see http://www.muenchen.de/rathaus/Stadtverwaltung/Direktorium/LiMux/Kontakt.html

FAIZ .A.M

Munich proved a slow migration could come in under budget.

–That doesn’t mean that there aren’t any risks (lack of internal personnel being one of them)–

Slow migration over 10+ years like Munich did you have the time to train or higher what ever staff you need. So there is no lack of internal personal problem to a Munich style migration.

Risks from the Munich model of budget blow outs is almost zero. Biggest risk is FUD that the cost has to of blown out due to the process taking so long.

So every issue that you can raise the Munich model handles for larger businesses.

Fast/short time frame migrations you run into brick walls with serous risks to budgets.

That risk is pretty low considering they can drop to thin clients any time and cut personnel needed to run the system… They have IT clusters at 50 locations. There’s a lot of fat in their system still. The design was not to minimize cost but dependence on M$ and “partners”. The reduction in cost is just a side-benefit. Typically, folks who use thin clients can have 3 to 5 times fewer IT staff. They have nearly 1K IT-staff at the moment for 30K employees. They could cut that to a few per building and a cluster at some data-centre by relying more on the network. I think 150 site-staff and 30 at the heart of IT could do the job. They have reduced the number of applications greatly. They could also reduce staff. I expect that will come eventually.

This is not to say that staff-reductions are an inevitable result of converting to FLOSS. They could also greatly increase services IT provides which would balance that. They have made the system more efficient for hardware and software. They could do it for staffing as well. Some additional services they might add would be information kiosks for citizens all over the place, more/bigger data-centres for additional data-bases, more automation of urban functions, perhaps even becoming an ISP of some sort…

Further, the training they do increases supply of staff and the increase in utilization by schools and ordinary citizens means supply is increasing externally. If they pay IBM, RedHat or Suse for support there will be no shortage at all…

http://www.ris-muenchen.de/RII2/RII/ris_antrag_dokumente.jsp?risid=2278465

Someone from the CSU — Christian Social Union, Bavaria’s conservative party who has governed Bavaria since 1946 and whose great leader Franz-Josef Strauß once claimed that “right of the CSU there’s only the wall” — asked the Mayor, Christian Ude (from the Social Democratic Party), if it weren’t a good idea to return to Microsoft, based on a lot of hearsay what seemingly is wrong with Linux/LiMux. The Mayor’s response can be aptly described as “You don’t know jack”, which he expresses more politely, of course.

LiMux works. And it came in much cheaper than a Microsoft-based solution would have. Nobody can deny that today. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t any risks (lack of internal personnel being one of them), but returning to Microsoft due to some made-up FUD is definitely not one of them. This would be a Treppenwitz.