[KLUG Members] Adoption of LINUX by Munich

[R.M.Deal]

Hello, kluggers,
As a recent immigrant to the Munich area from Kalamazoo, I've been 
particularly interested in the adoption of LINUX by the city of Munich.  
What I am including here may be old for many of you, I found it 
particularly enlightening in view of
the wildly different reports on how the Munich conversion is going.

Note the inclusion of the web reference at the top of the attachment in 
case you wish to read more details of the interview.
By the way, I tried to insert the actual text I had excerpted into this 
message but can't see how to.  Must one use
attachments for such in Firefox?

Neat to see KLUG continuing to do so well.  Wish I could attend your 
meetings.  There is a LINUXug based in Munich but all messages there are 
in German at which I am still poor.  You might be interested in that 
group having a Stammtisch ever so often, i.e. a table reserved at a 
local pub to which linuxug members are invited. 

             Ralph M. Deal, retired P.Chem. prof., in Haimhausen, 
Germany for a few years
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A SAP graphical user interface based on Java is planned and, because we still work in some cases with the good old Siemens BS2000 mainframe, we have ordered a Linux-based emulation of it from the Munich company Com2.

Will the BS2000 machines stay?
Yes. We already have a heterogeneous landscape anyway. Unusually for the IT sector, we never relied to any great extent on Microsoft servers and used Novell or Unix systems with Oracle databases, for instance. They will also stay.

Other public authorities will certainly be keeping a close eye on proceedings. Do you know of any other councils that are planning something similar?
Municipal authorities include Treuchtlingen, Isernhagen and Schwäbisch-Hall, and in Bavaria there is the Survey Office and the Audit Office. The Police in Lower Saxony are already using Linux. Our colleagues from Paris, who also want to change over, have already come to observe our progress.

Do you know about France's decision to switch to open source in various public institutions nationwide?
No, that's something new. But I assume that our colleagues from the town hall in Paris will have a certain influence on decisions taken at a national level.

What made you decide to switch to SuSE in particular?
The City Council tasked us to implement pilot projects with a Linux desktop, and IBM and SuSE offered their assistance. We built up examples with the SuSE Linux Desktop and tested interfaces to other applications such as SAP.

Here is an exerpt from http://www.computeractive.co.uk/analysis/1156162 which contains an interview with Wilhelm Hoegner, head of the information and data processing office of the City of Munich, dated Jun 24,2004.

That worked very well. But, of course, we have not made a firm commitment to SuSE at this stage. We will have to go through the tender process for the many component projects involved beyond the pilot stage, now that the decision has been made and the project has officially been started.

What about Microsoft?
We have not parted completely with Microsoft. The impression that has been created is totally wrong. We still have 24,000 computers in the schools in Munich, which have now been upgraded to Windows 2000 and will probably continue to use that system.

We are still in contact with Microsoft; in some areas of municipal administration, for example, it makes sense to use terminals instead of Windows desktops to keep costs down. We are still involved in talks in this regard.

However, when it comes to the desktops in the City's various departments, Microsoft has made no further offers and appears to have accepted the decision made by the City Council.