4 ms·

This is a bluff that almost every government and municipality with huge contracts with MS does whenever they come up for renewal as part of their negotiations,

This is a bluff that almost every government and municipality with huge contracts with MS does whenever they come up for renewal as part of their negotiations, nobody in MS is impressed. In other news: 2020 is not the year of the linux desktop.

lucb1e 6y ago
Do you assume it's bluff or is there more behind that statement? I understand that it has been in the news that MS spent a lot of energy on preventing people from moving away from Windows, and I think I remember steep discounts but it has been a while since I read about it, but while the government could be going "haha let's put out another statement and get more discounts" I would say it's more likely that there are people in power in Europe that genuinely want to lessen our dependency on the benevolent big brothers from the USA. But that's just how the news reports it, perhaps I'm not cynical enough. Anyway, if you know of a statement by anyone in a relevant government that claims this was a negotiation tactic, that would be interesting.
- seemslegit 6y ago
  The statement is in the language of the agreement as reported: "Where it is technologically and financially possible, the city will put emphasis on open standards and free open-source licensed software," Which in practice binds absolutely no one to absolutely anything.
sho_hn 6y ago
They're already on Linux currently. A government change and Microsoft Germany moving their HQ to Munich made them reconsider. Now the government changed again. The actual migration to Linux went mostly fine and was largely a success as far as government software programs go, FWIW.
- buran77 6y ago
  From my personal experience most times the hardest part is to convince the users. You can throw a lot of resources at the migration, money, good technical experts, and get it done right. But making the regular users happy? That's a whole different subject. Truth is most users still run Windows at home and are familiar with it. Getting used to something else will meet some resistance. Then you have the minor compatibility issues especially in a people facing institution. To this day eventually this attrition pushes many back to the more compatible and familiar solution. I've seen (usually very small) companies going to Linux and other FOSS solutions without actually understanding this beyond "they're free". Migration went great. Later on I came back to do the migration the other way around once they faced that attrition and realized that support costs were dwarfing the license cost.
  - mschuster91 6y ago
    > From my personal experience most times the hardest part is to convince the users. Former actual LiMux team member here, so I can speak from experience (almost a decade ago though). The hardest part was convince users to be happy on utterly inadequate and aged hardware. No, 1 GB of RAM won't cut it when you have to have Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice and some fucking Java crap open at the same time, and 1024x768 screens won't do so either.
    - bitL 6y ago
      Yeah, that must have been a huge problem. These days however an OKayish notebook can be had for $400 or an i3 NUC with 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD with an IPS 1080p monitor for $500, and those would run any Linux well for foreseeable future without killing city's budget.
      - mschuster91 6y ago
        Unfortunately that isn't easy with the way government procuring works. Basically, you make a specsheet what you want (e.g. spare components must be available for a duration of X years) and then have to publish tenders, and usually the vendors offering bids have to fulfill certain conditions (e.g. must have a reliable history working with governments). The last part alone excludes many cheap vendors as they don't have government contracting experience, and the spare parts requirements kills the rest as they can only be so cheap because they don't have to build much of a spare parts infrastructure. (Note: this is not specifically relating to LiMux in any way, I have no knowledge about the contracts/tender process that happened back then) Also, the scale matters: 15.500 PCs are even at 500$ apiece 7.75 million €.
dijit 6y ago
Pessimistically, I agree with you. But that lends the question; what does it take to end the Microsoft monopoly on our governments? It can’t just be open document standards. I think it goes further than that; into our schools maybe. I don’t have answers, but it’s a serious question I have.
- seemslegit 6y ago
  Easy, just create a software ecosystem that is superior to or at least on-par with the commercial offerings (being open source is not by itself valuable for the users), then grow a generation of non-technical users into that ecosystem
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - loudmax 6y ago
    > on-par with the commercial offerings That should be "offering" singular, not "offerings" plural. And it's totally feasible to produce a superior ecosystem. The hard part is absorbing years of financial loss while building the new ecosystem from the ground up while it isn't compatible with the existing proprietary system.
    - seemslegit 6y ago
      > That should be "offering" singular, not "offerings" plural. Why ? An ecosystem consists of multiple offerings and there are also multiple commercial ecosystems. > And it's totally feasible to produce a superior ecosystem. The hard part is absorbing years of financial loss while building the new ecosystem from the ground up while it isn't compatible with the existing proprietary system. Being able to finance something is an inherent part of its feasibility.
  - dijit 6y ago
    I think that this is not a charitable interpretation of the situation. While I generally agree that FOSS software (Libreoffice calc) is inferior for business needs, a _lot_ of the issues actually stem from compatibility. Not just compatibility of the document system and interpretation, though that is a large part. But compatibility of functionality too, along with UI design. People are more likely to re-train for a new UI on a new edition of their previous software because it is seen to them as a progression, but they are not so open to changing UI paradigms with different software that does the same thing. In order for something "better" to be accepted it has to not just be better- it has to be _so_ much better that it trumps everything else. in the very best of cases it has to be 100% compatible in all areas and _still_ at least substantially better. That's without getting in to opensource financing, which is a difficult topic. Though I can imagine if Munich put their resources into a FOSS foundation which was providing productivity software it would help tremendously. I don't think they're going to do that because Linux (and ecosystem) is seen as cheaper, so why negate the cost saving?
FeepingCreature 6y ago
The term is "threat". A bluff is a threat you can't follow up on. Munich have shown they can and will follow up.

lucb1e 6y ago

Do you assume it's bluff or is there more behind that statement? I understand that it has been in the news that MS spent a lot of energy on preventing people from moving away from Windows, and I think I remember steep discounts but it has been a while since I read about it, but while the government could be going "haha let's put out another statement and get more discounts" I would say it's more likely that there are people in power in Europe that genuinely want to lessen our dependency on the benevolent big brothers from the USA. But that's just how the news reports it, perhaps I'm not cynical enough. Anyway, if you know of a statement by anyone in a relevant government that claims this was a negotiation tactic, that would be interesting.

seemslegit 6y ago
The statement is in the language of the agreement as reported: "Where it is technologically and financially possible, the city will put emphasis on open standards and free open-source licensed software," Which in practice binds absolutely no one to absolutely anything.

sho_hn 6y ago

They're already on Linux currently. A government change and Microsoft Germany moving their HQ to Munich made them reconsider. Now the government changed again. The actual migration to Linux went mostly fine and was largely a success as far as government software programs go, FWIW.

buran77 6y ago
From my personal experience most times the hardest part is to convince the users. You can throw a lot of resources at the migration, money, good technical experts, and get it done right. But making the regular users happy? That's a whole different subject. Truth is most users still run Windows at home and are familiar with it. Getting used to something else will meet some resistance. Then you have the minor compatibility issues especially in a people facing institution. To this day eventually this attrition pushes many back to the more compatible and familiar solution. I've seen (usually very small) companies going to Linux and other FOSS solutions without actually understanding this beyond "they're free". Migration went great. Later on I came back to do the migration the other way around once they faced that attrition and realized that support costs were dwarfing the license cost.
- mschuster91 6y ago
  > From my personal experience most times the hardest part is to convince the users. Former actual LiMux team member here, so I can speak from experience (almost a decade ago though). The hardest part was convince users to be happy on utterly inadequate and aged hardware. No, 1 GB of RAM won't cut it when you have to have Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice and some fucking Java crap open at the same time, and 1024x768 screens won't do so either.
  - bitL 6y ago
    Yeah, that must have been a huge problem. These days however an OKayish notebook can be had for $400 or an i3 NUC with 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD with an IPS 1080p monitor for $500, and those would run any Linux well for foreseeable future without killing city's budget.
    - mschuster91 6y ago
      Unfortunately that isn't easy with the way government procuring works. Basically, you make a specsheet what you want (e.g. spare components must be available for a duration of X years) and then have to publish tenders, and usually the vendors offering bids have to fulfill certain conditions (e.g. must have a reliable history working with governments). The last part alone excludes many cheap vendors as they don't have government contracting experience, and the spare parts requirements kills the rest as they can only be so cheap because they don't have to build much of a spare parts infrastructure. (Note: this is not specifically relating to LiMux in any way, I have no knowledge about the contracts/tender process that happened back then) Also, the scale matters: 15.500 PCs are even at 500$ apiece 7.75 million €.

dijit 6y ago

Pessimistically, I agree with you. But that lends the question; what does it take to end the Microsoft monopoly on our governments? It can’t just be open document standards. I think it goes further than that; into our schools maybe. I don’t have answers, but it’s a serious question I have.

seemslegit 6y ago
Easy, just create a software ecosystem that is superior to or at least on-par with the commercial offerings (being open source is not by itself valuable for the users), then grow a generation of non-technical users into that ecosystem
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- loudmax 6y ago
  > on-par with the commercial offerings That should be "offering" singular, not "offerings" plural. And it's totally feasible to produce a superior ecosystem. The hard part is absorbing years of financial loss while building the new ecosystem from the ground up while it isn't compatible with the existing proprietary system.
  - seemslegit 6y ago
    > That should be "offering" singular, not "offerings" plural. Why ? An ecosystem consists of multiple offerings and there are also multiple commercial ecosystems. > And it's totally feasible to produce a superior ecosystem. The hard part is absorbing years of financial loss while building the new ecosystem from the ground up while it isn't compatible with the existing proprietary system. Being able to finance something is an inherent part of its feasibility.
- dijit 6y ago
  I think that this is not a charitable interpretation of the situation. While I generally agree that FOSS software (Libreoffice calc) is inferior for business needs, a _lot_ of the issues actually stem from compatibility. Not just compatibility of the document system and interpretation, though that is a large part. But compatibility of functionality too, along with UI design. People are more likely to re-train for a new UI on a new edition of their previous software because it is seen to them as a progression, but they are not so open to changing UI paradigms with different software that does the same thing. In order for something "better" to be accepted it has to not just be better- it has to be _so_ much better that it trumps everything else. in the very best of cases it has to be 100% compatible in all areas and _still_ at least substantially better. That's without getting in to opensource financing, which is a difficult topic. Though I can imagine if Munich put their resources into a FOSS foundation which was providing productivity software it would help tremendously. I don't think they're going to do that because Linux (and ecosystem) is seen as cheaper, so why negate the cost saving?

FeepingCreature 6y ago

The term is "threat". A bluff is a threat you can't follow up on. Munich have shown they can and will follow up.