"According to Kirschner, Munich's IT problems are not so much down to the use of free software as they are the result of poor management and organizational structure, a view backed up by Accenture's study."
Here is the full study (10MB PDF): https://www.ris-muenchen.de/RII/RII/DOK/SITZUNGSVORLAGE/4277...
But they have an organisational structure where demands from users get stuck between departments and improvements/testing does not work. Fixes and updates are not delivered on time and contain new problems. There is infighting between departments that have to account for their needs and this leads to local modifications that cause problems.
Issues they found are printing, software bugs and problems displaying documents. Quite a big percentage (30-40%) still running KDE 3.5 and Ubuntu 10.04 with OpenOffice 2? 3?
They had no Windows concept until 2012 and before that every department that wanted to use Windows had to roll their own and that led to installations without AD and updates. They still run XP and 2000 on 30% of Windows machines.
They can also only pay below average and Munich is expensive so it's probably not a first choice for IT guys. Additionally they don't have a budget for new hardware.
1) replacing the free software with microsoft software
2) see 1
3) need a third option ?
4) see 1 again
Something should be replaced, that's for sure.
Exactly my experience. I use Windows at work (lots of .Net) and Linux on side projects (Python mostly). When I get into a bind on Windows, the solution is typically a Google search and couple clicks away. On Linux, I find the Google search results often return a plethora of similar solutions each branching with every distro and major version change. This means I'm often sorting through similar (but not exact) issues on forums and trying them out one by one and then cleaning up a mess of packages when it doesn't work out.
Well, but that's how it works, isn't it? I wish I could go to an employer and say "Please remove that horrible MS Office 2013 from my computer, it is a steaming pile of orc manure, and I will not be forced to use it!", but that's just not how companies (or bureaucracies) work.
On one of my previous jobs my employer wanted to give me a macbook pro.
My view of OSX and Apple in general is very close to your view of MS Office 2013. I told them “let me try virtualization first”, inserted more RAM to my own Windows laptop, and used VmWare virtual machine for iOS development for the next couple of years.
My main customer insists all work be done on a company computer, using only company-approved software, installed by company admins. And don't even think about desecrating the machine by inserting a non-company USB stick!
Which is, admittedly, quite good from a security standpoint.
Well I also do some native code development.
That's why I have been given a tool that grants me limited time local SU privileges, given I enter at least 3 words in the field for "reason", and a valid cost center ID. I kid you not: It seems that executing a piece of code that grants me time limited local SU privileges leads to some company-internal financial flow to the IT department!
Edit: Installing s/w, btw, is usually done by opening a ticket with IT. If the required s/w is approved by IT, it will be queued for installation in the company's own s/w and configuration management tool chain in a few hours.
About your administrator tool, yeah, that sucks.
I once worked in a company where the managers were paranoid about us leaking the source code of the game we developed. We all had 2 PCs, one for development, another one for the Internet, two physically-separate local networks, a one-way network share to copy stuff (read-write from the online LAN, read-only from the offline LAN), and a KVM switches so we only needed a single display + keyboard.
It was very inconvenient, e.g. unable to copy-paste stuff from stackoverflow.
I used to have to do w/o the web for the longest time - but fortunately not w/o email!
So in desperate cases I used my telephone for web access and copy/pasted stuff into an email to myself@company.
In the mean time I do have web access there, but I had to ask the head of department to e-sign his approval on the application. Fortunately, he's a cool and reasonably guy and signed it no questions asked.
Not necessarily unwarranted; I still remember the leak of the source code for Half-Life 2 making headlines back in 2003.
https://games.slashdot.org/story/03/10/02/1547218/half-life-...
(Good grief, has it really been that long since Half-Life 2? I feel old.)
And even for larger companies with more bureaucracy, developers who do native code development often need to be local administrators on their PCs. To do my job, very often I need the permissions to install and upgrade software, debug stuff, install system services…
You have to consider this is an administration of one of the largest cities in Germany with lot's of custom processes and tools. Also workers there vary from their IT background and I guess most are not power users.
Their approach was basically eliminate Windows everywhere and tell everyone Linux is better.
They even gave everyone notebooks with with their own flavor of Ubuntu and KDE4 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux) and more or less forced them to use this. They were using Kolab - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolab and while I appreciate the effort if they really forced all users to use KDE Kontact with KDE4 I can understand that frustration was there. In my experience it's a UI nightmare and source of endless bugs. There is a difference between using out of personal interest or depending on it for work.
Their OpenOffice addons called WollMux was written in Java and at least judging from the screenshots is also an UI nightmare.
There was also criticism that the project was badly managed in parts and incompetence in the IT could have played a role.
These are all rumours, but it's believable.
Add to this that basically everyone else uses Outlook and MS Office and consider the difficulties when opening .docx stuff in LibreOffice and you can guess where the frustration might come from.
Another aspect is that Microsoft has quite a good story and technology with .NET and Active Directory / Group Policy and Powershell as well as .NET Integration to Office. Everything is accessible and .NET devs are plenty. Linux is more or less a wild garden of different solutions of different quality. This might contribute to the problems as more effort is needed to bring the software up to scratch. It's not something that is nice to hear but I can imagine that in the reality of public administration this stuff matters.
These might be reasons besides the political aspect of it. The polical stuff has some conspiracy touch to it and while I can image that a successful Linux toolkit for public administration that works well enough and can be deployed would easily kill Microsoft in that sector it's also likely that the opensource software is just lacking in some key aspects. Maybe it's a mixture of both.