Munich responds to FUD report on LiMux

The City of Munich has responded on its IT blog to a report commissioned from HP by Microsoft alleging that migrating to open source had cost the city millions of Euro more than opting for proprietary software. The following paragraphs are a translation of the relevant blog post.

The City has only had a short summary [of the report] at its disposal, which does not enable a properly well-founded critical analysis of the study. Even in the field of costs, many statements are based on the author’s assumptions or claims or could not be understood due to the lack of detailed information.

The support costs were thus calculated for 12,000 clients from the start of the project in 2003. The actual expenditure here has of course increased over the project period to a current total of 13,000 clients.

The study’s figure of 1,000 IT support workers which are being employed on user support on the LiMux project is also not correct. This figure, which was obviously taken from a presentation by the LiMux project manager, refers to the local authority’s total number of IT staff.

As regards hardware costs, the study postulates the same hardware requirements for Linux “as for the comparable Windows solution”. It thus ignores the experience that Linux clients have lower hardware requirements than Microsoft clients.

In addition, the study does not distinguish between “migration” and regular life cycle management since it counts regular updates of the same operating system as “migrations”.

Finally, the claim that current administrative procedures could not be migrated to Linux is also incorrect. All web-based administrative procedures can be used under LiMux with no conversion expenditure and most procedures which are closely integrated with Microsoft, can also be used on a Linux client via other standard techniques.

The City therefore shares the assessment of Prof. Dr. Helmut Krcmar of Munich Technical University that the study “cannot be termed scientific on the basis of the text submitted”. There is therefore also no reason at all to currect the individual statements.