Munich council: To hell with Linux, we're going full Windows in 2020 (Resistance is Futile)

Munich city council's administrative and personnel committee has decided to move any remaining Linux systems to Windows 10 in 2020.

A coalition of Social Democrats and Conservatives on the committee voted (PDF, in Deutsche, natürlich) for the Windows migration on Wednesday, Social Democrat councillor Anne Hübner told The Register.

Munich rose to fame in the open-source world for deciding to use Linux and LibreOffice to make the city independent from the claws of Microsoft. But the plan was never fully realised – mail servers, for instance, eventually wound up migrating to Microsoft Exchange – and in February the city council formally voted to end Linux migration and go back to Microsoft.

Hübner said the city has struggled with LiMux adoption. "Users were unhappy and software essential for the public sector is mostly only available for Windows," she said.

She estimated that about half of the 800 or so total programs needed don't run on Linux and "many others need a lot of effort and workarounds".

She said "in the past 15 years, much of our efforts were put into becoming independent from Microsoft," including spending "a lot of money looking for workarounds" but "those efforts eventually failed."

A full council vote on Windows 10 2020 migration is set for November 23, Hübner said. However, the Social Democrats and Conservatives have a majority in the council, and the outcome is expected to be the same as in committee.

She said the cost of the migration will not be made public until November 23, but today about 40 per cent of 30,000 users already have Windows machines.

CSU party council member Kristina Frank told The Reg: "Munich had huge difficulties in communicating with other authorities, communities and other externals.

"As everything needed to be developed by ourselves, the city's IT was 10 to 15 years behind market standard. The City of Munich is not an IT developer, but has other major concerns to deal with."

Hübner said "no final decision has yet been made" on whether LibreOffice will be swapped out for Microsoft Office. "That will be decided at the end of next year when the full cost of such a move will be known."

Peter Ganten, CEO of Univention in Bremen and a member of the Open Source Business Alliance, told El Reg: "The council of the city of Munich has just executed a decision which they have made long before."

Ganten said "of course nobody in the open-source community is happy that this decision has been made" and the city will spend "decades of man power" and "millions of euros" on migration (as it did with the LiMux project) while client OSes "becomes more and more unimportant and other organisations are wisely spending their money for platform neutral applications."

Matthias Kirschner, president of Free Software Foundation Europe in Berlin, said "there were never any studies" pinpointing what people were "unhappy" about. It might have been the LiMux client itself, or perhaps the migration process or lack of support.

He said he was also not aware of a comparison of the unhappiness of staffers in cities using Windows.

A report (PDF) by Microsoft partner Accenture commissioned by Munich found the most important issues were organisational.

Kirschner also described splitting the LibreOffice move as "strange" if the parties are concerned about interoperability. He said Microsoft Office will be "very, very expensive" so it's possible the coalition wanted to split up the costs, although he doesn't know for sure.

Next year, he said civil servants would require more training and could delay citizens receiving help – the move "is a cause for failure".

Kirschner said the Windows in Munich project will "paralyze the city administration for years" and civil servants and citizens will "suffer."

Florian Roth, of the Green Party, told The Reg: "Our Green Party are against this decision in favour of a mix of Linux and Windows. This is more secure and less expensive."

We contacted the city's press division, the mayor's office and the current head of Munich's IT department for comment on the migration vote.

An Italy-based spokesman for the Document Foundation, which is in charge of LibreOffice, attributed the decision to politics. "IT issues are normal regardless of operating system," he said. "When it's political, technology cannot do anything." ®

Linux has been designed client/server for about 99% if it's existence. IOW--it's always been client/server.

Apparently, you have a hard time reading what's written, or you have a problem with reading for comprehension.

Linux and Windows have been used as client/server OSes. I have not disputed that. Where the heck did you read that I disputer that? Don't make things up just because you want to win an argument.

\ What I did write is that, ALL OSes will have to be built for clients handling the end-user side, and servers handling the remote services/processing side.

Meanwhile. Linux is still lacking behind Windows on the local side, but that won't matter, since, eventually both will have to split to serving separate functions, with the thinly redesigned OS serving the client side, and the "bloated" OS serving the remote functions. Right now, Linux is serving as a "thin" client with Android on smartphones, and the back-end Linus servers at Google and phone-makers, serving the requests from those clients. But, most of what smartphones and even PCs do, is via browsers, and those browsers are being served by cloud services, those services coming from a myriad of services providers. Thus, both Windows and Linux are "bloated" in the sense that, most of what they do will be taken over by the remote servers/services. It's already happened and will happen a lot more, and eventually, there won't be much for Linux and Windows to do at the local level.

Azure and AWS and other cloud services will be doing the heavy work. Linux as it stands today will become irrelevant, and so will Windows as it stands today. Apple is also behind the times with its "bloated" MacOS.

Windows might be a "nice little toy" to you, but, it's doing most of the work around the world, as both, clients and servers. I like using the most used "little toy" in the world, and so do over 1.5 billion people. You can keep your 1.5% OS. I like working with solutions which are more easily available with the Windows platform.

IF that was why they made the initial decision, then it was the wrong decision. Software is a tool. Use the tool that gets the job done.

Unfortunately, many IT decisions are made that way. People can hate a corporation or a piece of software or have become attached to a particular way of doing things, and make their decisions based on what they have known or love, while disregarding what problems might arise or what costs might arise, while disregarding that whatever has been doing the job adequately and cost-effectively, might be the better way for the future.

Many decisions are made out of from perceptions, and not from what is best for a company or what is better in the long-run. What Munich did, for the most part, is to take what Windows was back in 2003, and converted its functions and applications and software from back then, not really looking at how things had changed and not really examining how things weren't meshing or not across the whole IT landscape for the city. Thus, a lot of incompatibilities were left to be resolved at the end or for when time allowed. In any case, timelines were missed and costs continued to rise, and even today, a lot of the people in IT are in denial about the issues, and continue trying to push to keep LiMux and the other applications which kind of met their goals. But, not all goals were met and a lot of incompatibilities were not fixed. In addition, the personnel working with Linux were having problems with their "new" way of doing things, especially when they needed to continue using a lot of boxes that were kept on Windows.

Who knows, eventually they might have resolved all their issues, but, why not go with solutions which they knew existed elsewhere and were "known quantities"? Besides, with Munich starting off with converting from Windows XP, they undoubtedly were not counting on the future of desktops and servers becoming "mostly CLOUDY". It's 14 years later, and the cloud is mostly the new way of doing things, like it or not.

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