10 ms·

Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions

180 points by arunc 12y ago

Chronic29 12y ago
A+ would read again!!
yoran 12y ago
Is 2014 the year of Linux on desktop? Joke aside, it makes me happy to see the transition from Microsoft to Linux has been a success. I remember reading the news headline when they first announced it. I wonder how many of the 22,000 government officers that use Ubuntu at work are now also using Ubuntu at home?
- zanny 12y ago
  They are not, unless there are Ubuntu computers available in stores. I actually know there are some German laws requiring computers be made available with varying or no OS, so it is much more likely than it is stateside to find an Ubuntu machine in store.
  - macco 12y ago
    Unfortunately this is not the case. I only new 2 Online-Stores in Germany that sell Ubuntu maschines - one is my own: http://rockiger.com/ http://rockiger.com/ On the other hand, System76 computers are not available in Germany. Best bet is probably is Sputnik from Dell, although their Ubuntu configuration is not that good.
    - velodrome 12y ago
      The initial Dell sputnik was lacking (notably small screen resolution, price, etc.). The second rev is decent: 4th Generation Intel® Core™ i5-4210U processor (3M Cache, up to 2.7 GHz) UBUNTU Linux 12.04 LTS (64-bit) 13.3 inch LED Backlit Touch Display with Truelife and FHD resolution (1920 x 1080) 8GB1 DDR3L at 1600MHz 128GB Solid State Drive Intel® HD Graphics 4400 3.02 lbs Dell Price $1199.99
      - Already__Taken 12y ago
        I don't understand why you'd get this and not the cheaper exact model with windows.
        zanny 12y ago
        Because there are few opportunities to buy a notebook without giving Microsoft a lot of money.
        jdong 12y ago
        Except you aren't giving Microsoft money while buying a Windows laptop. Nor can I see what you'd benefit from spending extra money to not give Microsoft money.
        zanny 12y ago
        > Nor can I see what you'd benefit Not giving Microsoft money means you are not funding the exact reason why Linux on the desktop is obscure in the first place. If MS did not have such comprehensive control of the consumer computer space, they would not have pervasive "deals" with every vendor to lock them in to shipping Windows across the board. Because if you, as a hardware manufacturer, install Ubuntu and make sure all the drivers work, out of the box it is no more buggy than Windows is at this point - probably less, and much more usable than Windows 8 for the average joe. But Microsoft has a firm grasp across the entire industry on all the vendors, and their ubiquity for 20 years has given them mindshare you cannot easily unravel. And giving them more money is not helping that.
        velodrome 12y ago
        Yea, I would too. You can't customize the model (ram, SSD, etc).
    - kuschku 12y ago
      Notebooksbilliger.de sells all the laptops in their student lineup without OS – I bought my laptop there to save the license cost. Sometimes you can also find occasionally a laptop in a store with FreeDOS, but I've never seen one being sold with Ubuntu.
- jonalmeida 12y ago
  I believe it's been well documented by many writers that Linux on desktop (LOD) won't be a thing in the foreseeable future. If you think about it, Android's problems with open source allowing manufacturers to have their own flavours of Android, is one of the reasons why the average user might think TouchWiz (or other skins) is Android and that's why it sucks. Note that this is just _one_ reason I believe LOD won't be a thing, there surely are more.
  - PyErr_SetString 12y ago
    "If you think about it, Android's problems with open source allowing manufacturers to have their own flavours of Android..." One is not really dependent on the other. You could use open source and not allow modifications or you could use closed source software and allow endless customization. I also don't consider it an "android problem" that manufacturers do this. Most of the good stuff ends up in standard android after a while, which wouldn't have happened if no one was allowed to make the changes in the first place.
    - jonalmeida 12y ago
      > One is not really dependent on the other. You could use open source and not allow modifications or you could use closed source software and allow endless customization. Good point. > Most of the good stuff ends up in standard android after a while, which wouldn't have happened if no one was allowed to make the changes in the first place. This was mainly due to Google pushing more stuff through Play Services. It would be nice if there was some more control/constraints on Linux flavours.
- velodrome 12y ago
  Honestly, it is going to take a while. The display drivers needs a lot of work (intel seems solid). Also, desktop itself needs to be super stable. Also, the software (from companies) is treated like a second-class citizen. Chrome is horrible on linux, --disable-gpu --audio-buffer-size what user is going to bother with that? I have to do all these tweaks and workarounds to get things to work. Regular users will not have the patience do this. The year of LOD will only happen when everything is stable and works. Imagine if CentOS, Debian, or Ubuntu on a server were this flaky? Would you use it? This is why people jump ship to Mac.
  - eru 12y ago
    > Chrome is horrible on linux, --disable-gpu --audio-buffer-size what user is going to bother with that? Really? Chrome is a first class citizen on ChromeOS, so I'd expected other linuxes to be well served, too.
    - velodrome 12y ago
      Yep. I think it has to do with AMD drivers but I am not sure (I have seen some Nvidia users complain too). It started around Chrome 33. By the way, I don't think ChromeOS is a good example. Can you use Firefox on ChromeOS? I consider ChromeOS like purpose-specific, dedicated hardware (like a router). It is a start though. By the way, Chromebooks use intel gpus - they are pretty solid. LOD has to be better than alternatives by a significant margin in order to attract users.
    - tdicola 12y ago
      No WebGL enabled on Linux Chrome in my experience. Kind of annoying when cool visualizations get passed around and you can't see them.
    - freehunter 12y ago
      My biggest gripe with Chrome on Linux is you can't change the default behavior of clicking in the address bar. In Firefox I can make it so clicking once selects everything. In Chrome, it drops a cursor and I have to click two or three times to get it to select everything. I understand some people want that behavior, but I don't. The Chrome team's response is that this is the Linux default and Chrome is a native Linux application, so that's how it behaves and it can't be changed. No thanks.
CSDude 12y ago
It reminds me http://xkcd.com/934/ http://xkcd.com/934/ for most simple users. What a government officer do at his/her workstation? They probably have every service through web pages, almost nobody builds native programs anymore. And for the most cases LibreOffice is not perfect, but adequate to do simple jobs. So it is very logical to use something free for these tasks, to replace Windows+Office and save money.
- jeffgreco 12y ago
  Heck, I'm impressed all the web software they use is compatible with something other than IE<8.
- ams6110 12y ago
  If (most) everyone is using LibreOffice that probably causes much fewer issues than a mixture of MS Office and LibreOffice.
- brusch64 12y ago
  I really wonder if LibreOffice is not totally adequate for the users in the city of Munich. I know that it has its problems if you want to use it with Word generated documents, and it obviously has problems with add-ons developed for Word. But I could really think that it works quite nice, if all your documents are generated for LibreOffice. I am using Open / LibreOffice since nearly 10 years exclusively at home and I don't have any problems using it - but my needs are VERY modest. Basically I am using it as an WYSIWYG typewriter.
  - wirrbel 12y ago
    the only problem that I can think of is that of exchanging word documents over the "city lines".
  - waps 12y ago
    I think this is really sad. As someone who went through university when the last wave of centralized unix died off, then the move to decentralized windows, and to decentralized linux (because they couldn't really figure it out mostly). I found that move to decentralization and the availability of compilers and tools and dev. environments and easy ways to get admin privileges, well I credit that with my learning how to code/admin/... and to my succes later in life. These computers, I've heard from a friend, are LOCKED down. As in, try to compile anything against a GUI library is a complete non-starter. Compiling anything under linux without root is almost impossible. Add to that that even the development environments that do exist on linux are ... well sorry to say but let's be honest here ... far inferior for learning to code and to writing simple games than the ones available on windows. Nobody's going to learn how to use computers, how to program and how to improve their situation on these linux machines. And that sucks. But hey, easier on the admins ! (not that it's anywhere near as bad as SAAS though)
virtue3 12y ago
I'm very impressed with the scale of the project. I can definitely see both the short term and long term ramifications and huge huge huge potential savings. I'm a bit curious to know what the shelf life on the OS choice is and how well it works. I believe redhat ran into this issue and adopted the "extended support" versions in order to address the concerns (the linux space tends to move _very_ quickly in directions and you can definitely be left out in the cold if you don't stay relatively current). All in all I doubt it's worse than the microsoft "you need to upgrade _now_" philosphy and the lack of "we don't break compatability" that used to be enjoyed in the heyday of the "Full M$ Stack".
- virtue3 12y ago
  Back with windows 95 Microsoft actually took backwards compatability very very seriously: An emphasis has been made by Microsoft on maintaining software backwards compatibility. To achieve this, when developing a new version of Windows, Microsoft sometimes had to implement workarounds to allow compatibility with third-party software that used the previous version's API in an undocumented or even (programmatically) illegal way. Raymond Chen, a Microsoft developer who works on the Windows API, has said: "I could probably write for months solely about bad things apps do and what we had to do to get them to work again (often in spite of themselves). Which is why I get particularly furious when people accuse Microsoft of maliciously breaking applications during OS upgrades. If any application failed to run on Windows 95, I took it as a personal failure."[19]
brudgers 12y ago
The numbers don't make sense to me. €34 million across 14,000 computers is about €2500 per computer. That seems a bit on the high side for the sort of computers a municipality requires. Particularly when an older computer provides suitable performance (otherwise the Linux boxes would need comparable upgrading). I'll add that a better comparison might be to the cost of Windows machines running open source productivity software since the comparison is closer in terms of specification.
- zanny 12y ago
  Except it isn't - you need to consider the costs of not just Windows, but all the software surrounding it. Photoshop licenses, Visual Studio licenses, Office licenses, etc. Even at business rates. Per workstation, $3000 can be an underestimate. Meanwhile, using Gimp / Krita / LibreOffice / kdev etc and, at the scale of a city like Munich, just having a dev team to fix the localized problems the city has in the software, or having a fund to bounty bugs and features the city wants, would be cheaper in the long run, and leave the city in control of its own software infrastructure.
  - ams6110 12y ago
    Not to mention the big kahunas, Exchange, Sharepoint, AD, SQL Server licenses.
    - Titanous 12y ago
      And don't forget the humans that support everything.
      - scholia 12y ago
        The humans being vastly more expensive than either the software or the hardware... which is why Munich is most likely in a deep financial hole over this project, due to the huge waste of staff time
    - velodrome 12y ago
brudgers 12y ago
Discussion two months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7720219#up_7720418 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7720219#up_7720418
ausjke 12y ago
I hope Munich somehow paid Canonical for its professional support or whatever to sustain a nice product in the long run.
- mschuster91 12y ago
  IIRC lots of stuff was done by IBM.
davidjgraph 12y ago
I'd love to see some detailed architecture docs for this or similar high-level Linux based rollout.
aagd 12y ago
What about long-term compatibility of Microsoft (or Apple) products? How can proprietary, maybe even binary file-formats be accessed in 100 years from now? Cities usually keep their books forever. I have so many files from the nineties that are already very difficult to restore. I could imagine that open source formats have a huge advantage here?! #LongtermCosts
- alkonaut 12y ago
  Short term costs work the other way though: every company or organization needs to be able to read an office file in the latest format, edit it, and return it to the sender with full fidelity. If OpenOffice inserts a page break where MS office wouldn't have, that is a problem. The open programs read docx reasonably well, but implementing ms word clean room with all it's behaviors is near impossible, and every difference hides a cost for the users that communicate. Within an organization you could agree to use some open format (regardless of word processor), and you could archive in some long term format. But you can't change the fact that incoming documents will be in the format that Microsofts latest word processor spits out, and you never want to have that nagging feeling that your word processor may have misread it ever so slightly.
- rmc 12y ago
  There are legal problems with binary file formats. Let's say someone comes forward allegating corruption 20 years ago and starts suing the city. Can the city prove that it was all above board? Well no-one can read the files anymore....
- mcb3k 12y ago
  When a document stops being a document and becomes a record, it should be saved in a format such as PDF/A for longevity, and not a binary format. That would be regardless of if it was created in libreOffice or Microsoft Office.
- wmgries 12y ago
  Not only are these file formats not binary (they are zipped XML), they are standardized and their standards are known and maintained. No issue here.
gtf21 12y ago
I want to know a bit more about how they solved the MS-specific problems like VB macros that are often quite vital to a company's infrastructure.
chrisBob 12y ago
I am not at all surprised that this worked. The biggest problem for mainstream linux is poor advertising. People with limited computer knowledge are just scared of change, and honestly, if no one knows how to pronounce Ubuntu then they are probably not going to pick a computer based on it. I mostly use Windows 7 and OS X, but I have worked with Debian/Ubuntu as a casual user. Linux was much easier to work with than Windows 8.1, but 90% of the population doesn't know that. Most people would be as happy, or happier with Linux if there was just one big advertising campaign.
- Alupis 12y ago
  Well, Linux is now the most commonly used general purpose OS/kernel in the world. Every Android device, every Chromebook device (plus all the regular desktops and servers). I can't help but feel that part of Android and Chromebook's success is in part due to the users not understanding/having-to-know they're running Linux. Android and Chromebook don't even mention Linux anywhere, and users are content. I think regular Joe's have a stigma about Linux, and just abstracting that aspect away has helped adoption.
  - chrisBob 12y ago
    Android may technically be Linux, but I am not sure I would count it as a step towards changing the desktop computer people get for their home. Chromebook is similar- as far as I can tell it just runs one browser window. This makes it more like a video game system than a PC.
    - Alupis 12y ago
      In industrializing parts of the world, mobile devices are often the only access to the internet and software (and sometimes the first experience with a computing device). Chromebook/ChromeOS is much more capable now than it used to be, with multi-tasking and multiple "apps" can be on-screen at the same time.
alkonaut 12y ago
The costs seem to mention training and support, but not comparing productivity makes it useless. It's like arguing that you can use the Gimp rather than photoshop, which is only true until you try. The whole point of software is that it increases productivity (word processor rather than typewriter). While it may be the case that Linux and open source alternatives saves a bunch on licenses, I don't buy the argument that it is an amount "saved" until thurough research is made in the productivity of the users.
- spodek 12y ago
  One might as well expect productivity to increase switching away from proprietary software. I would, at least. Taking your example of Gimp, I expect institutional adoption of free software would result in some people having it who didn't have Photoshop at all before. They can now become more productive and take less of other people's time.
  - freehunter 12y ago
    >One might as well expect productivity to increase switching away from proprietary software. I would, at least. That doesn't make any sense. What is inherent about closed-source that makes it hard to use and what is inherent about open-source that makes it easy to use? I think the important phrase here is switching away. That implies there's been a change, which brings increased training (either formal or learn-as-you-go) to learn the new system. If they need Word for their job and now they have OpenOffice, that's not a productivity gain, that's a loss at least until they get up and running (and then it's an ongoing loss every time they need to convert a docx with custom formatting that OpenOffice doesn't understand.)
    - alkonaut 12y ago
      There is such a thing as inherent productivity in the software though. Switching from one piece of software to another has a fixed cost, but switching to software that makes you more productive will help offset that cost. I agree on OO. The risk in my eyes here is that OSS (desktop) software is almost invariably less productive than proprietary software for some reason. Switching that way can make sense if you save a lot on licenses, administration etc., but if you have to pay once for a switch AND then pay continuously by using less productive software you are taking a much higher risk. It may give a warm fluffy feeling to be using open standards, but the problem is that the only standard that exists is a de-facto proprietary standard set by Microsoft. It may be noble to try to change that, but I certainly wouldn't want to spend tax money being the first major city to do so.
strykekyte 12y ago
They should totally have called it Munix.
jonathanriddell 12y ago
This uses Kubuntu rather than Ubuntu Unity

180 points by arunc 12y ago

A+ would read again!!

yoran 12y ago

Is 2014 the year of Linux on desktop? Joke aside, it makes me happy to see the transition from Microsoft to Linux has been a success. I remember reading the news headline when they first announced it. I wonder how many of the 22,000 government officers that use Ubuntu at work are now also using Ubuntu at home?

zanny 12y ago
They are not, unless there are Ubuntu computers available in stores. I actually know there are some German laws requiring computers be made available with varying or no OS, so it is much more likely than it is stateside to find an Ubuntu machine in store.
- macco 12y ago
  Unfortunately this is not the case. I only new 2 Online-Stores in Germany that sell Ubuntu maschines - one is my own: http://rockiger.com/ http://rockiger.com/ On the other hand, System76 computers are not available in Germany. Best bet is probably is Sputnik from Dell, although their Ubuntu configuration is not that good.
  - velodrome 12y ago
    The initial Dell sputnik was lacking (notably small screen resolution, price, etc.). The second rev is decent: 4th Generation Intel® Core™ i5-4210U processor (3M Cache, up to 2.7 GHz) UBUNTU Linux 12.04 LTS (64-bit) 13.3 inch LED Backlit Touch Display with Truelife and FHD resolution (1920 x 1080) 8GB1 DDR3L at 1600MHz 128GB Solid State Drive Intel® HD Graphics 4400 3.02 lbs Dell Price $1199.99
    - Already__Taken 12y ago
      I don't understand why you'd get this and not the cheaper exact model with windows.
      - zanny 12y ago
        Because there are few opportunities to buy a notebook without giving Microsoft a lot of money.
        jdong 12y ago
        Except you aren't giving Microsoft money while buying a Windows laptop. Nor can I see what you'd benefit from spending extra money to not give Microsoft money.
        zanny 12y ago
        > Nor can I see what you'd benefit Not giving Microsoft money means you are not funding the exact reason why Linux on the desktop is obscure in the first place. If MS did not have such comprehensive control of the consumer computer space, they would not have pervasive "deals" with every vendor to lock them in to shipping Windows across the board. Because if you, as a hardware manufacturer, install Ubuntu and make sure all the drivers work, out of the box it is no more buggy than Windows is at this point - probably less, and much more usable than Windows 8 for the average joe. But Microsoft has a firm grasp across the entire industry on all the vendors, and their ubiquity for 20 years has given them mindshare you cannot easily unravel. And giving them more money is not helping that.
      - velodrome 12y ago
        Yea, I would too. You can't customize the model (ram, SSD, etc).
  - kuschku 12y ago
    Notebooksbilliger.de sells all the laptops in their student lineup without OS – I bought my laptop there to save the license cost. Sometimes you can also find occasionally a laptop in a store with FreeDOS, but I've never seen one being sold with Ubuntu.
jonalmeida 12y ago
I believe it's been well documented by many writers that Linux on desktop (LOD) won't be a thing in the foreseeable future. If you think about it, Android's problems with open source allowing manufacturers to have their own flavours of Android, is one of the reasons why the average user might think TouchWiz (or other skins) is Android and that's why it sucks. Note that this is just _one_ reason I believe LOD won't be a thing, there surely are more.
- PyErr_SetString 12y ago
  "If you think about it, Android's problems with open source allowing manufacturers to have their own flavours of Android..." One is not really dependent on the other. You could use open source and not allow modifications or you could use closed source software and allow endless customization. I also don't consider it an "android problem" that manufacturers do this. Most of the good stuff ends up in standard android after a while, which wouldn't have happened if no one was allowed to make the changes in the first place.
  - jonalmeida 12y ago
    > One is not really dependent on the other. You could use open source and not allow modifications or you could use closed source software and allow endless customization. Good point. > Most of the good stuff ends up in standard android after a while, which wouldn't have happened if no one was allowed to make the changes in the first place. This was mainly due to Google pushing more stuff through Play Services. It would be nice if there was some more control/constraints on Linux flavours.
velodrome 12y ago
Honestly, it is going to take a while. The display drivers needs a lot of work (intel seems solid). Also, desktop itself needs to be super stable. Also, the software (from companies) is treated like a second-class citizen. Chrome is horrible on linux, --disable-gpu --audio-buffer-size what user is going to bother with that? I have to do all these tweaks and workarounds to get things to work. Regular users will not have the patience do this. The year of LOD will only happen when everything is stable and works. Imagine if CentOS, Debian, or Ubuntu on a server were this flaky? Would you use it? This is why people jump ship to Mac.
- eru 12y ago
  > Chrome is horrible on linux, --disable-gpu --audio-buffer-size what user is going to bother with that? Really? Chrome is a first class citizen on ChromeOS, so I'd expected other linuxes to be well served, too.
  - velodrome 12y ago
    Yep. I think it has to do with AMD drivers but I am not sure (I have seen some Nvidia users complain too). It started around Chrome 33. By the way, I don't think ChromeOS is a good example. Can you use Firefox on ChromeOS? I consider ChromeOS like purpose-specific, dedicated hardware (like a router). It is a start though. By the way, Chromebooks use intel gpus - they are pretty solid. LOD has to be better than alternatives by a significant margin in order to attract users.
  - tdicola 12y ago
    No WebGL enabled on Linux Chrome in my experience. Kind of annoying when cool visualizations get passed around and you can't see them.
  - freehunter 12y ago
    My biggest gripe with Chrome on Linux is you can't change the default behavior of clicking in the address bar. In Firefox I can make it so clicking once selects everything. In Chrome, it drops a cursor and I have to click two or three times to get it to select everything. I understand some people want that behavior, but I don't. The Chrome team's response is that this is the Linux default and Chrome is a native Linux application, so that's how it behaves and it can't be changed. No thanks.

CSDude 12y ago

It reminds me http://xkcd.com/934/ http://xkcd.com/934/ for most simple users. What a government officer do at his/her workstation? They probably have every service through web pages, almost nobody builds native programs anymore. And for the most cases LibreOffice is not perfect, but adequate to do simple jobs. So it is very logical to use something free for these tasks, to replace Windows+Office and save money.

jeffgreco 12y ago
Heck, I'm impressed all the web software they use is compatible with something other than IE<8.
ams6110 12y ago
If (most) everyone is using LibreOffice that probably causes much fewer issues than a mixture of MS Office and LibreOffice.
brusch64 12y ago
I really wonder if LibreOffice is not totally adequate for the users in the city of Munich. I know that it has its problems if you want to use it with Word generated documents, and it obviously has problems with add-ons developed for Word. But I could really think that it works quite nice, if all your documents are generated for LibreOffice. I am using Open / LibreOffice since nearly 10 years exclusively at home and I don't have any problems using it - but my needs are VERY modest. Basically I am using it as an WYSIWYG typewriter.
- wirrbel 12y ago
  the only problem that I can think of is that of exchanging word documents over the "city lines".
- waps 12y ago
  I think this is really sad. As someone who went through university when the last wave of centralized unix died off, then the move to decentralized windows, and to decentralized linux (because they couldn't really figure it out mostly). I found that move to decentralization and the availability of compilers and tools and dev. environments and easy ways to get admin privileges, well I credit that with my learning how to code/admin/... and to my succes later in life. These computers, I've heard from a friend, are LOCKED down. As in, try to compile anything against a GUI library is a complete non-starter. Compiling anything under linux without root is almost impossible. Add to that that even the development environments that do exist on linux are ... well sorry to say but let's be honest here ... far inferior for learning to code and to writing simple games than the ones available on windows. Nobody's going to learn how to use computers, how to program and how to improve their situation on these linux machines. And that sucks. But hey, easier on the admins ! (not that it's anywhere near as bad as SAAS though)

virtue3 12y ago

I'm very impressed with the scale of the project. I can definitely see both the short term and long term ramifications and huge huge huge potential savings. I'm a bit curious to know what the shelf life on the OS choice is and how well it works. I believe redhat ran into this issue and adopted the "extended support" versions in order to address the concerns (the linux space tends to move _very_ quickly in directions and you can definitely be left out in the cold if you don't stay relatively current). All in all I doubt it's worse than the microsoft "you need to upgrade _now_" philosphy and the lack of "we don't break compatability" that used to be enjoyed in the heyday of the "Full M$ Stack".

virtue3 12y ago
Back with windows 95 Microsoft actually took backwards compatability very very seriously: An emphasis has been made by Microsoft on maintaining software backwards compatibility. To achieve this, when developing a new version of Windows, Microsoft sometimes had to implement workarounds to allow compatibility with third-party software that used the previous version's API in an undocumented or even (programmatically) illegal way. Raymond Chen, a Microsoft developer who works on the Windows API, has said: "I could probably write for months solely about bad things apps do and what we had to do to get them to work again (often in spite of themselves). Which is why I get particularly furious when people accuse Microsoft of maliciously breaking applications during OS upgrades. If any application failed to run on Windows 95, I took it as a personal failure."[19]

brudgers 12y ago

The numbers don't make sense to me. €34 million across 14,000 computers is about €2500 per computer. That seems a bit on the high side for the sort of computers a municipality requires. Particularly when an older computer provides suitable performance (otherwise the Linux boxes would need comparable upgrading). I'll add that a better comparison might be to the cost of Windows machines running open source productivity software since the comparison is closer in terms of specification.

zanny 12y ago
Except it isn't - you need to consider the costs of not just Windows, but all the software surrounding it. Photoshop licenses, Visual Studio licenses, Office licenses, etc. Even at business rates. Per workstation, $3000 can be an underestimate. Meanwhile, using Gimp / Krita / LibreOffice / kdev etc and, at the scale of a city like Munich, just having a dev team to fix the localized problems the city has in the software, or having a fund to bounty bugs and features the city wants, would be cheaper in the long run, and leave the city in control of its own software infrastructure.
- ams6110 12y ago
  Not to mention the big kahunas, Exchange, Sharepoint, AD, SQL Server licenses.
  - Titanous 12y ago
    And don't forget the humans that support everything.
    - scholia 12y ago
      The humans being vastly more expensive than either the software or the hardware... which is why Munich is most likely in a deep financial hole over this project, due to the huge waste of staff time
  - velodrome 12y ago

brudgers 12y ago

Discussion two months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7720219#up_7720418 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7720219#up_7720418

ausjke 12y ago

I hope Munich somehow paid Canonical for its professional support or whatever to sustain a nice product in the long run.

mschuster91 12y ago
IIRC lots of stuff was done by IBM.

davidjgraph 12y ago

I'd love to see some detailed architecture docs for this or similar high-level Linux based rollout.

aagd 12y ago

What about long-term compatibility of Microsoft (or Apple) products? How can proprietary, maybe even binary file-formats be accessed in 100 years from now? Cities usually keep their books forever. I have so many files from the nineties that are already very difficult to restore. I could imagine that open source formats have a huge advantage here?! #LongtermCosts

alkonaut 12y ago
Short term costs work the other way though: every company or organization needs to be able to read an office file in the latest format, edit it, and return it to the sender with full fidelity. If OpenOffice inserts a page break where MS office wouldn't have, that is a problem. The open programs read docx reasonably well, but implementing ms word clean room with all it's behaviors is near impossible, and every difference hides a cost for the users that communicate. Within an organization you could agree to use some open format (regardless of word processor), and you could archive in some long term format. But you can't change the fact that incoming documents will be in the format that Microsofts latest word processor spits out, and you never want to have that nagging feeling that your word processor may have misread it ever so slightly.
rmc 12y ago
There are legal problems with binary file formats. Let's say someone comes forward allegating corruption 20 years ago and starts suing the city. Can the city prove that it was all above board? Well no-one can read the files anymore....
mcb3k 12y ago
When a document stops being a document and becomes a record, it should be saved in a format such as PDF/A for longevity, and not a binary format. That would be regardless of if it was created in libreOffice or Microsoft Office.
wmgries 12y ago
Not only are these file formats not binary (they are zipped XML), they are standardized and their standards are known and maintained. No issue here.

gtf21 12y ago

I want to know a bit more about how they solved the MS-specific problems like VB macros that are often quite vital to a company's infrastructure.

chrisBob 12y ago

I am not at all surprised that this worked. The biggest problem for mainstream linux is poor advertising. People with limited computer knowledge are just scared of change, and honestly, if no one knows how to pronounce Ubuntu then they are probably not going to pick a computer based on it. I mostly use Windows 7 and OS X, but I have worked with Debian/Ubuntu as a casual user. Linux was much easier to work with than Windows 8.1, but 90% of the population doesn't know that. Most people would be as happy, or happier with Linux if there was just one big advertising campaign.

Alupis 12y ago
Well, Linux is now the most commonly used general purpose OS/kernel in the world. Every Android device, every Chromebook device (plus all the regular desktops and servers). I can't help but feel that part of Android and Chromebook's success is in part due to the users not understanding/having-to-know they're running Linux. Android and Chromebook don't even mention Linux anywhere, and users are content. I think regular Joe's have a stigma about Linux, and just abstracting that aspect away has helped adoption.
- chrisBob 12y ago
  Android may technically be Linux, but I am not sure I would count it as a step towards changing the desktop computer people get for their home. Chromebook is similar- as far as I can tell it just runs one browser window. This makes it more like a video game system than a PC.
  - Alupis 12y ago
    In industrializing parts of the world, mobile devices are often the only access to the internet and software (and sometimes the first experience with a computing device). Chromebook/ChromeOS is much more capable now than it used to be, with multi-tasking and multiple "apps" can be on-screen at the same time.

alkonaut 12y ago

The costs seem to mention training and support, but not comparing productivity makes it useless. It's like arguing that you can use the Gimp rather than photoshop, which is only true until you try. The whole point of software is that it increases productivity (word processor rather than typewriter). While it may be the case that Linux and open source alternatives saves a bunch on licenses, I don't buy the argument that it is an amount "saved" until thurough research is made in the productivity of the users.

spodek 12y ago
One might as well expect productivity to increase switching away from proprietary software. I would, at least. Taking your example of Gimp, I expect institutional adoption of free software would result in some people having it who didn't have Photoshop at all before. They can now become more productive and take less of other people's time.
- freehunter 12y ago
  >One might as well expect productivity to increase switching away from proprietary software. I would, at least. That doesn't make any sense. What is inherent about closed-source that makes it hard to use and what is inherent about open-source that makes it easy to use? I think the important phrase here is switching away. That implies there's been a change, which brings increased training (either formal or learn-as-you-go) to learn the new system. If they need Word for their job and now they have OpenOffice, that's not a productivity gain, that's a loss at least until they get up and running (and then it's an ongoing loss every time they need to convert a docx with custom formatting that OpenOffice doesn't understand.)
  - alkonaut 12y ago
    There is such a thing as inherent productivity in the software though. Switching from one piece of software to another has a fixed cost, but switching to software that makes you more productive will help offset that cost. I agree on OO. The risk in my eyes here is that OSS (desktop) software is almost invariably less productive than proprietary software for some reason. Switching that way can make sense if you save a lot on licenses, administration etc., but if you have to pay once for a switch AND then pay continuously by using less productive software you are taking a much higher risk. It may give a warm fluffy feeling to be using open standards, but the problem is that the only standard that exists is a de-facto proprietary standard set by Microsoft. It may be noble to try to change that, but I certainly wouldn't want to spend tax money being the first major city to do so.

strykekyte 12y ago

They should totally have called it Munix.

jonathanriddell 12y ago

This uses Kubuntu rather than Ubuntu Unity