I hate Munich. Instead of using Windows, the city administration had built their own Linux distro called LiMux for all of the ~30000 city's computers. They invested years into developing it, because, hey, it's open source! Now they used it for four years, and just as Microsoft opens an office in town, they throw it all overboard and go back to Windows. Why? Because, umm, they can't even use MS Word, what all the others use and such.
This is such a bullshit. You had a good thing going here, in times of NSA surveillance and monopolies. Munich is such a capitalistic town. I'm happy to have moved out of it for good.

Wonder what deal Microsoft strucj them

Funny enough: I work for the company that brought them back to Windows.
I feel guilty.

A government should not be dependent on proprietary tech. I really like Microsofts products, but this is just wrong.

The problem is that per law every document must be in a format it can be accessed an used by everyone independent of what os or software they use, so the incompability problems are inacceptable. It is often mentioned that the problem with LiMux was the administration. Instead of getting the administration right the switch to Windows and burn all the money used to transform MS Office templates to OpenOffice templates and waste another millions to transform them back.

I'm not even a Linux fanboy, personally, I use Mac. But what annoys me in this issue most, is, that the dcision was never made by any professionals. It was the city council! You know, the kind of people who ask you to "fix their internet" at family dinner. Many of them don't even use Limux on a daily basis and probably judged on basis of their own unfamiliarity with the interface. Maybe Open souce is just a hippie dream. Maybe Windows *is* better for their use cases. But this discussion never was about use cases. And I really, really doubt that the switch back is in any way economical, except, of course, you count in MS new taxes.

we just need more smart user-driven development for libreoffice

@scholl3ss oh?
What did you argument to persuade them to it?

@dontbeevil French Police and Italian military is doing just fine and saving a lot of money. Not to mention Google and bunch of other companies who have banned Microsoft stuff for obvious reasons. The troubles in Munich have nothing to do with Linux but a lot with the choices they made how to approach the transition. Biggest problem is that other software suppliers have Microsoft as a requirement. Luckily this is changing rapidly since desktops applications for administration things are over. All webapps now. So more organisations are able to enjoin software freedom.

@dontbeevil
Your comment makes no sense since you obviously don't use Linux *troll

Nevertheless the wasted money cannot be right, independent of the project it was spent on / wasted for

@dontbeevil don't be evil! ;)
I was trolling on you, intention was fun, not to be mean. Sorry.

To be honest I absolutely agree with the religious os/opinion/etc POVs part of your argument.

It make no sense to use Linux for a government or big company. There's a reason why Windows is so popular. It runs MS Office and the majority of business applications, it's easy to support and above all, it's what the average Joe is used to.

I'm all for open source but you got to use the right tool for the job and in these cases, 99% of the time, Linux is not the answer.

@multimho You'd be surprised how many business applications still rely on outdated desktop technologies... Even new services are often using oneclick installs of some old win32 app (HR and finance apps are the worst).

Yes it's getting better with time but saying it's all web now is far from the truth.

LoL i guess the hipster phase ended for them.