9 ms·

City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software

142 points by anw 9y ago

dogma1138 9y ago
Hopefully it would work out better than in Munich.
- skc 9y ago
  I'm sure it's quite a lot more feasible now than it was when Munich embarked on their adventure. And one would also hope they have used Munich as a good case study.
- lunchladydoris 9y ago
  Context [0], for anyone interested. [0]: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/end-of-an-open-source-era-linux-pioneer-munich-confirms-switch-to-windows-10/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/end-of-an-open-source-e...
  - kartan 9y ago
    Thanks for the link. "Those supporting the move to Microsoft Office say staff using LibreOffice find it difficult to swap documents with external organizations, due to incompatibilities with Microsoft Office" This happens all around the industry. Once you are locked in there is no easy way to change. This renders the capitalist concept of competition obsolete. Everything becomes a monopoly. Intel, Nvidia, Facebook, Microsoft, Google... they amount of 90% of the market on their products. What was 20 years ago a dynamic fast changing industry, that feared anti-monopoly actions from the goverment, has become a short list of big companies with tight ties with politicians. Such lack of diversity opens the risk that a vulnerability is going to send all our IT into chaos, as Intel issues have showed up. It also hampers innovation and contributes to a world with less opportunities for new entrepreneurs, that are more focused in created something to sell to a big company than a long term viable business. So Munich decision is part of the problem, but just an small one. I hope that it works better for Barcelona.
    - cies 9y ago
      I thought Munnich's decision was also in part because MSFT would consider Munnich as a location for an office based on their decision on using their product to do their work. The old "we have to serve the corps (and their owners) or they leave" argument.
      - a254613e 9y ago
        Microsoft decided to move their HQ to Munich years before this. In fact the year the construction of MS HQ started Munich voted to start planning the move to LiMux.
        deknos 9y ago
        ah, so.. why then did the new mayor the last year have the need to meet with microsoft and prepare the move? Do you have data for your claim?
        a254613e 9y ago
        Sure - one of many articles from 2013 announcing the move: http://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/neue-deutschland-zentrale-microsoft-zieht-nach-muenchen-1.1813100 http://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/neue-deutschland-zentral...
  - yorwba 9y ago
    HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13625508 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13625508 mschuster91's first-hand experience: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13627452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13627452 Also, I read the underlying consultancy report, which did not appear to support the specific approach that was chosen: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13643182 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13643182
- EspadaV9 9y ago
  Munich was pretty good. It's been deployed for 4+ years and won't be replaced until the end of 2020 (assuming everything goes to plan) so that will be at least 7 years of use. It seems that the reasons to move back to Windows weren't completely technical either.
  - criddell 9y ago
    It's hard to come up with technical reasons for picking one OS over another for general business use. All of the operating systems are good enough. They have been for a long time. What drives OS choice is (and always has been) application support and cost. Despite Linux being free, it can be expensive to support or even an impossible choice if you need, for example, Microsoft Office or Final Cut. More often than not, Linux wins on ideological grounds. There's nothing wrong with that, but you do need buy-in from your users.
    - wastedhours 9y ago
      You need to start in education - MS has had that locked down for decades. It'll be really interesting to see whether ChromeOS will have any impact in the future when an entire generation has been using it daily for schoolwork.
      - leadingthenet 9y ago
        That's only true in the US. Practically nobody in the EU has heard of / uses ChromeOS. Or maybe I'm just out of touch.
        saiya-jin 9y ago
        nah, same here (IT person). it's that 'another' option when you actually are deciding between different 2, if deciding at all. and google's privacy approach has soured their portfolio for me a bit (albeit some of them are exceptionally well done and useful)
      - pirocks 9y ago
- squarefoot 9y ago
  Be prepared to a subtle PR war from proprietary solutions vendors, not blatantly directed at software (eg. not like giving 10000 free copies of Windows + Office + this and that) but indirectly helping the city to gain public acceptance, say funding schools, hospitals, public infrastructures etc. then offering at the same time the option to local politicians to get their face associated with the events. What politician would refuse the opportunity to address a speech during the inauguration of say a new library/hospital/mall/police station/parking lot etc. built with money that did not came from taxing people? That would make a hell of an argument during election time, so you can consider him technically sold to whoever the money comes from, even though he didn't get a single dime in the process, which of course will mean that once he is in power he will use whatever software solution the founder is "suggesting" to keep his seat.
- cies 9y ago
  Came here to say this. It is hard to fight the lobby power of big corps. Though Spain has the case of Extremadura. I could not find a better article, I remember reading some that outlined then massive success that was achieved in Extremadura (one of the poorer regions of Spain). https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2265108/spains-extremadura-government-switches-40-000-pcs-to-linux-and-open-source-software https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2265108/spains-ext...
- icc97 9y ago
  It actually gives strength to what Munich did. They proved that it was possible to swap. So Barcelona doesn't have such a political tricky situation as there is a pre-existing example. Let's hope that more follow Barcelona. Barcelona is possibly taking an easier approach. That is, replace the easier things like Office and IE. I've done similar things. So where as my software has to use IIS and Windows servers, I use Firefox, Thunderbird and Libre Office for everything with the odd exception. It means for me having a dual boot machine is fairly easy as all software usage is the same. You occasionally do have compatibility issues with Office but it doesn't have to. The more using it the better.
  - luma 9y ago
    I'm not sure how Munich "proved it was possible". The user community disliked it so much they are now switching back. They proved that it cost the city a lot of money in the transition (both times), and those costs have nothing to do with licensing. "Free" is only "free" so long as you and your user's time carries no value.
    - icc97 9y ago
      They switched over for 7 years, they got the initial political support required to switch over, they created their own distribution. So I regard that as having shown that it is possible to switch. This is purely showing that getting over the first hurdle is possible. They then showed what to what lengths MS will go to lobby against it, so Barcelona can be better prepared for the next hurdle. These are all fairly massive achievements.
    - deknos 9y ago
      not the users. the mayor and city council.
- snvzz 9y ago
  There's the Munich experience and the Extremadura experience, so there's mistakes Barcelona can avoid. I hear they're using a popular distribution (Ubuntu) rather than trying to make and maintain a forked one. This is a very clever choice that will save a tremendous amount of pain.
robert_foss 9y ago
It's nice to see the FSFE being active, and making an actual difference. Our donations are not in vain.
unmango 9y ago
So what will be the cost of deploying Linux, retraining on Linux, and then going back to Windows? These people can afford to make stupid decisions because it's not their own money they are wasting. The only reason this is happening is crony capitalism: they want to do a favour to the local open source businesses (there are a few of them) which are friendly to the local government. They will get lots of support contracts. It's blatant corruption.
- tankenmate 9y ago
  Actually a sizeable percentage of the public do support it because it has much better support for their native tongue.
Rjevski 9y ago
This is gonna end in a disaster. Linux usability is bad to begin with, managing Linux desktops at scale is even worse and interoperability is meh.
- Blaiz0r 9y ago
  FUD
  - dgsb 9y ago
    Indeed !
adwhit 9y ago
I kind of amazed that Microsoft are still successfully charging SO MUCH for their absolutely run-of-the-mill OS and Office products. Office, in particular, brings in something like $25bn/year revenue with presumably very healthy margins. For a product that has hardly changed in 20 years. It's a good product, sure. But a clean-room reimplementation of the bits that people actually care about surely couldn't cost more than $1bn. The power of monopoly capitalism.
- walkingolof 9y ago
  Problem is that you wont complete any RFPs without that "junk" that "nobody" uses, even if its just 1 percent that uses those functions of the users, those 1 percent is spread out on all the big companies that pay a big part of those $25B.
- blowski 9y ago
  You wouldn’t believe the number of workflows hardcoded to Excel and Outlook. Those two products alone guarantee that Office is here to stay for years.
  - adwhit 9y ago
    For sure. I've seen complete trading systems written in Excel macros. MS have played their hand very astutely and have managed to capture a large fraction of the enormous gap between cost-to-producer and value-to-user. Keeping things that way is worth $100bn market cap to them, and challenging them is worth relative peanuts to anyone else. Of course they're going to win every time. Our best hope is that someone like Google pours money into a fully-compatible fully-featured desktop replacement out of sheer spite.
    - Piskvorrr 9y ago
      Not even MS products from the Office are fully compatible with each other - I've seen issues with documents produced by older Offices being mangled in newer ones (compounded by locale differences). DOC/DOCX compatibility across different products is a tire fire, there is no solution on the horizon.
snvzz 9y ago
I'm Catalan. Catalonia has always been big on open source, and if anything I'm surprised this took so long to happen. The mindshare in universities and such is particularly high, and this isn't limited to computer science (my background). Even my high school did at the very least run a Linux server (running at least samba and squid) and had a few Linux workstations. This was 20 years ago. Back when I lived there, I worked in many companies, all of which had near 100% of workstations running Linux, something I now realize is not the case elsewhere. A strong argument nobody's mentioned in the thread yet is that free software support for our language (Catalan) is very good, whereas Windows/OSX support for it is terrible when it exists at all. There's the fact that we do still remember a previous effort where Microsoft released some version of windows in Catalan, I'm not sure if it was 98 or XP era, which was very broken; Microsoft never handled the issues back then, or released any more versions in Catalan, and it left a very bad taste in our mouths. We do care massively about our language, so it'll be very hard to sway anybody in here unless this fact radically changes.
- unmango 9y ago
  People in universities (both staff and students) are always left-leaning; the mindshare of Linux in universities has always been big everywhere, it's not really a Catalan thing. Because of that, I'm not surprised they are enthusiastic about the Catalan language either, but that's not the case anywhere else, where people usually run their software and enjoy their entertainment in Spanish without making a big deal about the language. I also believe Windows 10 has a good Catalan translation although I have never used it.
  - interfixus 9y ago
    Are you equating support for open source with left-leaningness?
    - unmango 9y ago
      Yes, I am. That's what matches my personal experience.
moonbug22 9y ago
I bet Bicing will still be running on XP a decade from now.
Findeton 9y ago
Which is great but as soon this government is replaced by a new one, this policy will be replaced by the old one.
mkstowegnv 9y ago
I once believed in open formats and the practicality of switching between closed and open source, but years of experience has convinced me that no two complex applications will ever really be interoperable for the long tail of complex documents that use a larger than average number of the applications' features. I waste too many hours trying to fix MS Word tables and embedded grapics so that they will render correctly in LibreOffice, too many nightmare experiences jumping between video editors, and vector graphics apps, etc. Programs like MS Office are so complex that only a Singularity-level AI will ever fix them.
- snvzz 9y ago
  Or legislation. Such as, say, requiring the use of OASIS standards within the administration, and for communication with the administration. "But we don't use libreoffice" is not a valid excuse when libreoffice is free software and available in Catalan for all the major OS platforms.

142 points by anw 9y ago

dogma1138 9y ago

Hopefully it would work out better than in Munich.

skc 9y ago
I'm sure it's quite a lot more feasible now than it was when Munich embarked on their adventure. And one would also hope they have used Munich as a good case study.
lunchladydoris 9y ago
Context [0], for anyone interested. [0]: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/end-of-an-open-source-era-linux-pioneer-munich-confirms-switch-to-windows-10/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/end-of-an-open-source-e...
- kartan 9y ago
  Thanks for the link. "Those supporting the move to Microsoft Office say staff using LibreOffice find it difficult to swap documents with external organizations, due to incompatibilities with Microsoft Office" This happens all around the industry. Once you are locked in there is no easy way to change. This renders the capitalist concept of competition obsolete. Everything becomes a monopoly. Intel, Nvidia, Facebook, Microsoft, Google... they amount of 90% of the market on their products. What was 20 years ago a dynamic fast changing industry, that feared anti-monopoly actions from the goverment, has become a short list of big companies with tight ties with politicians. Such lack of diversity opens the risk that a vulnerability is going to send all our IT into chaos, as Intel issues have showed up. It also hampers innovation and contributes to a world with less opportunities for new entrepreneurs, that are more focused in created something to sell to a big company than a long term viable business. So Munich decision is part of the problem, but just an small one. I hope that it works better for Barcelona.
  - cies 9y ago
    I thought Munnich's decision was also in part because MSFT would consider Munnich as a location for an office based on their decision on using their product to do their work. The old "we have to serve the corps (and their owners) or they leave" argument.
    - a254613e 9y ago
      Microsoft decided to move their HQ to Munich years before this. In fact the year the construction of MS HQ started Munich voted to start planning the move to LiMux.
      - deknos 9y ago
        ah, so.. why then did the new mayor the last year have the need to meet with microsoft and prepare the move? Do you have data for your claim?
        a254613e 9y ago
        Sure - one of many articles from 2013 announcing the move: http://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/neue-deutschland-zentrale-microsoft-zieht-nach-muenchen-1.1813100 http://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/neue-deutschland-zentral...
- yorwba 9y ago
  HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13625508 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13625508 mschuster91's first-hand experience: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13627452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13627452 Also, I read the underlying consultancy report, which did not appear to support the specific approach that was chosen: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13643182 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13643182
EspadaV9 9y ago
Munich was pretty good. It's been deployed for 4+ years and won't be replaced until the end of 2020 (assuming everything goes to plan) so that will be at least 7 years of use. It seems that the reasons to move back to Windows weren't completely technical either.
- criddell 9y ago
  It's hard to come up with technical reasons for picking one OS over another for general business use. All of the operating systems are good enough. They have been for a long time. What drives OS choice is (and always has been) application support and cost. Despite Linux being free, it can be expensive to support or even an impossible choice if you need, for example, Microsoft Office or Final Cut. More often than not, Linux wins on ideological grounds. There's nothing wrong with that, but you do need buy-in from your users.
  - wastedhours 9y ago
    You need to start in education - MS has had that locked down for decades. It'll be really interesting to see whether ChromeOS will have any impact in the future when an entire generation has been using it daily for schoolwork.
    - leadingthenet 9y ago
      That's only true in the US. Practically nobody in the EU has heard of / uses ChromeOS. Or maybe I'm just out of touch.
      - saiya-jin 9y ago
        nah, same here (IT person). it's that 'another' option when you actually are deciding between different 2, if deciding at all. and google's privacy approach has soured their portfolio for me a bit (albeit some of them are exceptionally well done and useful)
    - pirocks 9y ago
squarefoot 9y ago
Be prepared to a subtle PR war from proprietary solutions vendors, not blatantly directed at software (eg. not like giving 10000 free copies of Windows + Office + this and that) but indirectly helping the city to gain public acceptance, say funding schools, hospitals, public infrastructures etc. then offering at the same time the option to local politicians to get their face associated with the events. What politician would refuse the opportunity to address a speech during the inauguration of say a new library/hospital/mall/police station/parking lot etc. built with money that did not came from taxing people? That would make a hell of an argument during election time, so you can consider him technically sold to whoever the money comes from, even though he didn't get a single dime in the process, which of course will mean that once he is in power he will use whatever software solution the founder is "suggesting" to keep his seat.
cies 9y ago
Came here to say this. It is hard to fight the lobby power of big corps. Though Spain has the case of Extremadura. I could not find a better article, I remember reading some that outlined then massive success that was achieved in Extremadura (one of the poorer regions of Spain). https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2265108/spains-extremadura-government-switches-40-000-pcs-to-linux-and-open-source-software https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2265108/spains-ext...
icc97 9y ago
It actually gives strength to what Munich did. They proved that it was possible to swap. So Barcelona doesn't have such a political tricky situation as there is a pre-existing example. Let's hope that more follow Barcelona. Barcelona is possibly taking an easier approach. That is, replace the easier things like Office and IE. I've done similar things. So where as my software has to use IIS and Windows servers, I use Firefox, Thunderbird and Libre Office for everything with the odd exception. It means for me having a dual boot machine is fairly easy as all software usage is the same. You occasionally do have compatibility issues with Office but it doesn't have to. The more using it the better.
- luma 9y ago
  I'm not sure how Munich "proved it was possible". The user community disliked it so much they are now switching back. They proved that it cost the city a lot of money in the transition (both times), and those costs have nothing to do with licensing. "Free" is only "free" so long as you and your user's time carries no value.
  - icc97 9y ago
    They switched over for 7 years, they got the initial political support required to switch over, they created their own distribution. So I regard that as having shown that it is possible to switch. This is purely showing that getting over the first hurdle is possible. They then showed what to what lengths MS will go to lobby against it, so Barcelona can be better prepared for the next hurdle. These are all fairly massive achievements.
  - deknos 9y ago
    not the users. the mayor and city council.
snvzz 9y ago
There's the Munich experience and the Extremadura experience, so there's mistakes Barcelona can avoid. I hear they're using a popular distribution (Ubuntu) rather than trying to make and maintain a forked one. This is a very clever choice that will save a tremendous amount of pain.

robert_foss 9y ago

It's nice to see the FSFE being active, and making an actual difference. Our donations are not in vain.

unmango 9y ago

So what will be the cost of deploying Linux, retraining on Linux, and then going back to Windows? These people can afford to make stupid decisions because it's not their own money they are wasting. The only reason this is happening is crony capitalism: they want to do a favour to the local open source businesses (there are a few of them) which are friendly to the local government. They will get lots of support contracts. It's blatant corruption.

tankenmate 9y ago
Actually a sizeable percentage of the public do support it because it has much better support for their native tongue.

Rjevski 9y ago

This is gonna end in a disaster. Linux usability is bad to begin with, managing Linux desktops at scale is even worse and interoperability is meh.

Blaiz0r 9y ago
FUD
- dgsb 9y ago
  Indeed !

adwhit 9y ago

I kind of amazed that Microsoft are still successfully charging SO MUCH for their absolutely run-of-the-mill OS and Office products. Office, in particular, brings in something like $25bn/year revenue with presumably very healthy margins. For a product that has hardly changed in 20 years. It's a good product, sure. But a clean-room reimplementation of the bits that people actually care about surely couldn't cost more than $1bn. The power of monopoly capitalism.

walkingolof 9y ago
Problem is that you wont complete any RFPs without that "junk" that "nobody" uses, even if its just 1 percent that uses those functions of the users, those 1 percent is spread out on all the big companies that pay a big part of those $25B.
blowski 9y ago
You wouldn’t believe the number of workflows hardcoded to Excel and Outlook. Those two products alone guarantee that Office is here to stay for years.
- adwhit 9y ago
  For sure. I've seen complete trading systems written in Excel macros. MS have played their hand very astutely and have managed to capture a large fraction of the enormous gap between cost-to-producer and value-to-user. Keeping things that way is worth $100bn market cap to them, and challenging them is worth relative peanuts to anyone else. Of course they're going to win every time. Our best hope is that someone like Google pours money into a fully-compatible fully-featured desktop replacement out of sheer spite.
  - Piskvorrr 9y ago
    Not even MS products from the Office are fully compatible with each other - I've seen issues with documents produced by older Offices being mangled in newer ones (compounded by locale differences). DOC/DOCX compatibility across different products is a tire fire, there is no solution on the horizon.

snvzz 9y ago

I'm Catalan. Catalonia has always been big on open source, and if anything I'm surprised this took so long to happen. The mindshare in universities and such is particularly high, and this isn't limited to computer science (my background). Even my high school did at the very least run a Linux server (running at least samba and squid) and had a few Linux workstations. This was 20 years ago. Back when I lived there, I worked in many companies, all of which had near 100% of workstations running Linux, something I now realize is not the case elsewhere. A strong argument nobody's mentioned in the thread yet is that free software support for our language (Catalan) is very good, whereas Windows/OSX support for it is terrible when it exists at all. There's the fact that we do still remember a previous effort where Microsoft released some version of windows in Catalan, I'm not sure if it was 98 or XP era, which was very broken; Microsoft never handled the issues back then, or released any more versions in Catalan, and it left a very bad taste in our mouths. We do care massively about our language, so it'll be very hard to sway anybody in here unless this fact radically changes.

unmango 9y ago
People in universities (both staff and students) are always left-leaning; the mindshare of Linux in universities has always been big everywhere, it's not really a Catalan thing. Because of that, I'm not surprised they are enthusiastic about the Catalan language either, but that's not the case anywhere else, where people usually run their software and enjoy their entertainment in Spanish without making a big deal about the language. I also believe Windows 10 has a good Catalan translation although I have never used it.
- interfixus 9y ago
  Are you equating support for open source with left-leaningness?
  - unmango 9y ago
    Yes, I am. That's what matches my personal experience.

moonbug22 9y ago

I bet Bicing will still be running on XP a decade from now.

Findeton 9y ago

Which is great but as soon this government is replaced by a new one, this policy will be replaced by the old one.

mkstowegnv 9y ago

I once believed in open formats and the practicality of switching between closed and open source, but years of experience has convinced me that no two complex applications will ever really be interoperable for the long tail of complex documents that use a larger than average number of the applications' features. I waste too many hours trying to fix MS Word tables and embedded grapics so that they will render correctly in LibreOffice, too many nightmare experiences jumping between video editors, and vector graphics apps, etc. Programs like MS Office are so complex that only a Singularity-level AI will ever fix them.

snvzz 9y ago
Or legislation. Such as, say, requiring the use of OASIS standards within the administration, and for communication with the administration. "But we don't use libreoffice" is not a valid excuse when libreoffice is free software and available in Catalan for all the major OS platforms.