From Linux Voice:
How Munich switched 15,000 PCs from Windows to Linux
Hirschgarten, in the west of Munich, is one of Europe’s biggest beer gardens, with over 8,000 places to sit. It’s a spectacular sight in summer: hundreds of benches as far as the eye can see, trees providing some shelter from the heat, and a vast number of people relaxing and enjoying the city’s famous beers.
But while 8,000 is an impressive number, it’s not as impressive as 15,000. That’s how many people the Munich city council has switched from Windows to Linux over the last decade. Migrating workers of Germany’s third-largest city was no easy task and there were plenty of hurdles along the way, but by and large the project has been a storming success.
We’ve been following the progress of LiMux (Linux in Munich) for years, and now that the project is effectively complete, we decided to visit the city and talk to the man in charge of it. Read on to discover how it all started, how Microsoft tried to torpedo it, and whether other cities in the world can follow Munich’s lead…
Great story -- this really stimulated the local economy too because a lot of the applications needed tweaking and local programmers did the work because they had the source-code to refer to instead of having to ship this task off to a developer in a different country. SteveB is hoist by his own petard:
In May 2003, the city council was due to vote on whether to make the big switch to Linux. But Microsoft didn’t stand still: Steve Ballmer, the infamously loud CEO, flew over to speak with Munich’s mayor, Christian Ude. But this had an adverse effect, as Peter explains:
“Steve Ballmer tried to convince our mayor that it would be a bad decision to switch to open source, because it’s not something an administration can rely on. But some members of the city council said: what are we, if one member of a big company simply comes here, and he thinks he can just switch our opinions?”
And it just got worse for Microsoft’s boss. “Our mayor was preparing for a meeting with Steve Ballmer, and because English is not his native language, he asked his interpreter: ‘What shall I say if I don’t have the right words?’ And the interpreter replied: ‘Stay calm, think and say: What else can you offer?’ Later on during the meeting, our mayor was quickly at the point where he had nothing to say to Ballmer, except for ‘What else can you offer?’ several times. Years later, he heard that Ballmer was deeply impressed by how hard he was in negotiations!”
Dance monkeyboy dance!
