The Green party in Munich says the city’s use of the Linux operating system is wrongly being blamed for all IT issues. “The problem is usually not the operating system, but something else”, says Florian Roth, leader of the city’s Green Party. The party wants to increase support for the city’s central IT department, to bolster the open source strategy.
“We continue to support Linux as the best option”, the Greens announced in a statement published in January. Roth, reached by phone, said the statement was intended to counterbalance an article in a local newspaper that questioned the use of Linux for the city’s workstations. The article, no longer available on the newspaper’s website, was misleading, says Roth. “The headline alleged Linux was about to be shelved, but the article itself showed the problems had little to do with the operating system.”
“It is a misconception that all IT issues have to do with our use of open source”, Roth says.
Change management
The leader of the city’s Green Party recounts how the mayor and deputy mayor, upon being elected in 2014, began denouncing the city’s open source IT strategy. The city is now doing an assessment of IT problems, which includes a staff member survey. Roth expects that the strategic use of open source to be discussed in the city council later this year.
The Greens want Munich to continue to centralise IT operations, and warn against splitting responsibilities across multiple organisations. The political group says that frictions between IT departments are wasting time and creating inefficiencies.
The city of Munich uses Linux on just over 17,000 of its 18,000 workstations.
In January, IT news site Tech Republic reported how the city will have to spend some EUR 16 million over the next four years to get rid of the last 1500 proprietary desktops workstations (including virtual desktops). Most of this will be spent on replacing the business applications that are tied to these legacy systems by modern web applications.
More information:
Press announcement by the Munich Green Party (in German)
Tech Republic news item
Abendzetung news item (in German, and currently unavailable)
Comments
The never ending secret war of M$ to make this success story seem like a failure is a shame.
M$, a criminal organisation, convicted on EVERY continent, many, many, times, and STILL is bribing public servants, should be banned from any public tender for a decade.
Now we pay with tax money for criminal organisations (I mention Oracle too) for them to improve their software. Instead, we could and should, pay independent developers for Free and Open-Source Software to develop and improve software so the whole world could use, develop and improve further this software. Until, after a decade or two, every public service in the world has the use of an almost free, reliable, adaptable, trustworthy, software.
Shame on the politicians and public servants who get paid from those criminals!
The news item of the "Münchner Abendzeitung" can be found here:
http://www.abendzeitung-muenchen.de/inhalt.staedtische-it-auf-pruefstan…
OK, here come the first interesting facts of what really is the problem of the situation (in German):
http://www.heise.de/open/meldung/Muenchen-Berater-decken-Schwaechen-der…;