Barcelona Will Be the Next Major Open Source Failure (Premium)

The city of Barcelona plans to switch to Linux and other Open Source software solutions by the end of 2018. This is an amazingly clueless decision, given the technological inferiority of the products it has chosen. And like Munich before it, Barcelona will come to regret this decision and the financial disaster that it will entail.

"The funds that come from the citizens have to be invested in systems that can be reused and open to a local ecosystem," a translated quote from Barcelona Commissioner of Technology and Digital Innovation Francesca Bria to the periodical El Pais reads. "[The goal is] to avoid spending so much money on services that have substantial licensing costs."

This is a pointless goal that puts the needs of Open Source advocates ahead of the needs of the city and its citizens. It is also a perilous financial decision that will ultimately cost Barcelona more money than the "closed" Microsoft solutions it is trying to abandon. For some reason.

So why is Barcelona doing this?

In implementing open solutions like Linux (instead of Windows), LibreOffice (instead of Microsoft Office), and Open-Xchange (instead of Microsoft Exchange/Office 365), Barcelona will be the first city in Europe to adopt the ideals of the Public Money, Public Code initiative. This initiative was not created by the European Union or any government, as one might expect, but was rather invented by the Free Software Foundation as a means to push its Open Source agenda. The FSF is a charity---yes, really---and not a governmental organization.

So why is Barcelona doing this?

That's still a great question. So I have to turn to Ms. Bria's tortured and translated explanations in the above-quoted article because this obviously makes no sense at all.

According to El Pais, Barcelona will "reduce its spend on software licensing," though, of course, its real-world costs will go up while its capabilities go down. It will also "reduce its dependence on the proprietary suppliers that have held contracts with the city authorities for years or in some cases decades," which is a cute way of saying "abandon its long-term partners for an unproven charity and its lackluster software solutions."

In leaving Microsoft behind, Barcelona will also "procure more services from local SMEs as well as hire 65 new developers," which is entirely in keeping with the European norm of local governments over-hiring. It will write software in Barcelona, which it feels is ethically solid, and then provide it to other areas in Spain. Which one can only assume don't have the same high standards as Barcelona when it comes to software being created in their actual physical locations.

Here's the thing. It's not just that Munich engaged in a decade-long Open Source boondoggle and failed. Or that Munich lost millions of dollars in that process in order to attain some pointless ideal that it later realized was detrimental to its efforts.

No. It's that the Open Source solut...