Vienna’s failed migration to GNU/Linux
Free Software Magazine (free subscription here) has a nice analysis by Tony Mobily of Vienna’s failed migration to GNU/Linux. I did not know that Vienna’s IT Department was trying to create there own distribution called Wienux based on debian. I totally agree with Tony that this was a major mistake. Why didn’t they just take CentOS, Fedora or even Red Hat? Fedora is the stepping stone for the next RHEL release and largely sponsored by Red Hat, CentOS is the free version of RHEL and Red Hat is the leading Enterprise Linux vendor. All three distro’s are sound technical choices and when it comes to support and long term viability RHEL is a safe bet too. It would be interesting to learn more details about Vienna’s Wienux decision. My take is that the “techies” got too much leverage and were not properly directed by project management. As a result things spun totally out of control and the decision was made (or pushed) to create Wienux. So all in all I don’t think that Vienna’s migration was a failure from a technical point of view. It was a failure of Vienna’s ability to control the technical direction of the project, validate technical decisions and perform periodic due diligence on the technical and business parameters. And that sounds more like a Program Management and Project Management issue to me.