Following a successful pilot project, the northern German federal state of Schleswig-Holstein has decided to move from Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office to Linux and LibreOffice (and other free and open source software) on the 30,000 PCs used in the local government. As reported on the homepage of the Minister-President: Independent, sustainable, secure: Schleswig-Holstein will […]
I’m from Munich and followed that very closely when it happened.
The reality isn’t lock-in. The reality is lobbyism. Ballmer literally interrupted his skiing holidays in the 2000s to offer the then mayor a better deal when that mayor started the Linux project. But Ude stood firm.
Then the next mayor came, and with him, a new opportunity. Microsoft was planning to build near Munich you see, and it would be a shame if that had to be cancelled. So they met the next mayor, Reiter, behind closed doors to talk about the building project, and a bit after that, the (by then already clearly successful) Limux project was undone.
Not cancelled, that would imply that they weren’t done switching everything yet. They were. They just did the whole migration in reverse because Microsoft wanted them to.
There were interoperability issues on the federal level, but I’m with you, lobbying must have played a major role in reverting the migration.
At the time, there were also press releases mentioning increasingly slow support response times and missing features, but since (at least according to my knowledge) no stats on that have ever been published, it’s hard to tell how much of those were opinion pieces (with the interviews potentially being non-representative).
The always are inter operability issues on a federal level in Germany, because of the strong level of individuality of each state. That has little to do with Windows vs Linux.
Any project that has to aggregate data on a federal level is technically challenging and accompanied by a ton of political sensitiveness. The states tend to see any attempt at standardization as an attack on their state freedoms.
I’m from Munich and followed that very closely when it happened.
The reality isn’t lock-in. The reality is lobbyism. Ballmer literally interrupted his skiing holidays in the 2000s to offer the then mayor a better deal when that mayor started the Linux project. But Ude stood firm.
Then the next mayor came, and with him, a new opportunity. Microsoft was planning to build near Munich you see, and it would be a shame if that had to be cancelled. So they met the next mayor, Reiter, behind closed doors to talk about the building project, and a bit after that, the (by then already clearly successful) Limux project was undone.
Not cancelled, that would imply that they weren’t done switching everything yet. They were. They just did the whole migration in reverse because Microsoft wanted them to.
There were interoperability issues on the federal level, but I’m with you, lobbying must have played a major role in reverting the migration.
At the time, there were also press releases mentioning increasingly slow support response times and missing features, but since (at least according to my knowledge) no stats on that have ever been published, it’s hard to tell how much of those were opinion pieces (with the interviews potentially being non-representative).
The always are inter operability issues on a federal level in Germany, because of the strong level of individuality of each state. That has little to do with Windows vs Linux.
Any project that has to aggregate data on a federal level is technically challenging and accompanied by a ton of political sensitiveness. The states tend to see any attempt at standardization as an attack on their state freedoms.