How would a local government make the switch from Windows to Ubuntu?

Sensible organizations don't choose their computer systems because of the cost of the operating system. They choose them because the system supports the business operation at an acceptably low level of risk.

If you compare the potential cost of disrupting the business to the cost of continuing to run Windows, quite likely the cost of Windows licenses doesn't even show up on the radar. I would expect an average-sized municipal government organization could incur costs of millions of dollars/pounds/[insert your currency here] per day from an organization-wide IT disruption that took more than a few minutes to fix.

If you want to make a case for change, forget about computer based technical arguments, and grand philosophical propositions about the evils of closed systems and the delights of open ones. Leave that sort of thing to people like Richard Stallman. Make a business case instead!

And don't forget to include the costs (financial, disruption, temporary loss of productivity, additional support required, etc, etc) of retraining every computer user in the organization to work with new systems and software that most of them may never have even heard of, let alone used, and will see no good reason for "change just for the sake of change".

The above is not meant to be "anti change" or "pro Microsoft." It's just being realistic about how an organization works - and that is something which many IT staff seem completely ignorant about.

This is a critical issue to Linux and Ubuntu as a whole, see bug No1

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1

The 2 issues are:

1. Because our government, health care systems, military, and schools should not train our people and children to be dependent of any corporation to function and alternates to Microsoft and Apple must exist period.

and

2. I side with GNU / FSF on this issue, in the digital age people have the right to examine, modify, and distribute the software that runs on their hardware.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/linux-gnu-freedom.en.html

Our mission is to preserve, protect and promote the freedom to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer software, and to defend the rights of Free Software users.

This does not mean free as in free beer, people are free to charge for modification, distribution, and support of such code it means free as in the freedom to examine, modify, and fix (source) code without being dependent on such support systems.

Nor does it mean that I agree with everything Stallman/GNU/FSF proclaims, but I agree with the fundamental philosophy of GNU/FSF .

The "problem" is that our social systems are dependent on Microsoft and you can not ask schools / health care / business / government to stop functioning for the FSF philosophy, but you can make them aware they do have alternates and ask them to support such alternates.

Chromium, Libre/Openoffice, Firefox, and other open source options do exist so why not try them and consider paying to support them same as they use and support their current corporations.

Open source communities need to develop alternates to the systems our society uses and the most glaring deficiencies, IMO, are business and professional related apps, accounting, photography, digital processing, medical records, and voice recognition technology. It is sad my Android phone has better voice recognition out of the box than Linux desktops.

My current employer is in fact using Chrome and Open Office on windows rather than IE and Microsoft Office so it is a work in progress but a step in the right direction.

Migration

Migrating to Linux is no different than migrating to any other OS, including windows 10. I do not know any business that simply rolls out Windows 10, or any other OS without prep.

• IT Does the IT department have someone who knows the new OS ? If not they will need to train or hire someone who does. For Linux I suggest someone who is RHEL certified or similar. I have never seen a business roll out an OS the IT department is not intimately familiar with. Windows 7/8/10 was "under consideration" for many many years and many businesses remained and still remain on windows 2000 rather than migrating. Migrating to windows 10 is not as simple as claimed by the pro windows posts here and certainly was not in any way overnight.

• Hardware. All OS, windows included, have hardware requirements. Many of the problems here, on this site, and other support channels are hardware related. Business does not purchase hardware with no OS installed and then struggle to install windows, track down the drivers, etc, they purchase hardware with windows pre-installed or they purchase windows compatible hardware nand generally contract out hardware support. They need to do the same with Linux, purchase computers with RHEL / Ubuntu pre-installed and contract out support with RHEL or Canonical, same as they do with Microsoft.

• What software is needed ?

  • Linux can run some software and most if not all servers needed.
  • Desktop software that is no problem would include "desktop" functions such as web browsing, email (many email servers have web interfaces similar to gmail), word processing (Liibreoffice is similar enouhg to word and it is rare an end user would need something that can not be done in Libreoffice. Biggest problem with libreoffice is converting documents), PDFs are fine, etc.
  • Server side Linux works just fine as well. Linux can easily handle most if not all servers including web servers, ftp, mail servers, file servers, active directory, virtualization, etc.
  • Specialized software - Linux struggles with certain specialized software for example voice recognition, digital image processing (Photoshop), accounting (Linux just does not have a program to manage accounts receivable and payroll), video editing, music studio. Linux has programs that do some of these features but for the most part not up to par with Windows.
  • Propriety software - Many business use propriety software that is either specifically written for them or is not available on Linux. generally these are database driven apps such as medical records or accounting apps. Although there may be some attempts on the linux side, such as http://www.open-emr.org/ , generally they are not on par because business has not spent the millions on them they have the closed source options. https://www.americanactionforum.org/research/are-electronic-medical-records-worth-the-costs-of-implementation/ . 5 physician practice spend more than 200,000 in the first 60 days for a EMR. The reason I started this post with philosophy is we need to divert the funds spent on propriety software to open source. As it is now, the fact of the matter is most if not all of these propriety specialized applications want to lock business into long term contracts and more often than not there is no way to convert from one system to another.
  • I just used an EMR as an example as I am guessing people are going to understand that example better than others. Imagine the type of database amazon.com uses to track users on the web site, inventory, shipping, suppliers, reviews of products, etc of all they offer.
• Training - They need to train the help desk and support staff same as with any other OS. No business would roll out windows 10 without training the support staff.
• Implementation. No business rolls out windows 10 overnight as suggested by some of the windows supporters here. Doing so would cripple the business. You would roll out linux similarly , a certain quota of machines starting with the simple tasks and progressing to the more complex tasks in a measured step wise fashion with the old system to fall back to. Many businesses have a limited number of "power users" more or less beta test and then help train. Again, using an EMR as an example, an office of 5 physicians may have one of the 5 start using the new EMR on one or two encounters a day, falling back to the old if there are problems. Over days or months they would migrate to the new EMR and then bring the other 4 up to speed on the new much faster. No business would migrate to a new OS, including windows 10, or a new large software application, like an EMR, overnight and the suggestions of many posts here from windows supporters are frankly unrealistic and not the way business does things.

Government

Government is going to go through a similar process but much slower and more drawn out. Look at how they handle any large scale project, there will be meetings, analysis, political whims, pilot programs, migration plans, funding crisis, etc.

Schools

Schools and Universities need to teach out children and young adults open source solutions when available. This will obviously take longer, but as a parent I can tell you the schools my children attend have zero tolerance for open source OS and open source programs. Try submitting a paper in anything other than a .doc or .docx, lol . At least universities are starting to teach open source. Hopefully with bash on windows, firefox, libreoffice, and other successful open source options the migration will be easier moving forward.

Bottom line

• Like a drug, we as a society did not become dependent on Microsoft overnight, it took some time, decades in fact and we are not going to migrate to open source solutions overnight.
• The posts made here by the supporters of Microsoft are unrealistic and oversimplified.
• No one in the open source community is advocating an overnight change or bringing business to a stand still.
• The process of change starts with fundamental philosophy, do we as a society want to be dependent on Microsoft ? If you answer that question with a "yes" or a "who cares?" change will not happen. Change starts with a change in ideas, perceptions, and goals, and an implementation plan follows. This is evidenced by the pro Microsoft posts here, most of the posts are at step one, not even considering change.

Your argument is sound. In the long run, free software lowers costs because it keeps vendors competitive. (As an organization you will always depend on some vendor for service, even if it's in-house IT staff.) In the medium term, you need to consider that there need to be enough vendors around to make prices low. But in the short term, there are financial and managerial costs to making the transition that are difficult to swallow.

(Along the way you will also encounter nonsensical arguments like you described. Make a note of them and address them, possibly with the help of a vendor, but they are a smaller issue than costs and change management.)

Start talking to several vendors about those costs. An obvious consideration would be Canonical themselves. They offer commercial support called "Ubuntu Advantage". They specifically have experience with migrations, so they should be able to advise you on feasibility. You should also investigate if there are any local vendors in your city / region / country (they may support different distributions). What are their maintenance costs? Costs to train your IT staff?

You'll probably need to build up some case studies. Consider similar projects and why they succeeded or failed. Someone in the comments mentioned Munich (where LiMux is installed), and results there have been mixed not least because of vendor delays and political opposition. You can find other examples at the LiMux link. An interesting one is the ISS switching to Debian as their laptop operating system. Skippy points out the GendBuntu project in their answer. It is an excellent case study not just because it continues to be successful, but because it is well-documented and security is an important requirement.

You may want to contact the FSF for advice. They have an ethics-based approach rather than a financial one (so they wouldn't recommend Ubuntu, for example) but they may be able to point you to case studies as they are particularly interested in getting free software into government.

You could propose a single-user pilot project, where you are the test case. The cheapest way would be to dual-boot Windows/Ubuntu on your work machine -- but that's why you tagged your question dual-boot right?

Trying to make this small step happen will give you a good feel for:

• how much influence you might have on such a big decision
• any entrenched opposition (e.g. an IT department who aren't comfortable shifting / worried about job security) and potential allies
• immediate infrastructure issues (can you authenticate against your existing LDAP, can you function without sudo privileges)
• short-term usability issues (can you open documents sent from other offices, do you inadvertently rely on PDF Forms or Flash, can you get your email and can others read yours)
• your ability to demonstrate that you aren't losing time to these issues

As you can see even technical issues are just the root of organizational ones. Once you have your bearings you might want to post more specific questions about motivating for change at The Workplace Stack Exchange. You will get very realistic assessments and advice. But come back here for technical questions :)

Finally, please blog about your efforts, even small ones, so that others may learn. (Try get them syndicated, would Planet Ubuntu be appropriate? And obviously use a free license like CC-BY-4.0 so that others may build on your work!)