Cue a concerted effort by MS salespeople to make them an offer they can't refuse. See also: Munich.
Here's something more likely: Munich was ready to move back because the project was expensive to maintain, cumbersome in practice, killed productivity and was generally unpopular with the end-users, and Microsoft's new branch was just a cherry on top.
You might not like this line of argument, but it's not a "conspiracy theory" since it's well-supported. It's disingenuous to completely dismiss the role of political influence on a government decision.
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/linux-in-munich-no-comp...
But it isn't. You just asserted it. I don't dispute the facts at hand, but you can't just link those together and assert causality when there is no evidence for it .
>It's disingenuous to completely dismiss the role of political influence on a government decision.
I don't know what to do with that. There is no evidence and everyone disputes the corrupt link you assert. Not only that, there is an alternative explanation: the Linux deployment wasn't popular, killed productivity, and wasn't cheap to maintain. What you're doing is the definition of FUD.
I did not assert that Microsoft's move to Munich was the only reason for the city's change from LiMux to Windows. But, Microsoft did gain political influence in Munich by moving their headquarters there. Politics played a role in the city's decision, and there is sufficient press coverage to support this. See the TechRepublic article in my parent comment.
You're arguing that the deployment of LiMux itself was the one and only reason for Munich's return to Windows, and dismissing the role of politics in Munich's decision as a "conspiracy theory".
>Microsoft did gain political influence in Munich by moving their headquarters there.
And did it actually influence the decision of Munich to change their infrastructure? And how much? 10% or 90%? Let's say it was a minor consideration, on the order of 1%, and the rest was the result of the failure of the LiMux deployment itself - see what I mean about needing evidence. You can't just say things because of your FEELS.
Again, one thing we know, it wasn't a great deployment.
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/linux-in-munich-no-comp...
There are additional sources describing politics as a significant factor in the city's decision:
https://www.networkworld.com/article/3170104/munichs-great-l...
https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=https:/...
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
Reiter based the decision to switch back from LiMux to Windows on a report commissioned from Accenture, "the leading Microsoft services provider for the ninth consecutive year" with an obvious conflict of interest:
https://newsroom.accenture.com/news/accenture-and-avanade-na...
https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-partner-claims-munic...
I invite you to provide evidence for your assertion that the role of politics in Munich's decision is a "conspiracy theory" and "FUD".
EDIT: > role of politics
Role of politics is a somewhat different claim than just "pressure/influence by Microsoft" (which for sure happened, but it's hard to gauge how large the influence was), and includes lots of other factors that are likely to have also played a role. The entire thing is quite murky and I think "it happened because X" is too easy whatever the X is.
AGAIN, the BIG picture - this deployment didn't turn out to be the success Munich had hoped it was going to be. They could limp along, sure, and I'm sure there are plenty of people who like it, especially the guy who runs the entire project, and the people who are ideological inclined against Microsoft, and the Green party...
I mean Jesus, the only way they could get this LiMux thing to work was by maintaining Windows licenses for legacy software and interoperability, virtualizing Office because OpenOffice/LibreOffice sucks (and it does), and moving to Exchange for Calendar and Email. This is a chimera. It sucks.
There were good reason to ditch Windows in the first place, and now there are good reasons to ditch this Linux experiment as well. That's the big picture.
>I invite you to provide evidence for your assertion that the role of politics in Munich's decision is a "conspiracy theory" and "FUD".
I invite you to provide evidence that your bias has not coloured your interpretation of events. Have fun proving a negative.
(I read all the things you cited - it's the same kind of stuff - high on speculation, light on evidence).
Here is where you are misinterpreting all of the above. I did not say there were any "secret nefarious reasons". All involved parties made the decision that would be most beneficial to them ("business reasons" in the case of Microsoft), which influenced Munich's reversal.
Munich's switch to LiMux was an embarrassment to Microsoft, and one of the reasons for their move to Munich was to gain political clout by becoming a more important stakeholder to Munich. Generally speaking, companies have more influence on a city's decisions when they are actually located in the city, because they pay taxes to the city and have more employees living there. This isn't a "conspiracy theory", it's common sense.
In summary:
You: Munich switched back to Windows solely because there were issues with the LiMux deployment, and Windows software is superior to Linux software.
Me: Munich switched back to Windows because there were issues with the LiMux deployment, and because Microsoft made itself more important to Munich by moving its headquarters to the city.
We can agree to disagree.
And yes, Googlers & co., that includes you, even if the small lib you released is Open Source, the magic sauce powering Page Rank, Analytics, AdWords and such isn't.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/13/munich_committee_sa...
> Hübner said the city has struggled with LiMux adoption. "Users were unhappy and software essential for the public sector is mostly only available for Windows," she said. > She estimated about half of the 800 or so total programs needed don't run on Linux and "many others need a lot of effort and workarounds". > Hübner added, "in the past 15 years, much of our efforts were put into becoming independent from Microsoft," including spending "a lot of money looking for workarounds" but "those efforts eventually failed."
https://www.neowin.net/news/munich-germany-realizes-that-dep...
> https://www.neowin.net/news/munich-germany-realizes-that-dep...
Looks like the open source equivalents for the software didn't deal well enough with different file formats.
"In 2018, journalistic group Investigate Europe released a video documentary via German public television network ARD, wherein it is claimed that the majority of city workers were satisfied with the operating system, with council members insinuating that the reversal was a personally motivated decision by lord mayor Dieter Reiter. Reiter denied that he had initiated the reversal in gratitude for Microsoft moving its German headquarters from Unterschleißheim back to Munich."
This is also worth a read:
https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2017/02/14/statemen...
In short, it _was_ MSFT lobby grease.
I don't doubt that there were issues with 'different file formats', .docx and .xslx right up front (open standards that they are one wonders how there could have been an issue).
https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-germany-moves-into-a-new-h...
Probably has a lot more to do with it than file formats ever did.
A lot of gov / HR departments etc have embedded forms in things like word documents and PDFs. The same problem with alternative PDF viewers, they don't do PDF forms well if at all.
You don't know the requirements of the different departments and saying "this free alternative works fine when writing a doc" doesn't cover their use cases.
The Linux community like to think that Microsoft is the "big evil" that is trying to thwart them at every turn. I know quite a few people in Microsoft and they tell me that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.
So sorry I think it is a conspiracy theory and as someone that earns his living processing documents from Office I know that incompatibilities exist between Libre Office (which is a fork of Open Office) and MS Office.
> The Linux community like to think that Microsoft is the "big evil"
I really don't think I speak for the Linux community but I do think that MS is still the big evil, just in slightly nicer packaging. Fantastic PR, crappy company.
No. Please don't put words into my mouth.
The problem is that there is no specs / documentation for anything generally. Most of my time in dev has been spent dealing and finding work around for all sorts shitty bugs in applications when dealing with either web browsers or generating documents.
This is partially because of deliberate vendor lock-in and partially due to nobody being given time to actually produce specs as these are often an after thought. Customers don't care about me making proper documentation, even when they do other developers that do integrations DON'T RTFM and I have to guide them through it anyway. Customers don't pay for specs / docs etc, they pay for the product that lets them get shit done.
Fanatics of Open Source (and they are that) always argue about cost of the software, vendor lock in etc. The costs of the software are almost nothing compared to hiring people. I was on a team of 6 people doing a major rewrite (which shouldn't have been happening IMHO) and it cost the business about £500,000 just in staff. Licenses for SQL Server and Windows server was a small percentage of that and were about 1 man months worth of cost. These costs are nothing for large councils / businesses that will either recoup that cost from the software itself or will just raise taxes to cover the shortfall (which is what Gov always does).
The really good reason to use Open Source software is security, privacy and being able to run what you want on what you have purchased, but that never gets mentioned, it always the bullshit cost angle because £400 sounds a lot to the kids in University which are broke.
Also vendor lock-in is the norm for a vast number of reasons other than "M$ is the evilz, stop using Windoz". Just look at the 8bit/16bit era, almost everything was lock-in and much more expensive than today (by factors of ten). The free PC ecosystem is NOT the norm in computing.
> I really don't think I speak for the Linux community but I do think that MS is still the big evil, just in slightly nicer packaging. Fantastic PR, crappy company.
LOL. Google, Facebook, Paypal, Twitter are far more powerful than Microsoft and are much much more evil, you know why? Because they think they are the good guys. Microsoft are basically like IBM these days, they sell loads of proprietary stuff that office use because they have won in that sector, they are dominate almost nowhere else.
A great deal of the internet is now hosted on a about 5 or 6 providers, the largest being Amazon's cloud. That is far more frightening to me than Microsoft. Every single competitor (except Microsoft) uses Amazon's Object Storage API because they are the largest.
This isn't the early 2000s where Microsoft were a monopoly they simply aren't anymore because the market has changed so drastically in 20 years.