Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions

https://insights.ubuntu.com/2014/07/07/ubuntu-and-open-source-help-the-city-of-munich-save-millions/

by arunc • 12 years ago

180 107 12 years ago

insights.ubuntu.com

Chronic29• 12 years ago

A+ would read again!!

yoran• 12 years 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?

zanny5• 12 years 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• 12 years 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/

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.

jonalmeida2• 12 years 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• 12 years 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.

velodrome9• 12 years 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.

eru2• 12 years 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.

achiang• 12 years ago

YMMV, of course.

I have found the exact opposite experience.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/+AlexChiang/posts/JKdr1LTLQD2

jebus989• 12 years ago

Sounds like you last used ubuntu in 2006?

CSDude• 12 years ago

It reminds me 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• 12 years ago

Heck, I'm impressed all the web software they use is compatible with something other than IE<8.

ams61102• 12 years ago

If (most) everyone is using LibreOffice that probably causes much fewer issues than a mixture of MS Office and LibreOffice.

brusch64• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

the only problem that I can think of is that of exchanging word documents over the "city lines".

waps• 12 years 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)

gburnett2• 12 years ago

I use LibreOffice in an environment where almost every other user uses Microsoft Office tools. I've had difficulty with some documents in the docx format. Most of the documents will turn out to be ok but when certain types of formatting are included problems start to appear.

Most of the problems come from, I think, unnecessary features. For example a footer for the author's name on each page.

xorcist• 12 years ago

What a strange view of what a "government officer" does.

If you include all civil servants (which the definition listed by wikipedia does) you will find police officers, national economists, sociologists, intelligence officers, surgeons, traders and many many more professionals there.

All the specialists will of course require domain specific software. In anything involving economics or statistics you will probably find SAS or R, someone tasked with planning mobile spectrum would have GIS applications etc.

nmrm4• 12 years ago

Yes, but for every person who needs specialized software to do their job, there are many who don't.

For instance, even most police officers in the area where I live don't need special software. Some do, but most use a few web apps and java apps to do their paper work.

It's like a non-tech mid-sized business, really. All the management and many of the employees don't need anything more than word processing. And then there are people in technical roles whose needs are served on an individual basis (or, in good environments, their manager is handed a budget and told "have you people get what they need")

mimiflynn• 12 years ago

In my time working for financial firms (~4 years), I can tell you that there are a lot of proprietary applications being developed with web technologies.

perlgeek• 12 years ago

The problem is usually interacting with other agencies; those don't have well-defined data formats for data interchange, instead they often work with forms in Word documents, and require the document to be edited with a very specific version of MS Word. Of course that makes interaction harder.

The technical lead of the LiMux project told a story once about a German federal agency that required documents to be submitted in a very specific, unusual font that basically everybody had to buy first.

RobAley• 12 years ago

As you note, these requirements tend to be with specific versions of Word, and so libreoffice and co present no more of an impediment that using other/current versions of Word.

chrisBob3• 12 years ago

I am sure that requirements like this aren't that unusual (the NIH requires grants to be submitted in one of 3 fonts), but an arbitrary rule shouldn't be confused with a compatibility issue.

andyjohnson0• 12 years ago

"...almost nobody builds native programs anymore."

Outside of the HN echo chamber there are thousands of companies building native applications, which are used by millions of organisations around the world. Not everything is delivered via the web.

virtue33• 12 years 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".

virtue33• 12 years 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]

brudgers5• 12 years 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.

zanny5• 12 years 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.

ams61102• 12 years ago

Not to mention the big kahunas, Exchange, Sharepoint, AD, SQL Server licenses.

brudgers5• 12 years ago

As I mentioned common open source productivity software runs on Windows. That includes Gimp, Emacs etc. - not that I believe that Munich is rolling out 14000 development/graphics boxes. The comparison does not appear to be between equivalent specifications. It's assuming that Windows requires Office. That's simply false.

brudgers5• 12 years ago

Discussion two months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7720219#up_7720418

ausjke• 12 years ago

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

mschuster91• 12 years ago

IIRC lots of stuff was done by IBM.

davidjgraph• 12 years ago

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

aagd• 12 years 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

alkonaut9• 12 years 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• 12 years 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• 12 years 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• 12 years 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• 12 years 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.

chrisBob3• 12 years 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.

Alupis2• 12 years 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.

chrisBob3• 12 years 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.

alkonaut9• 12 years 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• 12 years 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.

freehunter4• 12 years 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.)

alkonaut9• 12 years ago

Well, it could work either way I suppose, but in my experience, usability/productivity of desktop software is severely lacking in OSS software (unlike e.g server software). Perhaps due to problems attracting non-developers to work on them. Polish is expensive, but polish is productivity.

The potential upside like you mention would be more licenses at lower cost. Whether that was a bottleneck depends on the organization in question. Either way I don't think it's possible to make any conclusions without research.

scholia4• 12 years ago

The vast majority of free/open source software is available for Windows, and that includes things as horrendously unusable as GIMP.

virtue33• 12 years ago

I've used both photoshop and gimp a lot. If I had to use gimp for my day to day photo editing software I'd be _severely_ hampered in productivity.

codemod• 12 years ago

The LiMux wiki page mentions a timeline of how the migration happened, so it looks like their phased rollout helped them 'convert' to Linux smoothly.

Quoting from the wiki.. September 6, 2005 - It is decided that the project needs an additional one year pilot test, and migration slips one year.[19]

September 22, 2006 - The "soft" migration begins, one year behind original schedule.[20]

November 2008: 1200 out of 14,000 have migrated to the LiMux environment (9%; March 2008: 1000=7%), in addition 12000 workstations use OpenOffice.org 2 installed on Windows (March 2008: 6000) and more 100% use Mozilla Firefox 1.5 and Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5 (March 2008: 90%). 18000 of 21000 macros, templates and forms are changed into Linux-enabled[21]

brudgers5• 12 years ago

The study MicroSoft commissioned from HP put the total cost at about €60 million or between two and three times the costs Munich claims and substantially more than their estimate for using Windows.

http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Microsoft-partly-rele...

That said and even if it's fabricated from whole cloth, the numbers are all chump change in the budget for a city with 1.4 million inhabitants, particularly when the spending is spread over more than a decade. Ten million euros in savings is less than a Euro per inhabitant per year since the project kicked off in 2002. Using Munich's numbers, they could do the entire project every year with a head tax of €25 per year.

€10 million is a lot of money if it's yours. At the scale of a city it's repaving a few streets.

pippy• 12 years ago

One thing bureaucracies are susceptible to is vendors requiring mandatory software updates on custom software. This costs much more than most people think, and with the city of City of Munich would dwarf any productivity overhead.

Sure it's the case with Photoshop as it's an off the shelf piece product, but it won't be with CustomVendorDirectXAccounting v13.5. I doubt City of Munich has teams of people running photoshop, and any designers likely have suite of macs anyway.

I'd wager the cost savings of switching to OpenSource likely won't come from initial costs. It will come from forcing custom software vendors to distribute software that inherently requires less ongoing costs.

slgeorge2• 12 years ago

Sorry, but it's not like arguing you can use "Gimp rather than Photoshop" at all.

You just identified a specialist application that's used in a specific use-case by a limited user-base who fully use the capabilities of the software. When a designer uses those tools their productivity is significantly increased or limited by the software. The focus of the role is using the computer as a tool, so if it performs poorly so do they.

Most 'general office' users, and certainly many administrators don't fully use the capabilities of the software they have because it's not the focus of their jobs. The software isn't the limiting factor in them doing the job. Take the example of someone working in job centre or similar, they'll likely use a Word processor for providing letters, e-mail for external/internal interaction and some custom internal applications (e.g. the jobs database). There are all well within the capabilities of Open Source software.

Framing it that way would certainly be an argument against replacing Photoshop for Gimp; but it doesn't tell you anything useful about replacing general Windows/MS Office with Linux and Open Source.

alkonaut9• 12 years ago

I think the same argument holds for OO vs MS Office as well. They are much closer than Gimp/PS obviously, but for power users they aren't even close to interchangeable.

A good middle ground would be migrating the 95 or 99% who are "casual" users to open source, but you'd then have a heterogeneous system, which isn't ideal. VM's could be used to have all-Linux desktops and still provide users of win-only software with what they need.

My point is: the big savings are in the 95% but the big cost is for migrating the last 5%.

strykekyte• 12 years ago

They should totally have called it Munix.

jonathanriddell• 12 years ago

This uses Kubuntu rather than Ubuntu Unity

Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions

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