New Munich city government agrees to use open source software where possible
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
> Die Stadt München unterstützt die Entwicklung von Open Source-Projekten mit einem "Munich Open Source Sabbatical". Professionelle Programmierer*innen, die sich für drei oder sechs Monate ganz auf die Fortentwicklung eines Open Source-Projektes kon-zentrieren möchten, können sich dafür auf ein städtisches bezahltes Stipendium bewerben. Die Projekte müssen einen kommunalen Nutzen haben.
[1]: https://www.gruene-muenchen.de/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Dr...
it would have to something that covers your current living expenses, no matter how high they are, because unless you are young and single with a lot of flexibility, you are not going to be able to put a hold on all those expenses.
therefore the two reasonable options are: the government continues to pay your current salary, or it pays what you'd get if they'd hire you. the latter would disadvantage high earners, but that is somewhat reasonable.
anything less would unlikely get any people interested.
I bet tax and pension systems have the same basic requirements cross countries with some local specifics.
if the goal is to create jobs, then that also happens either way. i don't see the problem.
But whether this is a legal issue is actually an open debate, in some specific cases companies could potentially sue Amsterdam for sharing solutions with other governments and thereby "competing" with the market. How a judge would rule is not clear. But this is something they are aware of and it's a risk. It seems to also be connected to the way the project is shared.
As far as I know they are looking into changing the law on the national level so this stops being a problem. Also strangely enough, I've been told, as soon as the project gets funded by the EU, this law is not applicable anymore.
Open source means published on github, not many projects are actually properly documented.
There is no valid reason to just pay rent to anyone for nothing, even if they are a local company. That's not a good enough reason.
Buying software has the benefit that the manufacturer carries the risk.
Imho, they should set standards, APIs, file formats etc to enable competition and keep vendor lock-in to a minimum.
Communal software isn't always custom-built, the majority is normal off-the-shelf stuff, just focused on that niche. My involvement is limited to a small city a few years ago, that may be different in a large city as Munich if they have lots of custom requirements they don't share with other cities.
the buyer can not shift the risk to the seller. how would that go? put out a tender for a completed solution and then wait until someone builds the software on their own risk, hoping to win the tender? that's like a designer competition, and those have been considered unfair.
If the cities built it themselves, they would not be able to choose who to buy from. And if their self-built software sucks, they've wasted money and have a shitty software. One that they may not be able to replace, because there's no longer a market for that kind of software. Public endeavors into building things (airports, train stations, rapid train lines etc) in the recent decades in Germany does not predict a bright future for these kinds of things.
of course software is created. but the risk a company takes in creating is irrelevant to the decision a government makes. that risk is from the past.
you said that the government can either choose to take a risk by developing their own, or offload that risk.
but that is not the decision it needs to make. when it takes an existing product it is not offloading that risk, because the risk that vendor took is independent of the risk of the government.
the situation should be rather like this: either a solution exists, then we use that solution with a small or no risk because the vendor already took that risk in the past. or the solution doesn't exist, then we don't have a choice but to custom develop with all the risks that that includes.
at no point is there an option to offload an existing risk.
the only way to offload an existing risk would be to say: we wait until vendors come up with solutions.
(it may be that i am getting hung up on little details here. i believe that we are actually mostly in agreement in how a government is handling custom development)
opensource system can create much needed transparency in government project and organization effort. In my home country the unemployment agency spent atrocious amount of money to create an unusable job-posting app; something private companies do for fraction of the cost. More surprisingly, they doubled down on it; instead of scrapping it when it wasn't delivering. My guess it that some nepotism/favoritism was at play, and if the project was at least open source it could've been examined by others.
Happy to say that I am working on such a project. Heavy (and unnecessary NDA) so I cannot say in cleartext but it is in use in one Nordic country already, it is opensource and already I hear that the Dutch found it to be a good starting point and probably will be using it too.
Some more details, the company I work for is owned by one country but doesn't compete as much as cooperate - I am a consultant from another company. And we both use open source software and libraries and publish as open source most of what we create.
I hate it that I can't talk about it.
- capacity planning for renewables (hydro power)
- streamlining mass transit
- large scale collection and recycling of bottles
- search and rescue operations in the North Sea
- education
as for why the NDA, my best guess is because "they could". Someone should tell them they are losing out on some great publisity and goodwill.
Which is why I think the NDA (or my reading of it) is way too wide.
To add one other angle: what is cheaper, paying 5 million to a company in Redmond yp provide licenses for opersting systems and officd software, or 10 million to a number of local companies to set up and adapt a slightly less refined open source tool for the local needs? In one scenario the money leaves the local economy, in other the city might spend more money but the money stays local and is used to buy houses or sandwiches, pay handymen or bus tickets or taxes. Where is the long term cost/benefit/ratio higher?
Free software and open source doesn't mean non-commercial. SUSE in Germany provides commercial support to their distro for example. Such a weird article, zdnet doesn't getting any better...
This is all politics. Nothing more...
I'm sure Canonical would happily hier some devs from Munich to make this look local.
Linux also has more market share in Germany than any other western country, I think.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
I still don't understand why major nations don't create or help create national OSes for their own countries/industries. You would think an OS is national security issue at the very least. A municipality isn't going to cut it. It's going to require a major national effort to stave off a monopoly like microsoft.
The downside is that much of the 'trunk' of IT (workstations, Business Software, internal systems) are still contracted out to monolithic, old-school contractors who have no incentive to innovate by non-technical procurement teams. This leads to a culture of proprietary software where the established/expensive solutions are seen as the most trustworthy and there isn't any cost to vendor lock-in or non-interoperability of systems until the next tranche of officials have taken over and all of those issues can be written off as 'legacy' and as a sunk cost.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Digital_Service
Our software licenses are paid through a grant from the federal government. If we replace them with open source software, we don't get to keep the difference. So now I have licensed software like SAS and ArcGIS gathering dust on my machine while I use R and Python.
And sharing software we develop is even harder. I've pushed to release code for my statistical reports. When I said researchers and other states could benefit by reusing parts, my supervisors only saw it as a liability with no benefit to us. I might try to slip it in as part of the technical notes.
1. Lack of central organization, it's easier to work with and pay a single private company or a contractor than hiring folks and working with open source projects that usually has no legal body, no billing, etc. Hiring and working with various companies to update, maintain, and so on with many projects isn't as easy as it sounds. (True, you could hire a single company to maintain a single distro for the whole gov't to use but is it cheaper than a private solution that 80% of the market already uses?).
2. Lobbyists, they'll explain it's cheaper to hire private companies to produce and cheaper maintenance over time especially since ^.
3. A share of citizens that doesn't believe in a bigger federal govt.
4. States want to do it their own ways instead of trusting the fed govt.
5. Distrust in govt in general on all fronts.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-champion-munich-will-swi... , https://www.techrepublic.com/article/end-of-an-open-source-e...
This reminds me of a quote by the character Humphrey Appleby on "Yes, Minister" ("The Office"-like sitcom about government):
"Almost anything can be attacked as a loss of amenity. And almost anything can be defended as not a significant loss of amenity."
This is the same ol' carousel we've been going round and round on now for more than 2 decades.
Some people 'get' free and open software, the other people run our world.
Then in a very short timespan (1) a new conservative city government came in, (2) Microsoft announced a big local office and (3) the new government killed the open source project without warning and anlunced they'd switch everything to windows 10.
This transition back to windows is now still ongoing and as contracts are signed will not really be feasible to stop. The now new-new Green+social democratic government makes noe a pledge to take open source seriously for all future needs (and I suppose switch back to a Linux asap).
In other news: 2020 is not the year of the linux desktop.
I understand that it has been in the news that MS spent a lot of energy on preventing people from moving away from Windows, and I think I remember steep discounts but it has been a while since I read about it, but while the government could be going "haha let's put out another statement and get more discounts" I would say it's more likely that there are people in power in Europe that genuinely want to lessen our dependency on the benevolent big brothers from the USA. But that's just how the news reports it, perhaps I'm not cynical enough. Anyway, if you know of a statement by anyone in a relevant government that claims this was a negotiation tactic, that would be interesting.
Which in practice binds absolutely no one to absolutely anything.
The actual migration to Linux went mostly fine and was largely a success as far as government software programs go, FWIW.
To this day eventually this attrition pushes many back to the more compatible and familiar solution.
I've seen (usually very small) companies going to Linux and other FOSS solutions without actually understanding this beyond "they're free". Migration went great. Later on I came back to do the migration the other way around once they faced that attrition and realized that support costs were dwarfing the license cost.
Former actual LiMux team member here, so I can speak from experience (almost a decade ago though). The hardest part was convince users to be happy on utterly inadequate and aged hardware. No, 1 GB of RAM won't cut it when you have to have Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice and some fucking Java crap open at the same time, and 1024x768 screens won't do so either.
The last part alone excludes many cheap vendors as they don't have government contracting experience, and the spare parts requirements kills the rest as they can only be so cheap because they don't have to build much of a spare parts infrastructure. (Note: this is not specifically relating to LiMux in any way, I have no knowledge about the contracts/tender process that happened back then)
Also, the scale matters: 15.500 PCs are even at 500$ apiece 7.75 million €.
It's too gentle to say that users are struggling or resisting.
The fact on the ground is that a significant part of users are simply incapable of learning new computer software, they can't even use effectively the software they've been working on for years. This is glaring in a giant government organization with tens of thousands of employees. Thus any attempt to move OS is doomed to fail.
Classic example is the popup when closing a word document. "Do you want to save the document before exiting? Save/Quit/Cancel". The typical user clicks the little red cross in the top right corner of the dialog.
But that lends the question; what does it take to end the Microsoft monopoly on our governments?
It can’t just be open document standards. I think it goes further than that; into our schools maybe.
I don’t have answers, but it’s a serious question I have.
That should be "offering" singular, not "offerings" plural.
And it's totally feasible to produce a superior ecosystem. The hard part is absorbing years of financial loss while building the new ecosystem from the ground up while it isn't compatible with the existing proprietary system.
Why ? An ecosystem consists of multiple offerings and there are also multiple commercial ecosystems.
> And it's totally feasible to produce a superior ecosystem. The hard part is absorbing years of financial loss while building the new ecosystem from the ground up while it isn't compatible with the existing proprietary system.
Being able to finance something is an inherent part of its feasibility.
While I generally agree that FOSS software (Libreoffice calc) is inferior for business needs, a _lot_ of the issues actually stem from compatibility.
Not just compatibility of the document system and interpretation, though that is a large part. But compatibility of functionality too, along with UI design.
People are more likely to re-train for a new UI on a new edition of their previous software because it is seen to them as a progression, but they are not so open to changing UI paradigms with different software that does the same thing.
In order for something "better" to be accepted it has to not just be better- it has to be _so_ much better that it trumps everything else.
in the very best of cases it has to be 100% compatible in all areas and _still_ at least substantially better.
That's without getting in to opensource financing, which is a difficult topic. Though I can imagine if Munich put their resources into a FOSS foundation which was providing productivity software it would help tremendously. I don't think they're going to do that because Linux (and ecosystem) is seen as cheaper, so why negate the cost saving?
Obviously that would disrupt quite a few existing business models in software industry, so do not take that as a completely serious proposal.
More specifically, if you can find another place which sells the same model for less, then you get it for the other price.
Thing is, they are the only seller of that model. The vendor has a model X123 for that shop, a model X124 for another place, etc. And that shop is the only one who can sell that specific model. So they of course have the lowest price.
Something similar exists for software: that's why there's "home" and "office" and "professional" and "enterprise" and so many other variants.
So, your "home" version only supports 2 connections at a time, your "office" one doesn't implement a certain function that "professionals" are more likely to use, and your "enterprise" defaults to logging. Even better, with software you can have a unique product for each sale.
All different pieces of software, so all different prices.
Then on top of that, you don't sell the software but software + support. And the support costs can vary.
Which means I think it's easy to bypass your hypothetical restriction.
> Thing is, they are the only seller of that model. The vendor has a model X123 for that shop, a model X124 for another place, etc. And that shop is the only one who can sell that specific model. So they of course have the lowest price.
This is endemic in the mattress industry. Products that are identical and manufactured by the same company will be relabelled based on the company that buys them.
That's why your "dream-air luxury liner" could not get a discount because the other company has a "dream-air luxury comfort", which is the same exact product.
There needs to be other vendors who can supply document editing software that is 100% compatible with MS Office. But more than this, there needs to be other vendors who can supply operating systems that are capable of running Windows software.
As long as a single company has the leverage that Microsoft has over the enterprise ecosystem we won't have a free market. Governments can start by mandating that new software deployments have several possible vendors, including at the operating system level.