rushing off to random cloud services at the first hint of adversity.

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 20, 2017 21:08 UTC (Mon) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link] (15 responses)

> For years, people thought that a combination of Kontact and Kolab covered this need

Having been both a daily Kontact+Kolab in addition to Outlook+Exchange user over the last decade, you can count me into the group that saw Kontact+Kolab covering the need, or at least being the only realistic hope of ever doing it.

> this means evaluating both the client and server (or, rather, scheduling)

Yes, but scheduling has been available in Kontact+Kolab throughout the decade. Are you sure you know what you are talking about?

Actually, it would be very nice to hear about experiences in Munich on this topic. The only hint I heard was a mail-server outage (Kolab is certainly just as stable as Exchange, so I am afraid that is nothing more than FUD) and syncing Apple phones (but activesync has been supported in Kolab for years, so this was maybe before Munich rolled it out?). In any case, I have seen no feed-back on the topic even helping a millimeter to improve the situation. Your post I am afraid is not helping at all to cast new light.

Yes we should learn, but uneducated slandering of solutions is not helping. It only makes the position of the open projects even harder. Hence, I beg you to remove the prosaic slander from your posting, and replace it with to-the-point technical content.

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 21, 2017 0:03 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (5 responses)

> Having been both a daily Kontact+Kolab in addition to Outlook+Exchange user over the last decade, you can count me into the group that saw Kontact+Kolab covering the need, or at least being the only realistic hope of ever doing it.
Sorry, not even close. Exchange allows to set up distributed highly-available system, this is "supported" only by creating a database cluster in Kolab.

Exchange has rich support for auditing and logging, compatible with SOX (Sarbanes–Oxley Act) and other official standards.

Microsoft Outlook is available for macOS, Kontact doesn't work there. Exchange supports fully managed mobile devices with calendar and mail sync, Kolab doesn't. The project to add full Exchange emulation has died earlier last year ( https://github.com/openchange ).

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 21, 2017 9:27 UTC (Tue) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link] (4 responses)

> Exchange allows to set up distributed highly-available system, this is "supported" only by creating a database cluster in Kolab.

People set-up highly-available systems with Kolab using heartbeat a decade ago. Not sure how many users you need to warrant a cluster set-up. Spreading the various services in kolab (e.g., running the web-server on a different node) have afaik also been done successfully for a decade. How many users would a single modern node cater to on the database side? I am not surprised if 100.000 users runs smooth.

> Microsoft Outlook is available for macOS

True. I did quite a bit of testing of Kontact+Kolab on OSX, at the time it was not in a useful state.

You forget that outlook is not available on linux. To make matters worse, office365 is so bad as to be totally useless. The current web-interface in Kolab is light-years ahead, and will actually give most macos users an OK experience.

> Exchange supports fully managed mobile devices with calendar and mail sync, Kolab doesn't.

Are you being intentionally sloppy in your posting? Does calendar and mail sync work in Kolab or not? If you simply mean Kolab does not support managed devices, then that may be true, I have not checked. However, that "feature" that is a strange selling point. I have lost more hours than I can count on my phone getting wiped for no good reason. So much so that many today use alternative apps to sync with exchange to avoid the whole managed thing.

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 21, 2017 14:07 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (3 responses)

> People set-up highly-available systems with Kolab using heartbeat a decade ago.
Well, I set it up myself. It's not a pretty sight.

> You forget that outlook is not available on linux.
To be fair, OWA works fine on Linux, I'm using right it now in FF without issues. It's actually better than Kolab's web interface.

> Are you being intentionally sloppy in your posting? Does calendar and mail sync work in Kolab or not?
Since there's no good real way to use it on macOS and mobile - no they don't. These days for many companies _especially_ in the public sector the managed mobile endpoints are a necessity, so that admins can remotely wipe a lost device.

You can use third-party MDMs with Kolab by integrating them through LDAP, but this is not something that Kolab supports nativly.

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 21, 2017 14:47 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> Since there's no good real way to use it on macOS and mobile - no they don't.

So you're saying that macOS doesn't have calDAV and cardDAV clients? iOS certianly does, and it's a single package away on Android too.

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 21, 2017 20:31 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

That too. The built in clients on Mac are not really any good. Mobile clients are not much better either, if you try to use them for serious collaboration.

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 21, 2017 15:16 UTC (Tue) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link]

> To be fair, OWA works fine on Linux,

No it does not. I use it daily, it sucks so hard I cannot say it strong enough. It has never worked well. I used both it and kolab today. While kolab is hosted a couple of countries away, it was responsive and nice to work with, you should try it one day. Clean well thought out user interface. OWA on the other hand... My only conclusion is that you have never used OWA for any serious work.

> You can use third-party MDMs with Kolab by integrating them through LDAP,

Cool, so you can set up managed devices with Kolab too.

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 21, 2017 14:46 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (8 responses)

Yes, but scheduling has been available in Kontact+Kolab throughout the decade. Are you sure you know what you are talking about?

Thanks for selectively quoting my message so that you can build a narrative that wasn't there. I actually mentioned an evaluation of all aspects of groupware solutions - clients and "servers" - so that people might not claim that CalDAV servers exist, for example, but then it turns out that people aren't happy with the clients, which we've already seen in this discussion. But instead you've turned this into a credentials-questioning exercise.

Meanwhile, are you talking about Kolab 2.x or Kolab 3.x (or whatever versioning is now being used)? For the benefit of others reading this, as I am sure you already know, these are different code bases. Kolab 2.x might be completely solid and usable, but the appearance of no further development or support (from obvious sources) changes the perception of anyone considering a deployment.

(Kolab is certainly just as stable as Exchange, so I am afraid that is nothing more than FUD)

I never claimed anything about the relative merits of these products. In fact, I advocated Kolab in the situation I described where Exchange was eventually deployed.

Yes we should learn, but uneducated slandering of solutions is not helping. It only makes the position of the open projects even harder. Hence, I beg you to remove the prosaic slander from your posting, and replace it with to-the-point technical content.

I will now give you the opportunity to choose your words more carefully because "slander" is a serious allegation. Indeed, the only thing approaching "slander" that I've experienced was the representatives of one Free Software project badmouthing another based on the supposed lack of openness of the latter. Odd, then, that the latter project will have its code as official Debian packages before long, unlike the former project who regards half-baked "alien" vendor packages as sufficient and not at all an obstacle to adoption.

On the matter of learning, I fear that certain parties are not really interested in doing so if it doesn't "boost" adoption of their own specific technology stack, which actually undermines Free Software and notions like choice and interoperability. But then, cultivating beneficial things like a development community seem to be pretty hard as well when people don't want to learn or listen to feedback.

To take an example, one observation I read when Kolab was all-too-briefly considered for the deployment I mentioned above was that Kolab's development mailing list didn't seem very active. At the time of writing, that list hasn't seen any activity for 110 days, and the forums that were meant to make collaboration so much easier seem to get more "Dodgers play the Broncos Friday!" American sports spam than actual traffic. I guess we could ask the community involvement expert responsible why this is, but I believe he doesn't work there any more.

Still, there might be something to learn from external perceptions about the vitality of such projects if people are willing to and not immediately cry "slander" at the first opportunity.

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 21, 2017 15:00 UTC (Tue) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link] (7 responses)

> Thanks for selectively quoting my message so that you can build a narrative that wasn't there.

I simply tried to extract technical content from your post.

> Meanwhile, are you talking about Kolab 2.x or Kolab 3.x

Both, I have tested scheduling in both. I still do not see any technical content in your post though.

> Still, there might be something to learn from external perceptions about the vitality of such projects if people are willing to and not immediately cry "slander" at the first opportunity.

I am simply explaining to you how your post came across to me.

Note that I am in no way associated with the Kolab project. I am a user and a customer, and did spend more than a few hours voluntarily to help others on getting Kolab running. That's it. The company behind Kolab has afaik always been supportive of debian packages, but then again I really have no idea where you are heading with your post (more insinuating slander just to call me a strawman again if I am to guess). I am simply exercising my privilege to speak my mind. I am not trying to promote anything, and I am certainly no spokes person for the project in any capacity. I simply state my opinion on your posts.

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 21, 2017 15:45 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (6 responses)

Note that I am in no way associated with the Kolab project. I am a user and a customer, and did spend more than a few hours voluntarily to help others on getting Kolab running. That's it. The company behind Kolab has afaik always been supportive of debian packages, but then again I really have no idea where you are heading with your post (more insinuating slander just to call me a strawman again if I am to guess).

Please quote the part where I called you a "strawman". Or is the game here to trot out different rhetorical terms?

I'm sure Kolab Systems has been "supportive of Debian packages" in that, if I recall, Paul Klos did a lot of work to do the original packages targeting "Debian proper" (that is, not some random OBS output, but actual packages that the Debian project could produce and provide) and someone mentioned that for all that work they bought him dinner and beers (paraphrasing a message on a public mailing list from October 2013). These days, it's up to one guy and anyone who bothers to help him out, and any pretence of actually getting those packages into Debian is gone.

I hope I'm not boring you with "non-technical" facts again. If you want, I can expand my account to include all the mind-numbing detail of trying to improve the Debian packages myself and the lack of traction that yielded, but since you seem to be a user, customer and volunteer, I actually expect you to be aware of what takes place in public mailing lists and bug trackers.

I am simply exercising my privilege to speak my mind. I am not trying to promote anything, and I am certainly no spokes person for the project in any capacity. I simply state my opinion on your posts.

Sure, we all have the right to express an opinion within the bounds of decency. I don't think that accusing me of "slander" is within the bounds of decency, however, when I neither criticised Kolab's suitability for any particular deployment nor criticised its suitability in general, but merely said that maybe we should look at how all the Free Software solutions complement each other and whether more working together could occur.

But once again I'm inclined to think that in the realm of collaboration software, the zero-sum game is king.

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 21, 2017 15:59 UTC (Tue) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link] (5 responses)

> Please quote the part where I called you a "strawman".

Here:
"Thanks for selectively quoting my message so that you can build a narrative that wasn't there."

> I can expand my account to include all the mind-numbing detail of trying to improve the Debian packages myself and the lack of traction that yielded

Yes, that would be infinitely more interesting than what you have written on the topic so far. I did test the Debian packages earlier this year, but found them too immature. I was indeed encouraged to help out, but I am busy trying to get some other stuff into Debian.

Generally speaking, I still find your tone very provocative. You seem to somehow blame the company for not providing debs, while it is quite obvious to me that the community is to blame. That means you and me dear fellow, it is our fault. Not that it matters. If you were serious about the product you would bite the bullet and use CentOS like I did.

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 21, 2017 17:22 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (4 responses)

Please quote the part where I called you a "strawman".
Here:
"Thanks for selectively quoting my message so that you can build a narrative that wasn't there."

Well, I'm sorry, but you did build a narrative that wasn't there. Whether you want to take the title of "strawman" is up to you.

I can expand my account to include all the mind-numbing detail of trying to improve the Debian packages myself and the lack of traction that yielded
Yes, that would be infinitely more interesting than what you have written on the topic so far.

Thank you for the condescension. If you are really interested, you can read what I wrote about it at the time instead of me reproducing the account here. To avoid getting upset from the start, I suggest starting at the end of the page and working forwards in time to the point where I concluded I was wasting my time.

I did test the Debian packages earlier this year, but found them too immature. I was indeed encouraged to help out, but I am busy trying to get some other stuff into Debian.

Then I imagine you realise why those packages are still "too immature". I hope you also realise why they will never land in "Debian proper", either, unless someone else started on the task of making them actually suitable for Debian's mechanisms.

Generally speaking, I still find your tone very provocative.

So I point out general observations about the health of the Free Software groupware ecosystem and the lack of collaboration, and this gets interpreted as some kind of "slander" about Kontact and Kolab. I honestly doubt that anything I subsequently write is going to be less "provocative" when I have to respond to this kind of misrepresentation.

You seem to somehow blame the company for not providing debs, while it is quite obvious to me that the community is to blame. That means you and me dear fellow, it is our fault.

Again with the condescension. I don't "blame" Kolab Systems for not providing usable Debian packages. In fact I don't really blame them for anything when they act in their own interests as a business. In fact I did step up and try and move the software towards being more suitable for Debian packaging, but ultimately it required upstream involvement to be able to deliver this in a sustainable way.

Now, if the attitude is that anything that somehow compromises the company's absolute best interests is to be avoided, and if the role of the community is to polish up things that come over the wall from the closed development process, then the only way to achieve my objectives (and those of Debian package users) is to fork the software. When I pointed this out, I was told that this would be terrible and that outsiders should not be dealing with the "internal workings" of the software, anyway.

That's right: the people who told everyone that they were "a full Free Software company" who "do almost everything out in the open" (when promoting a crowdfunding campaign that seems to have ground to a halt) used the Bill Gates rationale for people only ever needing proprietary software. Now, if you think these "non-technical" details are unimportant then you understand about as much of people's motivations for developing Free Software as the people who seem to juggle these contradictory positions without exhibiting any kind of shame.

Not that it matters. If you were serious about the product you would bite the bullet and use CentOS like I did.

And I suppose that if I wanted to change a garden ornament I would tear up every square centimetre of the garden to do so as well. Now we know who isn't being "serious".

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 21, 2017 22:23 UTC (Tue) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link] (3 responses)

> And I suppose that if I wanted to change a garden ornament I would tear up every square centimetre of the garden to do so as well. Now we know who isn't being "serious".

No, I am simply stating the obvious. The real problems with free groupware has little to do with existence of debs. You getting all wired up over it when CentOS was supported just tells me that you do not know how to make priorities in a project. Read cyberaxe's comments and you may get a hint at where the real problems were Instead of going all defensive, try to understand what I am writing. His points are technical, but unfortunately so misleadingly formulated that they also look like slander, so you need to read carefully through them all to see the actual pain points. No, it is not the lack of phone sync. It is lack of native clients on mac and windows and complexity of setting up advanced configurations. I could also add polish on Kontact. Kontact is simply too nerdish in its default configuration, and could do simplification and a couple of extra features (at the expense of a few unneeded ones). All of these pain points are solvable and should not be a show-stopper. I believe we are already quite a few happy paying customers whether Munich is in or out.

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 22, 2017 0:51 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (2 responses)

The real problems with free groupware has little to do with existence of debs.

This is just one symptom of how the project in question fails to work with the community. And had you paid attention to what I wrote (rather than what I didn't), you would have joined the dots and realised that it would be yet another illustration of how potential adopters might perceive the level of support they might get.

You see, when people consider adopting Free Software, they sometimes consider certain aspects of its vitality based on the advantages that Free Software can bring, like whether it is just one company developing it or not, whether there is a community around it. If they cannot get those advantages and don't see a problem with just buying a proprietary product instead, they will as often as not choose the proprietary product, especially if it is backed by a huge corporation, even if that corporation is a convicted monopolist.

You getting all wired up over it when CentOS was supported just tells me that you do not know how to make priorities in a project.

You have no idea about what I actually consider important "in a project" and have no business even claiming to know. So far, I have been transparent about what I have actually contributed whereas you, despite offensively labelling me as "uneducated", have been little more than an Internet pundit.

And you have somehow managed to fixate on a parenthesized note about Kolab, which given the 2-to-3 transition is accurate and not even negative, made in the context of people thinking that the groupware problem was solved for good (with Kolab version 2 being the product that made the headlines at the time, along with Evolution being the client "everyone" knows), and have then taken my general remarks out of context in order to conjure up some perceived "slander", which seems to be your "go to" term for just about anything you don't agree with.

Meanwhile, you have failed to refute any of the observations made about the level of collaboration between groupware projects or the viability of those projects if they try to solve every problem themselves instead of playing to the strengths of each individual project and actually working together. I am not the one being defensive here. Instead of conjecture, I have noted actual observations from a real deployment that could have gone for Kolab or the other Free Software alternatives, but ended up not doing so for a variety of reasons, many of them dubious but some of them unpalatable to people who want to see Free Software succeed in this domain.

Internet mail was a bastion of Free Software and yet organisations switch to proprietary software and services regardless. Groupware solutions based on Free Software should have emerged and dominated in this domain. That they have not has a lot to do with those the way the current offerings are developed: this is one of the fundamental, unpalatable truths of the matter, not whether there is a mobile client for iOS or some extinct Windows Mobile platform and whether it is any good. Fail to fix the former problem and you will always struggle to fix the latter.

Indeed, quite how you expect a bunch of small, under-resourced companies and volunteers to tool up and address those "pain points" if they are all playing a zero-sum game remains a mystery. To you, such fundamental viability issues are evidently "non-technical" and thus non-issues, so I guess your solution involves the Internet pixies or magic or something. But thank you for fixating unnecessarily on specific products in order to argue a point I never made and thus demonstrating this silo mentality for all to see.

Don't waste any more of my time with a reply unless you actually have something constructive to say about what I actually wrote. I never thought that my time wasted on Kolab matters would include being trolled on LWN about it, but I can't say I'm surprised, either.

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 22, 2017 2:20 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> Internet mail was a bastion of Free Software and yet organisations switch to proprietary software and services regardless. Groupware solutions based on Free Software should have emerged and dominated in this domain. That they have not has a lot to do with those the way the current offerings are developed: this is one of the fundamental, unpalatable truths of the matter, not whether there is a mobile client for iOS or some extinct Windows Mobile platform and whether it is any good. Fail to fix the former problem and you will always struggle to fix the latter.

I don't know that it's a matter of how the "current offerings are developed" so much as a recognition that e-mail is a *service*, and services cost money to provide. You can't compete against services by providing only software, and you can't survive providing (much less developing) services when you're competing against what is effectively free -- because your would-be competition makes their money selling advertisements based on mining user data..

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 22, 2017 22:59 UTC (Wed) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link]

> You have no idea about what I actually consider important "in a project"

I beg to differ. You have many lengthy posts on this topic here now, so I think we all have a fairly good picture of what priorities are.

> perceived "slander"

Yes, that is my perception of your posts in this sub-thread, sorry. Allow me to elaborate:

>Meanwhile, you have failed to refute any of the observations made about the level of collaboration between groupware projects or the viability of those projects if they try to solve every problem themselves instead of playing to the strengths of each individual project and actually working together.

This is where I believe you lack understanding and perspective. Kolab did all the collaborative stuff. The actual reason why you had difficulties making debs, was that Kolab used existing free software solutions where ever they could. Problem was, they needed to patch them to get them up to speed on functionality. Yes, they did the right thing, they sent all the patches upstream, and eventually they made their way into the respective projects. However, that meant you could not use those same packages in debian. That is the main reason why packaging for debian was hard. Kolab went to great lenghts to provide rpms for a closed environment to still make installing from packages easy. These days CentOS is supported since the patches are upstream, and efforts are still ongoing on debian.

You keep mentioning Kolab 2 to 3 transition. The most important aspect of that was that they finally ditched the Horde web-interface in favour of Roundcube. They were really patient with the Horde project, more than was healthy for Kolab I believe. (Horde did have nicely working scheduling by the way, extensively tested by yours truly. As have Roundcube. I have no idea where your scheduling remark came from.)

Short story: they did far more than you or me could expect, and they did all the right things with the right priority. This is my clear understanding of the facts.

They provided all the infrastructure a community needs. Mailinglist and wiki most notably. Actually, I set up the recipe and even hosted a virtual image with all of kolab installed for you there. All you needed to do as download the virtual machine, one file, fire it up and put in your credentials and domain name. I thought making it dead easy for people to get kolab running would make them interested. Problem is, most people are not interested. I repeat, the problem is you and me. We did not care enough. Too few people give a shit. Making non-existent evolution developers work on kontact will not magically solve it. There is only one open source groupware project, and that is Kolab. The others are open core. This also explains why I am a paying customer, I care.

Short story: read pizza's post above and try to understand.

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 11, 2017 10:13 UTC (Sat) by spaetz (guest, #32870) [Link] (1 responses)

> To be fair, the German Microsoft headquarters previously used to be in Unterschleißheim, which is right outside Munich, so it's not a huge step, geographically, as far as Microsoft is concerned.

Yet, for the citi's tax coffers and its unemployment statistics it makes all the difference whether Microsoft's HQ is just before or within Munich's boundaries.

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 17, 2017 23:48 UTC (Fri) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link]

I doubt it's financially really all that important for a big & rich city like Munich (for the new mayor's prestige OTOH…), but for a town like Unterschleißheim it likely was a lot more important.

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 9, 2017 18:10 UTC (Thu) by branden (guest, #7029) [Link]

The old mayor did not run for reelection, so a new mayor, Dieter Reiter, from the same party was elected. Reiter did not like Limux and was quoted in some articles as being a Microsoft fan. He ran partly on the idea of switching away from Limux.

From then on, Kirschner said, "Limux was the cause of all evil in Munich".

[...]

A city council meeting was held with a late, surprising, addition to the agenda: to vote on moving to an integrated (proprietary) client. There were no costs or justifications associated with that agenda item, it was just an attempt to have a decision made about that question.

This council meeting didn't happen to take place in a beer hall, did it?

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 10, 2017 8:31 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (1 responses)

> It may be better to focus on applications, rather than on the operating system [...] Those need to work right away as part of any migration.
> He thought it might make more sense to try to get the budget for the free-software project, instead of volunteering. [...] That may have been too much focus on one migration.
> implement legislation requiring that publicly financed software developed for the public sector be made publicly available [...] public administrations are not in competition with each other. It should be easy for them to understand the advantages of sharing and reusing the software they procure.

The title lured me into reading what I thought would be a religious article or some kind of flamewar. But then I found myself reading all this common sense. Very disappointed, I want my money back! :-)

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 10, 2017 14:53 UTC (Fri) by kirschner (subscriber, #62102) [Link]

Thank you, your comment made my day! I will use it to promote this article :)

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 10, 2017 21:10 UTC (Fri) by metasequoia (guest, #119065) [Link] (1 responses)

"Neoliberalism" is a global movement, some would say a cult, which seems to be most deeply established in the US and EU, and it is quietly undermining democracy by means of an ever growing web of binding, allegedly irreversible trade and investment agreements, which extend their reach over policy of all kinds "affecting trade in services".

They derive their core definitions of scope almost universally from the mother of them all, the virtually unknown 1994 WTO General Agreement on Trade in Services. (GATS) which mandates that "all measures affecting trade in services" be consistent with its goals, with the definition of services being made extremely broad.

This is a huge change that has largely been hidden from the people of the developed countries. Developing countries seem much more aware of it because they claim to have been promised market access to the service economies of the developed countries in the initial Uruguay Round.

Also they claim entitlement to ever expanding market access as a payback for staying involved in GATS negotiation over a period of what is now almost two decades. This is a ticking time bomb, and its also a big con game because not only are these agreements illegitimate, they also are a contrived means of setting up potentially huge penalties which could easily steal trillions of dollars from taxpayers everywhere. Its happened again and again, successful thefts by a small group of people who successfully looted countries leaving them buried in debt.

Why would FOSS be seen as a bad thing by this monster? Because its a gift to everyone.

The agreements embed an entire ideology, which is basically a wish list of ideas rejected at the ballot box which they are quietly forcing countries to accept. This has the effect of holding their own policy hostage. The deals are basically trying to steal the wealth of the entire world away from its people, in preparation for a work-sparse future.

The agreements embedded policy performs many strange twistings of logic, framing the state of affairs in the past, when countries had more unambiguously public services, as a bad thing, a theft, from corporations.

They now frame privatization of practically everything as the only possible future, and frame public services as discriminatory, coming closer and closer to almost criminalizing government regulation, particularly whenever they attempt to do their jobs, helping their people- in ways that involved the public good.

Notably GATS and its progeny seem to frame public ownership of resources as a theft from corporations of profits they are entitled to.

The WTO and GATS also wage a global war on public services, requiring meetings every two years (the next is in December in Buenos Aires) to put pressure on countries to open more and more of their jobs to foreign competition, where the lowest bidding firm has an entitlement to win.

That means the large scale privatization of public jobs, unless they meet very narrow criteria. GATS in theory does not contain ISDS but it does embed the same concepts in a very ISDS like policy, 'indirect expropriation'.

The conditions in the arbitral fora for ISDS cases are very narrow - WTO cases are similar.

I suspect that regardless of its many benefits, FOSS would be framed as a barrier to the entry of foreign firms to jobs they were entitled to by low bidding (they can pay the wages they pay at home which gives them an inherent advantage) because they are likely much more familiar with Windows.

This may be part of whats going on, I don't know.

The Article I:3 (b) and (c) of GATS is very controversial outside of the US.

It defines the scope of privatization in these kinds of settings, it is below.

"For the purposes of this Agreement...
(b) 'services' includes any service in any sector except services supplied in the exercise of governmental authority;
(c) 'a service supplied in the exercise of governmental authority' means any service which is supplied neither on a commercial
basis, nor in competition with one or more service suppliers."

Carve outs are greatly needed to protect all public services in countries that still have them.

In this environment, Free software, which is a 'gift to everybody' is an anomaly to say the least.

Despite its being free, its very very unlikely to be able to allow a service to meet the criteria for the governmental authority exclusion and the necessity for it to predate the relevant effective dates of the GATS agreements.

More likely, FOSS is being framed as a theft from corporations of profits.
GATS, TISA, TTIP, and the recently proposed TFS (and many others) are using mechanisms - whose descriptive names give an idea of what they entail.. "standstill" "rollback" "ratchet" "negative list" "top down" "indirect expropriation" "ISDS". T

They want a global harmonization of all standards downward to the least common denominator - rather than upward to the level they are in the developed countries. This is a key point. The two paths represent two wholly different futures, one is really a nightmare world where money is everything, and where people without money perhaps wont be allowed to be helped by governments, without those governments becoming targets, the other is a world gradually transitioning to a future where life is more balanced between work and other activities such as learning.

This is a very stark choice. These agreements represent themselves as helping poor countries but that is not the case. People in developed countries don't realize that the educated people from poor countries are invariably from the well to do families that run those countries and as such helping them further entrench their rule is not helping the poor in those "least developed" countries, which really should be called the least equal countries.

Indeed, the GATS was first represented to corporations as an agreement to "future proof" the conditions under which they do business, in the developing world.

In this environment, FOSS, being available to anybody who can get a computer, is a sort of oasis of value as well as functional thinking.

But it is also likely to be seen as posing a threat to elites because in that world poor people are never given any help thats likely to help them rise out of poverty.

We can draw a parallel to the Cold War era, and its so called "domino theory", (or the laws against teaching slaves how to read in the pre Civil War South)..

To most, FOSS is really a uniquely positive, otherwise non-controversial 'public good'.

---

This link is about carve outs from FTAs to preserve public services and policy spaces in countries that still arguably have them

http://www.epsu.org/article/new-study-model-clauses-exclu...

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 10, 2017 23:05 UTC (Fri) by metasequoia (guest, #119065) [Link]

I wanted to add that I am pretty sure that provisions in the GATS and likely also its progeny the Trade in Services Agreement would bar national laws or regulations of any kind at any level from requiring contracting firms do anything or especially share anything as such requirements would not be in keeping with the spirit and goals of the GATS.

Contracts must be awarded
"based on objective and transparent criteria, such as competence and the ability to supply the service;
(generally this seems to mean formal qualifications are required rather than subjective ones)
and especially

"not more burdensome than necessary to ensure the quality of the service" All regulations must pass that test.

Also all measures of domestic application, basically all laws and regulations must not constitute unnecessary barriers to trade in services.

What we might see as a reasonable requirement, they might frame as an intentional trade barrier keeping their companies out of getting the jobs they feel they have been promised.

Or so they say. IMHO, its a scam. The legality and legitimacy of this international scheme by two groups of rich people to steal their respective futures by stealth and undermine the aspirations of their middle class, indeed arguably destroy their middle classes, needs to be challenged.

--------

The most recent leaks on TiSA that I know of are at bilaterals.org and earlier ones are at wikileaks.org

A rough declassified (Public) outline of TiSA that was published in 2013 by the EU is entitled "Draft Directives for the negotiation of a plurilateral agreement on trade in services" and its on the EC's europa.eu site I think it is document 6891/13 dated 8 March 2013

A really good resource for clear and understandable writing on FTAs is the site of the Council of Canadians policy arm, policyalternatives.ca under Trade and Investment Research Project.

Here is a recent report in part by Scott Sinclair who is a very prolific author on FTAs for CCPA his writing is world class.

https://www.policyalternatives.ca/publications/reports/ti...

https://www.policyalternatives.ca/authors/scott-sinclair

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 14, 2017 2:03 UTC (Tue) by salimma (subscriber, #34460) [Link]

> In fact, without waiting for a decision from the city council, some services were
> stopped and email started to be migrated to Microsoft Exchange. The "pattern is quite
> clear", but the public is being told that the city is still examining options. That is
> "harming not only free software, but also democracy", he said.

The parallels to how a certain health care system is being surreptitiously dismantled in the US is quite disturbing. It happening in the US is no surprise, but I'm a bit surprised that such disregard for facts and due procedure is happening in a major German city too.

The rise and fall of Limux

Posted Nov 14, 2017 14:54 UTC (Tue) by hholzgra (subscriber, #11737) [Link]

There's another, smaller, town where migration seems to have started earlier, been more smoothly, and is still going strong:

http://www.schwaebischhall.de/buergerstadt/rathaus/linux/


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