[Cisl-comunidade] How Munich Abandoned Microsoft for Open Source

[Andre Felipe Machado]

...

Munich says the move to open source has saved it more than €10m, a claim contested by Microsoft, yet Hofmann says the point of making the switch was never about money, but about freedom.

"If you are only doing a migration because you think it saves you money 
there's always somebody who tells you afterwards that you didn't 
calculate it properly," he said. 

"That was the experience of a lot of open source-based projects that 
have failed," Hofmann noted. They were only cost-driven and when the 
organisation got more money or somebody else said 'The costs are wrong' 
then the main reason for doing it had broken away. That was never the 
main goal within the City of Munich. Our main goal was to become 
independent."

"Windows has developed from a pure PC-centred operating system, like 
Windows 3.11 was, to a whole infrastructure. If you're staying with 
Microsoft you're getting more and more overwhelmed to update and change 
your whole IT infrastructure [to fit with Microsoft]," according to 
Hofmann, whether that be introducing a Microsoft Active Directory system
 or running a key management server.

Free software was ruled the better choice by Munich's ruling body, 
principally because it would free the council from dependence on any one
 vendor and future-proof the council's technology stack via open 
protocols, interfaces and data formats.

The prospect of such a high profile loss, and other organisations 
following Munich's lead, spurred Microsoft to mount a last ditch 
campaign to win the authority back. A senior sales executive at the time
 told general managers in EMEA "under NO circumstances lose against Linux."
 Steve Ballmer himself took time out of a skiing holiday to make a 
revised offer in March 2003, followed two months later by Microsoft 
knocking millions of Euros off the price of sticking with Windows and 
Office.

...


Nine years is a long time for a desktop migration by anyone's standards,
 but the LiMux project was always going to be more than a simple 
transition.

"We never planned to carry out a big bang migration. From the start we 
planned a slow migration, carrying out the migration and the development
 of our LiMux client in parallel."

However, by Hofmann's reckoning, that slow and steady migration is one 
of the reasons the project has largely managed to stay within its budget
 with minimal disruption. The project finished within budget in October 
2013, with more than 14,800 staff migrated to using Limux and more than 
15,000 to OpenOffice.

...

A myriad technical challenges emerged as Munich tried to reconfigure an 
infrastructure littered with proprietary formats and protocols to play 
nicely with LiMux and free software.

Large chunks of the software used by the council were built using 
Microsoft technologies. For example, a sizeable proportion of Microsoft 
Office macros were written in Microsoft's programming language Visual 
Basic, while other departments were tied to Internet Explorer by a 
dependence on ActiveX. This preponderance of lock-in interfaces was 
described as "awful" in 2010 by then deputy head of the LiMux project 
Florian Schiessl. 

A small number of apps have proven impossible to port, make accessible 
or switch away from – particularly software whose use is mandated by the
 German government – and have to be run directly on Windows machines.

...

Munich has worked with other users of LibreOffice, including authorities
 in the German city of Freiburg and the Austrian capital Vienna, to pay 
for updates to LibreOffice that should improve interoperability with 
Microsoft's office suite.


...

"We had an issue with OpenOffice in the past and a support contract 
wouldn't have helped us because nobody else has this sort of problem, so
 we would have had the choice to live with it or forget about it," said 
Hofmann.Instead Munich paid a company to resolve the issue for them, and put the patch upstream."The only downside is there's no-one to blame when things do go wrong, but what's the advantage of that?" Hofmann said.
(mas no Brasil precisa sim alguém para culpar. Façam contratos de suporte técnico. Existem empresas no mercado para isso.)



http://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-munich-rejected-steve-ballmer-and-kicked-microsoft-out-of-the-city/



-- 
André Felipe Machado

CEAGO/COTSC/COSTE
As Lou Gerstner, former Chairman 
and CEO of IBM, observed: 'I came to see, in my time at IBM that culture
 isn’t just one aspect of the game; it *IS* the game.'
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