Former Mayor of Munich Explains How Microsoft Undermined Linux

http://techrights.org/2019/11/09/christian-ude-on-microsoft/

by virtualritz • 7 years ago

118 45 7 years ago

“The decision to convert (14.000 PC clients) back to Microsoft from Limux [some time] until 2020 was a purely political one. Christian Ude: “There wasn’t a single unsolvable technical problem.”

I have worked on the Limux team during university. There were a couple of problems that led to resentments:

- fossilized, underpowered computers (1G RAM!) combined with fossilized software versions (Firefox/Thunderbird/Openoffice) thanks to testing/conformity requirements. This was what drove the majority of customer complaints.

- underpowered Internet uplinks of the dozens of government offices - you would think each had a gigabit fiber uplink, which is far from reality

- lack of manpower in the dev department, mostly caused by abysmal pay compared to the free market

- special IT software was mostly Windows-only or, if it was available for Linux, compiled for rpm-based distros while Limux was Ubuntu-based leading to all sorts of issues

- city staff being used to MS and not to Linux, requiring extensive training

- infighting among departments of the city, not everyone was a friend of centralization in IT

Technically all of this would be solvable but the budget was too low. People, especially key deciders, blamed it on "Linux" instead on their failure to provide adequate resources. The colleagues were the best people I have had the pleasure to learn from and work with, even to this day, but the best work is moot against idiots or bought-off morons in politics

MaupitiBlue• 7 years ago

“failure to provide adequate resources”

So you’re confirming Microsoft’s point that Linux on the desktop provides no cost advantage? Combine that with OpenOffice’s Word 6 level UI, and it’s understandable why they went back.

tinus_hn2• 7 years ago

He’s confirming using free software is not free. People trained to use Microsoft’s ribbon can’t use OpenOffice, just like many people trained to use older Office versions can’t use the ribbon.

rhn_mk1• 7 years ago

That's not what they say though. We'd need to know 2 things:

- what was the difference between LiMux and the Microsoft direction

- how much more would be needed to fix LiMux problems

specialist• 7 years ago

"The colleagues were the best people I have had the pleasure to learn from and work with, even to this day, but the best work is moot against idiots or bought-off morons in politics"

This is a universal truth.

jbaiter• 7 years ago

- lack of manpower in the dev department, mostly caused by abysmal pay compared to the free market

Abso-fucking-lutely. IMO this is the main factor why most government IT in Germany is in such a disastrous state. Not just abysmal pay, but also coupled with:

a) Limited-term contracts (usually 2 years)

b) Ludicrous academic requirements: You only get pay grade E13 (which is ~40k€/year) with a Diplom or a Master's Degree, so there's no way to hire motivated talent that the rest of the market is more likely to ignore

c) In the case of Limux, Munich has one of the highest costs of living in all of Germany. You earn the same amount of money for a position, no matter if you live in Munich or somewhere in the middle of nowhere with half the cost of living.

d) Since this year there's now also a requirement that a candidate must not have worked under a limited-term contract for the government before. You can imagine how that works out, when most government jobs of the last decade were mostly limited-term.

BrandoElFollito• 7 years ago

I was thinking about the same in France.

I recently had a look at the jobs in the administration and the salary was ridiculous compared to a similar one in the private sector.

This is particularly visible in the middle management are where a lit of actual decisions are made. No surprise that bringing in talent is not easy.

Same in science. I would love to come back to research but I cannot afford a smash (not cut) of my salary.

I do not think that the gouvernent is actually interested in having good pepole.

bonoboTP• 7 years ago

Ludicrous academic requirements: You only get pay grade E13 (which is ~40k€/year) with a Diplom or a Master's Degree, so there's no way to hire motivated talent that the rest of the market is more likely to ignore

Surely 40k EUR seems very little from an American perspective, but in Germany you cannot really expect much more than maybe 50-60K straight out of uni (as a normal, average student). 40k is surely less (I think E13 is more than 40k though), but the difference isn't that huge.

_y5hn• 7 years ago

For normal users the software must "Just Work (tm)" (former "Plug&Play"). These people need devs/power-users to turn to for help, though should usually be unnecessary. The experience need to surpass alternatives, ie. better privacy, no advertisements, rapid updates, more choice, freedom, no bugs, no useless notifications and distractions.

Not sure how this aligns with most businesses and govs, though they should support companies/orgs that make this their core.

rapsey• 7 years ago

I would prefer a translation instead of this editorializing.

ce42• 7 years ago

Here's the original 4-page interview of former mayor Christian Ude, it's very readable and should translate well with Google Translate:

https://www.linux-magazin.de/ausgaben/2019/10/interview-2/

justinclift• 7 years ago

Hmmm, it's not a very good translation:

Page 1:

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...

Page 2:

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...

Page 3:

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...

Page 4:

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...

sys_647382• 7 years ago

I usually use Microsoft Edge for translating webpages on the fly. It's great tech.

tinus_hn2• 7 years ago

The interview has practically no content. The mayor says that a leader of the ‘green’ party suddenly switched sides supporting Microsoft at every turn but states no reason why, so insinuations this was influenced by Microsoft somehow aren’t made in the interview. Then he laments about how much this probably is going to cost and what they could have done, mostly invest in better hardware and just better politics, convincing people of the value of independence and data security.

mrzool• 7 years ago

That’s maybe the reason why also the linked article almost has no content. It’s just a series of allegations and diversions into how much Microsoft sucks. There’s not even anecdotal evidence mentioned. As much as I sympathize with the view, you need to back it up. I didn’t get any value from the article, and that’s disappointing cause I’m sure there’s a real story to be told here.

dredmorbius• 7 years ago

Unfortunately, that's pretty much par for the course with Schestowitz. Even where he's got some actual meat (and many of his roasts are at best thin stews, often verging on homeopathic), he trips over himself slathering on the umbrage and insinuation.

I tend to believe what he's insinuating here, that Microsoft prioritises desktop licenses well above any apparances of playing nice with Linux (Azure may be a market, but that's virtually (hah!) all servers). But Schestowitz can't get out of his own way to tell the story.

Going straight to the source is generally recommended in any case. All the more so in this instance.

tzs• 7 years ago

Techrights (formerly Boycott Novell) is not the place to go for that.

It is the conspiracy site that has claimed such things as Microsoft caused the Deepwater Horizon spill, Bill Gates invests in companies that cause polio in Africa, the real purpose of the Gates Foundation's work in Africa is to oppress brown people so that Africa can be recolonized by western governments, that Microsoft has significant control over the US government, the French government, the UK government, PBS, the Lancet, the Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN, and others (possibly related to Microsoft's attendance at the Bilderberg meetings).

And that's just a few I remember from literally hundreds of such things that have been posted there in the 13 or so years its been around.

It's not all conspiracy theory stuff, but even when it covers something that is actually true it tends to mix in some of the conspiracy stuff.

ncmncm2• 7 years ago

Conspiracy necessarily implies violating the law. They do not typically claim lawbreaking, more usually just garden-variety underhanded dealing. Microsoft is not at all shy about engagement in the latter.

Consistent pressure in one direction over decades can have profound effects even when nothing that seems especially noteworthy is done.

mikece• 7 years ago

“We assume our readers are wise enough to understand that Microsoft is the same old corrupt company, with new lies and PR.”

I assume Microsoft still wants to make as much money from Windows and Office as they can but the trend has been to get users onto Azure and that’s not incompatible with Linux desktops and LibreOffice. That said, it’s possible that Microsoft Germany is doing things of which Redmond wouldn’t approve if it were fully know back at HQ. This isn’t Ballmer’s MSFT anymore.

simion314• 7 years ago

I am sure that all the bribes Microsoft gave in Europe were not known in US /s

lstroud• 7 years ago

I’m not sure it’s changed much on the Windows / Office side. There’s definitely a different attitude with Azure. However, it’s hard to tell if that’s a culture change or if it’s just because they are the little guy in the cloud space.

fartcannon• 7 years ago

It's not the same, no. Now they're significantly better at getting people to parrot their PR for them.

freehunter2• 7 years ago

I thought the same thing on azure but I recently stood up an environment there and found there are a lot of cool tools available that are greyed out with a message saying “not available on Linux hosts”. Maybe it’s just temporary until they add those features and Linux stuff deploys just fine, but I did feel like Linux was a second class citizen. It doesn’t help that most of the selection boxes I ran into had Windows as the default option.

topkai22• 7 years ago

It depends on the service, and a lot is the legacy of Azure actually being windows first or only for the first 5 or 6 years. I'm betting the area you were playing around in was web apps or VMs. If you look at the various container based offerings or the newer dev tools they are clearly Linux first. I'm pretty sure the new Visual Studio online offering doesn't even have a windows configuration.

BuckRogers4• 7 years ago

You either pay with licensing or hire a team to support. There’s no free as in beer, anywhere. At least once you get beyond some guy’s single Linux Mint install on his personal laptop, but not at any complex scale. Active Directory, development support, these things are needed. Hiring and maintaining a competent team is most often more expensive and importantly, far more difficult to competently do than licensing. Microsoft has a complete, vertically aligned stack that they’ve spent decades building and refining, there’s a lot of value there. Ubuntu is setup to compete here, and they’re a fine choice, but you do lose some things over going with Microsoft.

The wish upon a star for free beer is strong.

imglorp• 7 years ago

Desktop much?

In this century, cloud apps as a managed service are sufficient for some 90 pct of office workers. Chromebook/thin clients can be wiped on the hour or chucked in the trash if they break. So, 365, which is killing it. Not an MS cheerleader but this is the right play for them.

Developers are obviously different and need a curated desktop experience.

BuckRogers4• 7 years ago

Thin-clients are very much last century, mid-last century at that. They were called terminals. That's just a new buzzword because technology became fashionable for the non-technical, like calling server farms, "the cloud".

A thin-client is just a desktop that can't do much of anything under its own power. There's good reason Apple keeps advancing their A-series chips, why not stop at "thin client" (running a browser), like a Chromebook? Instead, they're near desktop Intel speeds. To answer that, it's because they want their platform to actually be able to do something on its own. AR, VR, image processing, video editing, you name it. No developer is required to own it, unlike this idea that "curated desktops", which can be around the power of an Apple A13, as somehow just aimed at developers.

Agreed on O365. Microsoft can do thin clients, and has a complete stack that integrates easily to resolve more complex demands out of the box. Just because it's the 21st century doesn't mean any of these concepts listed are new, nor is what Microsoft built in the 80's, 90's and 00's valueless. Depending on requirements it's very strongly to the contrary.

WalterGR• 7 years ago

In this century, cloud apps as a managed service are sufficient for some 90 pct of office workers.

Is there data on this?

So, so, so, so many companies have random internal desktop apps, or are dependent on external ones, that I think chucking a Chromebook at 90% of office workers is a pipe dream.

But absent data, this is all pure speculation.

baybal2• 7 years ago

Support? I urge you to try run your IT on Microsoft, with a support contract. Their phone support was useless, is useless, and will be useless.

I worked in BestBuy once, their IT gave up on fixing Windows and defaulted to re-imagining disks upon first issues with Win/Office despite having a support contract.

BuckRogers4• 7 years ago

That's not the sort of support that I'm talking about. That's trivial, and those Best Buy employees are most likely just incompetent, kids off the street that enjoy computers. It's true you might get better desktop support out of a Redhat engineer (for Windows, desktop Linux, or otherwise), if you could afford to pay him. The same would apply if people had a direct line to a Microsoft engineer.

I'm talking about ensuring some script you wrote in VB6 in 1998 still works on machines in 2019. Take that scenario times 100. It's not advertised but they do fix (or break, then fix) enterprise issues better than any entity I've seen, and definitely at that scale.

sys_647382• 7 years ago

BB's policy makes sense as it's the most cost effective solution.

lazylizard4• 7 years ago

99% of the desktops in my office are ubuntu. A few are centos or windows. Laptops usually come with windows so we don't remove it. Some are mac. Shared resources like email, shared storage,vpn, wifi and cluster access auth via ldap. Most of the windows desktops belong to the admin group. We host our own...everything..from dns to room booking. Most of it run on lxc on proxmox. The most painful things to do here..one of them is definitely licensing.

lazylizard4• 7 years ago

Linuxes are easy. All you need is ssh access. Ansible can do everything afterwards. Much easier to troubleshoot. Windows are hard. Very hard to troubleshoot. And so many ports open but still hard to remotely manage.

Former Mayor of Munich Explains How Microsoft Undermined Linux

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