Re: [tlug] City of Munich switches from Linux to Windows

[Christian Horn <chorn@example.com>]

Hi,

On Sun, Nov 26, 2017 at 04:03:12PM +0900, Benjamin Kowarsch wrote:
> The end for LiMux: Munich city council kicks penguin out the door.
> [..]
> I am wondering if there was any trouble or whether this was solely a political decision?
> 
> Does anybody, perhaps from Germany or even from Munich, know any of the background to this?

I lived for 15 years in Munich before moving to Tokyo last year, I
am following these things from German sources and have a friend in
the Limux team.

- This is purely a political decision.  Microsoft moved their head-
  quarters to Munich.  The town mayor and his deputy are both known
  as pro Microsoft.
- Munichs IT consists of 3 departments which have aparently not been
  united, this is leading to most of the issues which are now
  (without proper reasoning) accounted to Linux.
- Over the last years, there have been constant movements in this
  direction, this one seems to come through.
- One of the technical comments which are around are that the pro-
  ject tried to much, in creating an own debian based distro.  
  IIRC due to their (slow) release cycle they had to care for some
  pieces like open/libreoffice after upstream stopped caring.
  They also hit many limits in open source software, contributed
  properly to upstream what they fixed.

I have also seen talks about 'what we should have been better',
some are about better lobbying.  There are studies about how much
money was already saved, there is no proper study about how much
the move to Windows will cost, but the decision is beeing made 
nontheless.  This does not sound like an environment where de-
cisions are made based on facts..

Chris