Yeah, if you read that site you'll see that the Munich switch was really mismanaged and underestimated. This press release sounds more like pr spin then anything, since they we supposed to be done a very long time ago
My understanding is that Munich had a lot of issues which were orthogonal to Linux - decentralized support, lack of inventory, lack of standards. Of course, it didn't help that the original proponents were of an 'ideological' bent and perhaps bit off more than they could chew.
There's some misunderstanding here. The migration did not take 9 years. The project itself started in 2003 but was put on hold in 2004 or 2005 due to the legal worries surrounding Linux and software patents. It was resumed after some decision of the European high court. Still, the first years up to 2006 were spent on evaluation and planning and political board games.
Measuring the success of an IT project in years is wrong in any case. Success is defined in meeting your goals at the required time. Munich is a little late and they have had their own share of issues and roadblocks, but all in all they met their goals. Considering that this was the first large scale migration of a city administration in germany, that's not dismal.
In 2003, Munich publicly gave the finger to Steve Ballmer himself and declared they were moving to Linux. If they really needed 3 years to think about it, perhaps their PR was all wrong, because all eyes were now on them as the Linux test case.
And perhaps you would work through this sort of multiyear migration plan, but I certainly wouldn't. From what I can tell the project was driven by feel-goodisms and not at all properly scoped.
The original decision was made in 2003, however if you know how german administrations work its not surprising that things took another year until the final go was given. This is in no way an uncommon time if you're dealing with any (german) administration - vendors need to be selected by a certain prescribed process, then vetted, contracts need to be made and approved. Then came legal issues which took more than a year to resolve. So all in all I'm not much surprised by the timeframe.
Added to that is the fact that the migration happened department by department in multiple steps, one done, next started. So yes, it's a multiyear plan and I do agree, I would not have planned and gone through that plan but calling it a failure because someone actually had the guts and vision and pulled it off is a bit far fetched.
Actually, the article is not based on a press release. The original document is a response of the cities administration to a question brought up in the cities council chamber. The question was brought up because Vienna obviously stopped its WieMux migration.
