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Comment by mseebach | Hacker News Reader

No, a million times no.

This is the kind of thinking that makes the public sector a quagmire of inefficiency. The IT department of the city of Munich has exactly one mission and that is to enable the employees of the city to service the citizens of Munich in the most efficient manner - not playing politics on behalf of the free software movement (or Microsoft, for that matter).

By the same yardstick, the city of Seattle should stick with Microsoft everything to protect local jobs, in spite of evidence of superior alternatives.

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"The IT department of the city of Munich has exactly one mission and that is to enable the employees of the city to service the citizens of Munich in the most efficient manner"

Exactly. It is more efficient for Munich as a City to support local business than to transfer money to american sharehoulders, if they think faresighted instead of shoresighted. Because part of the money comes back as taxes.

National economy is not a profit business but a money circuit. Therefore the efficienty laws are different. The goal max. efficiency is the same, but the ways to accomplish this are totallly different, because the economic systems are different.

The city shouldn't maximise for profit, that's clear. But in this case they might be optimizing for a vague political goal at the cost of quality of service. Stuff like, a planning permission taking longer to process, but, hey, we benefited the local open source community.

I'm not saying that's what happened, I'm saying that's the kind of unintended consequences you risk running into when you muddle the mission goal.

By the way, any contract of any meaningful size must be tendered EU-wide. It's illegal for a city to demand that its providers are local.

The quality of service in Munich is excellent. The goal is not vague but a very clear strategic one. Be not dependent on a foreign monopoly. Support and adjucate your own people. That is the constitutional duty of any government. And Munich excells in this regard with the help of Free Software.

But using Linux was not a decision of the IT department - it was a political decision by the city council and the mayor. If they decide to give a subsidy to Linux to promote local software development, that is perfectly within their mandate.

By the way, you need to realize that Munich's finances are very sound. In 2012 the city had a budget surplus of around 700 million € - so spending 20-30 million € on a 10 year IT project is not something that hurts them very much...

The council playing politics with the IT department is the same thing. Yes, it's within their mandate, but it's still the kind of decisions that makes public services so crappy.

The only source of income for the city is its citizens. The fact that they have apparently been overcharged to the tune of €700 million is not a license to squander €20-30 million - on a project that might decrease the quality of service.

I challenge you to go investigate the Munich public service and come back and comment on your claim that they are "crappy". Seriously.

I challenge you to read my original comment and the comment I replied to. Seriously.

I'm challenging the idea that there is a difference in how you measure the success of a public sector entity over a private sector one, not wether Munich is a competently run city.

In fact, the OP suggested that is was meaningless for Munich to have done this private-sector-style savings analysis. I wholeheartedly disagree with him and agree with the approach of the City of Munich.

I've only visited Munich once, but from my experiences there of everything from the police to transportation or keeping the streets clean it seems to be one of the most "got their shit together" cities I've visited.

"The IT department of the city of Munich has exactly one mission and that is to enable the employees of the city to service the citizens of Munich in the most efficient manner"

Does the City have only this purpose? Is there not a secondary purpose in stimulating local business/spend?

In the UK we have local councils making people redundant and replacing local services and contact with call centres in a distant timezone. The cost saving by doing this is possibly offset by the increase in social security/benefit bill (from a national budget of course).

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