Floschi’s Blog

Again one more year is over now and yes, it’s time to look back what has happened in 2009 in and around the LiMux project. That’s my personal look back, not neccessarily the one of the City of Munich.

There are again some rumors about LiMux’ dead here in Munich. I don’t want to comment on the origin of them, but to the responsible company: This doesn’t work out. LiMux is more alive than ever and the story goes on very well. Sure

To encounter the many rumors and anti-lobbying activities, I’m running my personal comments in this blog. And in 2009, I started an own category “LiMux questions” with the first article “Why did Munich choose free software“. Feel free to ask questions to me.

ODF as standard, OpenOffice.org everywhere

LiMux has achieved one very important goal. The open standard Open Document Format (ODF) is now Munich’s primary used internal document exchange standard, beside of PDF for non-editable documents. Congratulations to all, who made this great success happen! Our standard office workplace consists now of OpenOffice.org (Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw), Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird and many other sometimes needed apps like e.g. GIMP.

This achievement is not just replacing one office software by another. Well, every workplace is migrated to OpenOffice.org, but it was an almighty effort to be able to do this switch, to get rid of many vendor lock-ins created in the past. Over 20,000 templates have been consolidated and migrated, either to templates, macros or web apps. Most of them use our self developed free software WollMux to assist our employees in the administration’s template jungle. A number of business apps had to be adapted to use ODF instead of vendor locked-in Microsoft mechanisms.

SAP is one of them, one of the apps penetrating many of our business processes, the same like in other big companies/administrations. We did some self customizations to enable the communication with OpenOffice.org. And of course, we shared our experiences (at Linuxtag, thx to Uwe Hähle). We want to publish our customizations, but at the moment the SAP company is examining the legal aspect for some months now. We’ll see, if 2010 might be a break-through.

LiMux Basisclient pilots ready

Another achievement in 2009 was the establishment of linux client pilot areas inside every of our 12 departments. This was, beside the OpenOffice.org migration, the fundamental step to increase the drive for our client migration in general during the upcoming years. Yes, these are only small areas (together with our completely migrated departmetns round about 2,500 clients), but to get them up and running is important to be able to get a closer look into the IT infrastructures, the needed business apps and their interfaces inside of every single department (which invented the wheel for its own in the past). And of course, to train the IT staff step-by-step for this technical change.

LiMux’ Community Engagement

We try to be part of as many as possible events to actively share our experiences and to show: YES, Munich can! If interested, I try to put them into LiMux’ google calendar. We also started our inofficial twitter feeds or identi.ca dents. And I upload some of our talks at planetlimux.

Important for me was the winning of the German DebConf 2011 bid, so I hope to win the global bid in March 2010 and to welcome the Debian community in Munich in 2011.

We’re also part of the Open Source Meeting, a new event created by OpenOffice.org and Mozilla in Munich, which will take place every month from 2011 and targets interested beginners and professional free software enthusiasts as well. @Florian and Carsten: good job, go on!

Of course, I have to mention our WollMux. This year we started the WollMux Roadshow together with DBI company and the Linux Solutions Group (LiSoG), including events in Munich, Stuttgart and Hamburg. It’s like a promotion tour for OpenOffice.org as basis, WollMux for template management and Munich as the one bringing both together. Every event got well criticisms and we’re planning to go on next year.

Improving ODF as leading open standard was the goal of the first ODFplugfest in The Hague. I took part to get an impression of things moving in this (former) battlefield and I was amazed about the team work done there.

We’re committed to give others back our experiences after 2 years of office migration and we took part in the first OpenOffice.org congress of Economy and Administration in Wiesbaden, and we also joined the OOoCon in Orvieto later this year.

LiMux – the upcoming future

The whole project will be adapted during the next months for the final big step, the client migration in general. Some improvements and optimizations in the project structure, to learn from the past and be ready for continuing the success story.

For me there is a big change, a good one in my opinion. From 2010 on I will be responsible for just one topic: Munich’s external IT communication and relationships, especially in the field of open standards and free software. Yes, I worked on this topic also during the last years, but from now, it’s the only one I can improve in a more general view, not only with LiMux as focus. Interesting times ahead for me

And now finally…

I’d like to thank all of my team members, all of our partners, thanks to everyone giving us feedback and helping us by writing free software!

Thank you all and see you next year!

Florian

Congratulations to Munich’s Debian local team!

Yesterday there was a hard but fair fight on which location will represent Germany in the global bid process for Debconf 11 in the next months. The choice was between two excellent locations: Berlin and Munich.

And in the end the winner was the proposal of: Munich.

The next step is now to get more in detail and prepare for the next round, the global bid. Other interested regions are Thailand and Bosnia.

If you are interested in joining the local team please feel free to contact the mailing list. At the moment we meet 18h every monday in the city center at our LiMux office.

OK, so now it’s time to go home after one week diving into the Debian GNU/Linux community at DebConf9 in Cáceres, Spain. Marsmensch, Roert and me represented “the City of LiMux (Munich)” (quote from Marsmensch).

At first: Cáceres, the capital of Extremadura, is quite hot in the summer. Really quite hot. So every day starts before noon, ends shortly after noon and restarts again in the early evening. Siesta time between.

I gave a talk (slides) at Debian OpenDay, the first day of DebConf targeted at an Debian interested audience. Many Debian Developers attended, imho because the other talks were held in spanish. And the feedback was great. Fine

DebConf was for me an new experience, I have never before attended such a real community event. Wow, great. Wifi nearly everywhere, even at the beer pub located in the recreation park beside the venue. Highly motivated developers, hacking and discussing nearly the whole day (and night, of course).

Roert gave a talk about one of the topics he is working on at LiMux, how to distribute and manage applications in VirtualBox Images (slides). Great work and very interesting discussion afterwards. Don’t think about virtualization, get your streaming up and you’re done. We’ll discuss this next week.

We want DebConf11 to be in Germany, especially in Munich. I blogged about this some days ago. Strong support from our City Mayor, very good.

The official GroupPhoto with nearly all attendees (some slept during the meeting) is online.

Debian won’t be Debian without some breaking news. This time at first the Release Team announced to switch to time-based releases, but then revisits its decision after enormous community protests. I’m curious about when the freeze for squeeze will happen

I also enjoyed the discussion with the developers from our cooperation partner, the German Federal Foreign Office. We have a lot of common tasks to do, but we finally have to start working together on a technical base. We’ll see and I’ll blog.

To conclude: thank you attendees, thank you organizers and thank you everyone who wants my thanks.

Yesterday the possible bids for the upcoming selection process presented themselves at DebConf 9 in Cáceres.

Beside the bid from Bosnia there are 3 german regions competing for one german bid until end of this year, of course our pulsating capital Berlin, the Rhein/Ruhr area and Munich.

Our Munich entry slide:

Impressions from Munich

Then we described some facts and figures about Munich and ended up with a statement by City Mayor Christian Ude, welcoming Munich’s bid:

C. Ude

“The City of Munich uses free software and open standards. Both are an essential base for our information technology. I would be pleased to welcome the worldwide developer community of Debian GNU/Linux in Munich in 2011.”

At the moment we’re the onliest only region with such a strong political committment and support. Great.

I think it is really important for Munich to host recognized open source events to show the broad support for openess and freedom in Bavaria’s capital. Political support is one success factor, but politicians everywhere imho slowly realize nowadays, that there’s no future for being dependend or locked-in to special vendors. Fine

Some thoughs about dc9 will follow the next days.

My comments after one week “openess” in Germany’s pulsating capital

First part of my programm was the new event “Berlin Open“, organised by a team of students lead by Prof. Lutterbeck of TU Berlin. Topic was “Open Innovation” and during the two conference days many talks by quite different people showed an impression of the very interesting aspects around “openess” – in mind, music, software, (geographical) data and research.

Germany’s secretary of state Schallbruch clearly commented that the Federal Government is not amused about what’s going on with document interoperability; a hint to Microsoft and their behaviour with OOXML in general (which was declined by his Ministry) and ODF interop as shown in Office 2007 SP2. And he announced that the user software for Germany’s new electronic ID (ePA) will be free software. Great, thank you fed gov!

Also a very interesting talk by Simon Hampton, Google’s lead of public policy in Brussels, about Google’s Openess with 4Cs. And many others… Just one more to mention. PhD Leonhard Dobusch talked about his studies of four different (non) migration projects in four Municipalities, Vienna, Frankfurt, Berlin and Munich. His conclusion: “Speaking as economist, I could tell you, what Munich is doing is real innovation”. Thank you, Leonhard!

To sum up this event: interesting speakers, quite good location, only few participants. Changes in concept neccessary, but only if repeated. Thanks to Prof Lutterbeck and his team. Good luck in retirement!

Let’s go on with the next event, Europe’s leading event on free software and business, the Linuxtag. From Wed to Sat our LiMux project was ready for sharing experiences in four different talks during the conference and at the booth together with our partners from Foreign Office, Federal Office for IT-Security and the Federal Open Source Competence Center, which also organised the booth; thanks for that. Besides general information about our project it was the WollMux people asked about, wanted to know more. Great. A clear todo for our office team to get some needed public improvements on presentation and documentation done, finally.

(This photo shows our booth staff on the left, Matthias, Michael and Jens, thank you! – and our LiMux project manager Peter Hofmann togehter with Munich’s CIO Karl-Heinz Schneider, both visiting Linuxtag on thursday for some meetings with the fed gov and others)

Linuxtag again was an opportunity for strenghtening the network of governments using free software and talking about future plans. Thinking strategic, I’m sure it is the time for a real change now for public administrations – if we have the courage to think about what we will need not only tomorrow, but the day after tomorrow. Let’s do it, now!

I attended Jan Wildeboer’s (RedHat Open Source Evangelist) keynote at FUDCon, which was held together with Linuxtag for the first time. He is responsible for the world wide conspiracy against Microsoft, as he was told by a MS lobbyist in Brussels. He talked about the important role of open standards and explained the idea of twitter/facebook/… folks beeing the next open source programmers; so we shouldn’t ignore them. You can find him at identi.ca, for sure.

The DebConf 2011 could be in Germany and at the moment three german regions think about a nomination, Berlin, Rhein/Rhur and… Munich. So I (as non Debian developer) attended the first common meeting as the onliest one speaking for Munich. Where were the many Debian people from Munich?

Today I shortly visited the last day of Linuxtag and was quite disappointed about some exhibitors have already gone. E.g. the french people left behind a nearly empty booth and also some other business booths were “open space for free people”. Hm, strange.

To sum up Linuxtag: a lot of conference talks, great opportunities for networking, imho fewer visitors than last year at our booth and the Berlin Fairground trying to get too much money for every step they moved. Changes for future urgently needed, maybe change the location?

My final statement: Dear Berlin Open organizers, you’re doing a great job, but it is an absolute “must” to join Linuxtag next year. Not two independent events, one in common. And Linuxtag, thank you for all, but please decide if Messe Berlin is really the right partner for you… and not only for you, but also for the free software and open standards movement. Berlin is such a great location, maybe there are other places?

Thanks

Two events to be aware of:

• Linuxtag 2010: June 9th until 12th, link
• OpenOffice.org public administrations congress Germany: October 6th and 7th, link