It is worth noting that a decision of this magnitude - made as it was by a body responsible to the public as opposed to a 'for profit' organization - is essentially a public policy decision. In a truly democratic system, and in a world where government application of technology plays an increasingly important role in the everyday lives of its citizens, it is more imperative than ever that the public can become acquainted with the workings of the technology supposedly implemented to serve the public good. In theory at least, it should be possible to disclose with absolute certainty precisely what and how the technology does, its limitations, and any potential security risks inherent in its deployment. Short of violating an MS license I do not see how this could be accomplished with any Windows platform - you simply must take a few things on faith or face legal action. Open source software by its very nature lends itself to this sort of accountability. Isn't it possible that the Munich City Fathers were simply taking this into account? If the alternative to open source is a 'black box' of which the inner workings (source code) of only certain components are made available to licensees. . .maybe the risk of any additional costs related to implementing Linux are more than worth it.
Though I do have to agree with Tarantolato, above. Linux as a terminal server seems like a no brainer when compared to a fat-client implementation of this scale. Anywho. . .it might be worth remembering that Linux is free software - not in terms of money, but in terms of Freedom.

After reading a lot about migration, I have finally had the opportunity to do it myself in two situations: 1. My mother-in law, who is 72 years of age and has no computer experience. 2. My two teenage daughters who are quite computer savvy. Results? 1. My mother-in law loves it (Mandrake 10). She used it for emails and typing letters and other corro, and is learning to print off scanned family photos onto her new HP inkjet printer. She still makes basic mistakes (putting dates in the filenames as 3/12/2004,etc) but some of these these problems apply to any OS. I spend a bit of time with her each week and she is making steady progress. Noone told her that linux is supposed to be for nurds, so she had no preconceptions. 2. My daughters hated it for a long time. The reasons could be summed as "it isn't windows" Having kopete is a must for teenage girls, as the lingua franca for this group is MSN Messenger. They hated using OpenOfffice although gradually they got used to them. The trick is to tell them that you will install Office 2003 if they will go and buy it, 'cause I'm not going to. You know that the schoolbags of teenage kids are just full of pirated software, and I see all this as being part of responsible use of licensed software. I'm sure that MS would agree with me on this. No?

In my experience it's the users who think they kow it all about Windows that'll cause the problems. They're the ones who stand around the company helpdesk all day talking about the latest articles in IT magazines, annoying those who are actually trying to do some work. They're the ones who have all their little tweaks set up, and the ones who cause all the problems helpdesks lose their reputations trying to fix.

They're also the ones who know thatthey know more than the company IT department, and any big change like this is automatically, in their opinion wrong. Why move to Linux? I know better. I saw an article...

Having a locked down system like Linux can offer is probably the best thing for everyone, if it only keeps these types out.

I am not optimistic. It sounds as if they're going from a Wintel fat-client/server architecture to a Lintel fat-client/server architecture. Whether or not you agree with me that this is a dubious decision, consider that deploying a true multiuser operating system in effectively single-user mode is a lot like deploying chainsaws to a bunch of chimpanzees.

In my experience *nix's strengths become apparent when you use it as it was meant to be used: a lot of terminals plus maybe a few high-powered standalone workstations. For many standalone machines it's no less of a headache than Windows and in some ways more of one.

I know, I know, thin-clients never took off, yadda-yadda. But I maintain that the biggest part of why they haven't is that deploying Office this way is prohibitively expensive. If you're moving to OO.o, it starts to look a lot better.

(One nice thing about a Linux thin-client setup is that legacy Windows machines can act as terminals with Cygwin/X, allowing Windows and Linux apps as to be deployed in parallel.)

As recently announced, Novell is planning on releasing this summer the first desktop product since they bought Ximian and Suse. Waiting for this OS, that will combine several key client/server pieces (eg Evolution/Exchange), will be of great benefit to Munich.

It will also be of great benefit to the rest of the world since Munich will be a great testing ground :-) (all software is in constant beta). Since Novell is positioning this as a 'Business Desktop' I expect that it will have excellent integration with Windows, Exchange, NetWare, and GroupWise servers. Certainly something to wait for when converting an entire infrastructure. Since Novell/Suse were involved in the pitch to the city of Munich I expect that the migration strategy, and the decision to migrate, were based heavily on the future plans that Novell/Suse/Ximian have for bringing OSS to the business world. Note the mention of 'contribution to OpenOffice.org' in the above article. BTW, anyone know what email server the city currently uses? Or anything other details about their network (file servers, print servers, application servers, etc.)?

I hope those in charge of this migration will be honest in reporting how the migration goes. I wouldn't expect the migration to go without some hitches somewhere and I hope it is reported what the glitches are.

Of course, expect MS to jump all over the problems and say "I told you so!" but overall I hope Munich becomes the standard bearer for a mass migration to Linux.

Basically they should come out and say hey here is how things went, here are the problems and here is how to avoid them. The moral of the story hopefully will be that any large entity can migrate to Linux and get away from the MS lock-in.

Linux is one of the easiest OSs I have ever seen for a *complete beginner* to learn how to be productive on. Much easier than Windows. But for many people it is just a bit harder they are used to Windows, and the culture shock is what gets them.

Personally, I think that Munich's plan is great. It means that they are moving applications one at a time to give people a chance to learn things a little at a time.

Ok Linux is a good OS, but they're about to have to retrain approx 16,000 workers, many of whom never heard of Linux and some are total creampuffs in computers. They will be retraining to a platform the users may not like as well.

The long run costs will probably be worth it as upgrades are free. However the short term costs of re-training I shudder to think about. At 16,000 workers they need a whole university's capacity of retraining. In fact any Linux guru looking for a job? Munich sounds like a good bet...

The big reason here is that Germany really, really hates being run by foreigners, particularly Americans (but they have other pet peeves too), in any way.

Germany likes to be in charge of things. It's effectively in charge of the EU. Good thing Germans in general are more focussed than average on doing a competent job, but a bad thing when they get carried away by their own success.