German Company Switches 10,000 machines to Ubuntu

Michael Reed — Mon, 02 May 2011 13:00:00 +0000

German insurance company LVM has switched 10,000 laptop and desktop machines over to Ubuntu Linux with the help of Ubuntu creator Canonical (announcement). Some early reports on the net have hailed this as a victory for Linux, but it seems like the company was already a mixed shop of Windows and Linux machines with a long history of reliance on open source software.

According to this announcement on the Red Hat website, LVM had been using a customized Linux solution as early as 2000. It seems that they migrated from that to Red Hat in 2005. Presumably, the company have now migrated from Red Hat to Ubuntu. So, the story that is floating around the internet at the moment, of a massive company abandoning Windows in favor of Linux, seems to be the result of a misinterpretation. However, it is an example of Linux achieving success on the desktop.

The main applications that the system has to support are Open Office, Lotus Notes, Adobe Reader (presumably, that just means any PDF reader) and a custom insurance application that was written in Java. Ubuntu's good level of hardware support was also a point in its favor as this allows the company to be flexible in its hardware purchasing decisions. It seems that this is a company that has kept its options open from the start with sensible IT decisions that have avoided the dreaded lock-in.

The move to Ubuntu began in 2010 with 7000 machines in individual offices spread out over Germany. In first quarter of 2011, the remaining 3000 head office machines were converted. It seems that there is still some Windows in the organization, and some use of virtualization on Ubuntu desktops to support this.

It's a shame that some of the tech press have represented this as a mega-coup and mass abandonment of Windows. In many respects, a company that has been using Linux since 2000 and has now moved over to Ubuntu, is the more encouraging, although less dramatic, story.

Canonical's original announcement. Notice that it doesn't actually state that this is a migration from Windows to Ubuntu Linux.
Google Translate makes a good fist of translating LVM's announcement.

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German Open Source Experiment: Things Not Going To Plan

Michael Reed — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 15:38:24 +0000

by Michael Reed

Recently, the Foreign Office of Germany made the announcement (translated news report) that it is migrating away from Linux back to Windows as its desktop solution. We've covered the concept of national adoption of Linux at a government level a couple of times before, but this is one of the first cases of a government moving back the other way. The most important action that community can take at this point is ask, “why?”

The German Foreign Office first moved over to Linux as a server platform in 2001. It then began using Linux and open source software in general on the desktop in 2005, and all laptops were moved to a Debian system. Making the regression even more frustrating, reports released in 2007 and 2009 (both documents German) indicated that the adoption of FOSS, despite a few small problems, has been a success.

Making matters worse, the transition back to Windows XP, to be followed by Windows 7, includes dropping OpenOffice, Firefox and Thunderbird in favor of MS Office and Outlook. Yuk.

This might a time to start asking some difficult questions. It was a prestige victory for FOSS and Linux on the desktop when the German Foreign Office first migrated, and getting a straight answer about what went wrong is now vitally important.

Actually getting to the answers isn't easy because the decisions weren't arrived at in a technical forum, but rather, in the murky world of politics. For English speakers such as myself, the fact that the available documentation is in German presents a further barrier. From what I've been able to glean, thanks to Google's translation facility, the problems that have been stated fall into three categories: hardware support, interoperability and training and user adoption.

The hardware support problem is an old chestnut, and I think the only reasonable analysis of the situation must be a pragmatic one. Within an office, a certain percentage of hardware won't work as soon as it is plugged in. A smaller percentage of the total will never work at all. The report lists scanners and printers as an example.

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