Munich’s much vaunted migration to Linux could be about to unravel, sending the city back into the fee-driven bosom of Microsoft.
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2014/08/munich-city-linux-switching-back-windows
The City of Munich, Germany has been a Linux user for over 10 years but it appears that city employees are clamoring to switch back to Windows.
The issue I see is that they built their own distribution - LiMux. It was originally based on Debian and then switched to Ubuntu. The last stable release of LiMux was in 2011 and is based on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS which was released in April 2010. That version of Ubuntu is seriously old in the tooth now -- even Microsoft releases new version of Windoze faster.
Seems to me that the City of Munich suffers from "Not invented here" syndrome and would be better off if they just switch to an vendor with commercial support like Ubuntu or Red Hat instead of trying to build and maintain their own distro.
Side note:
ReplyDeleteThe new mayor and deputy mayor played a major part in Microsoft moving its German headquarters (and the tax revenue that comes with it) from one of Munich's satellite cities into Munich proper.
Now after the election they're also the most vocal ones complaining (but never providing concrete details) about the completed Linux migration, but I'm sure that's just pure coincidence.
The OS was just the tip of this project iceberg. The real battle was to turn all the city's software and hardware infrastructure and the different isolated applications into a common system.