German Open Source Experiment: Things Not Going To Plan

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

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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German Open Source Experiment: Things Not Going To Plan