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Virginia Beach Pays Microsoft $129,000
An unnamed correspondent writes: "As a follow-up to a story a few weeks ago about Microsoft's surprise audit of the city of Virginia Beach municipal government's office PCs, the results are in. This story in the local newspaper tells us that they just sent a check to Microsoft for $129,000. Apparently they couldn't find the paperwork for 800+ licenses (out of 6000+), so rather than spend more time trying to track down the invoices/receipts they just sent a check to try and settle. No word back from Microsoft yet as to whether this is sufficient to close the matter." Of course, that much money (just the money they're paying to take care of uncertain licenses) could probably also buy CD burners and enough blanks to create no-license-hassles copies of Linux or Free / Open / NetBSD for every computer the city owns.
Big companies do this kind of shit, because they have the power.
Whether or not you agree with Microsoft, the city signed a contract with them agreeing to pay x amount of money to use their software. They didn't live up to their end of the bargain.
Now I'm all for free software, but there is some software that isn't free, as much as we'd like it to be. I'm referring to say, engineering software. Would I even want to use free software at my company? As an engineer, you are responsible for the product you turn out - you can't just say "Well sorry guys, there was a bug in the software I used". You need some accountability. Is this possible with free software? And therefore shouldn't companies that make this big expensive software have a right to demand that it is paid for - theoretically to maintain high standards? This is not to say that trial and student versions shouldn't be available, but companies that can pay for it should.
"We're going to have the best educated American people in the world."
Governor George W. Bush, Jr., 9/21/97
One of the biggest problems in general office use Linux-vs-MS TCO calculations is that the cost of running Linux this year is substantially higher than the cost of running Linux next year, and the year after, etc.
Yes, there's additional training involved. Yes, this means training for office staff, not just the back room administrators.
But when it's all said and done, you're not paying through the nose for updated MS products as often as they deem fit to bump a version number.
SQL Server 7 does hold the highest scores for standardized database benchmarks. Nothing that runs on Linux can stand up to it, so don't even try :)
Ok people whine that the users must "re-learn" this is wrong. If you tailor their X environment correctly the login is basically identical, and you can make the desktop act the same. BUT you as a IS guy have more up your sleeve...
I can keep the users from installing or screwing up the settings of EVERYTHING! Imagine... dan in accountig can't install elf-bowling! Sue in Sales can't blow up the computer because she thought that USER.DAT in the winnt directory was un-needed, or a myriad of drivers/dll's that she can screw with that NT will gladly let her delete.
It's just there are very few IS people out there that have the ability to handle an advanced OS like Linux.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Most KDE programs run fine on the Gnome desktop, as long as you have the libraries installed. I run Gnome on Red Hat, but I spend^H^H^H^H^Hwaste incredible amounts of time playing Shisen-Sho, a KDE game. And I have found Gminesweeper (or whatever it's called) quite an adequate replacement for the Windoze version.
... well, that's another matter, ALL of the Linux versions I have tried seem to have slightly different rules from the Windoze version.
Solitaire
Teen Angel - a Ghost Story
No, I am sure other socialist idiots find it wrong as well. Think of the taxes paid by MSFT employees... imagine MSFT gave everything away... what would be the financial impact of that? Billions and billions I am sure... everyone form the local car dealer, real estate agents, restaurant owners, and on and on would be out of business... but thats ok.
Pressure cities out of their tax money? Or pressure them to pay for something they purchased? The fault really lies with the city, not MSFT. If they could produce the licenses for what they purchased, there wouldn't have ben a problem... would your stance be any different if it was Ford, or maybe Coke looking ofr payment?
Get off you high horse. The city made the decision to use MSFT products, so they need to live with it.
Care to comment on the several billion dollars Mr. Gates has given to charity?
I can just picture it...
Are you sure you wanna place that kind of power in the hands of M$?
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
129K would have bought 2 or 3 decent admins who could've burned a few CDs and helped oversee the conversion precess too. I don't beleive that everyone over there is so incompetent that they couldn't follow the lead of an admin with a little experience. After that, they'd save money due to the increased stability and likely increased productivity aftter a couple of months of acclimating to the new system. I would've taken the job. I'd still take the job if they asked... :)
Nobody ever buys an OS for its own sake. People buy an OS for the applications they can use on it.
.doc resume. I tried wordperfect first, but it's crap when it comes to reading my older resume.doc.
This is why a city/county/company/whatever uses Windows, so that it has a shitload of payroll/inventory/cash register software to run on the supercool PCs it has purchased.
Now what kind of software would they run on linux?
generally this question is met with the handful of general use programs available for linux, so let me illustrate the absurdity of saying "Oh, you can run star office!" or some crap like that.
A few weeks ago, I saw an environmental engineer with some air quality monitoring stuff hooked up to a laptop. Windows. The proprietary shit automatically loads it into an excel chart or something.
Resumes. Headhunters want word. Many want ascii, but you can't expect people to sacrifice their fucking careers for a file format ideology, so I install windows and write a
Games. Go to your nearest computer fair or sales thingie. I found a games counter with hundreds of windows games, asked if they had any linux ones. They laughed and said they had two. "Maybe if people buy them we'll order more!". hahaha.
Welcome to the real world.
linux - good for networking, file/print/web servers, hard core hacking, research.
Windows, good for the masses. How do you think billy boy makes his money? He isn't stupid, you know.
Good point. In an audit like this, M$ should come forward with how many registered copies, site liscences, and whatnot it has for whoever is being audited.
Of course, it would help if the auditing agency wasn't an M$ puppet...
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
A proprietary piece of software requires tracking of it's licenses - an issue that has been routinely ignored by most companies.
Not to say that companies can't track it. As someone pointed out, companies track financials all the time.
But rather, FAILURE to track the licenses may end up in rather hefty fines. That $129k is NOT the cost of the software, but a penalty to track the licenses.
This immediately implies that SOMEONE needs to track licenses (salary) plus costs for storage of said licenses. (Not to mention the additional costs of inspection of machines to see if employees add additional software - sans license - without the employers knowledge.)
People can ignore TCO...but if you ignore your licenses, this proves Microsoft WILL come after you.
Get kill.exe from the resource kit, shell to the command prompt and kill the process.
I have great faith in fools - self confidence my friends call it. - Edgar Allan Poe
Sorry for the double reply. Mantrid also asked:
Does Linux have an equivalent to Citrix?
Yes it does. It's more reliable and Free. It's called VNC. Most Linux users use the Windows server and Linux client kinda like a cross-platform PCAnywhere. If instead you use the Linux server and whatever client you feel like, it pretty much works like Citrix, except you are getting a Linux desktop rather than a Windows one, and your budget isn't hemmoraging due to Citrix's licensing fees. There are officially distributed clients for Linux, Solaris, Windows (95/98/ME/NT/2000 AND CE-SH3/CE-MIPS), Java, Macintosh (68k & PPC), and Alpha OSF1. It's Free software so if your client machine isn't listed it should be easy to port it.
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Open mind, insert foot.
Of course, depending on what you're looking for, the necessary apps might already be there. StarOffice is adequate as an office suite, if a bit bloated (but then, find me a slim office suite). Mozilla nightlies (pick a recent one) are good-to-great. Evolution is developing, but you can slap together a solution using Balsa or Pine and ical, or the KOffice package. I think StarOffice itself also supports e-mail (POP and IMAP), though the web browser stinks.
Now, if you need functions that only MS Office has, you're kinda screwed. Still, all some shops need is a migration path for their applications in order to send Windows and its myriad licensing issues packing.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
That was 2 years ago and not matter what I do I'll never break 100 seconds. I originally thought I'd never get past 180 seconds, then 120. If you can do the Intermediate in 59s you should have no problem getting the expert level. It's the guesses that'll kill ya.
:wq
The first thing to note is that the 'raids' are taking place in Virginia. I don't think this is accidental: Virginia is the first state to pass UCITA.
I suspect that what Microsoft is doing is attacking in the place where it has the best chance of winning, and then using the precedents (if anyone tries to counter in court) to bully governments and companies in the other states where UCITA is not the law.
Microsoft must be getting desperate for revenue growth sources. Somebody at the corporate offices probably realized that most people are not fastidious about keeping 'proof of purchase' certificates, and realized that recharging legitimate owners was a potential revenue stream.
This is absolute bullshit.
1. You insinuate that they really had those 800 licenses. Riiight... yet another little guy being kicked around by "Big Brother" @_@
2. Anyone who's spewing nonsense about having them switch to Linux obviously doesn't realize the cost of moving an organization from one operating system to another.
3. Microsoft was in the right here, they enforced their licensing clause. Get over it.
The fact remains that they were running a commercial product on machines without proof that they were licenced to do so - a payment to MS would have been in order even if they changed all machines in the city to Linux the next day since they had used the software.
With all due respect, but I still think a M$ network is easier to maintain than a *Nix one.
And as a previous poster already mentioned, we have to care for our Minesweeper-addicted public workers, don't we?
There is little shortage of Minesweeper clones in the Unix world.
I'm not convinced a Unix network is harder to manage than a M$ one; the only area where I would agree that Unix is a bit lacking is in the quality and breadth of Office type software. KOffice is getting there but has a long way to catch up before it reaches the functionality of Office. [ Having said that though, how many people actually use anything like the full functionality of any Office package ?]. And whilst there is StarOffice, WordPerfect et el, none of them are quite up there with Office. and of course there is the external compatibility issues too.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Of course, that much money (just the money they're paying to take care of uncertain licenses) could probably also buy CD burners and enough blanks to create no-license-hassles copies of Linux or Free / Open / NetBSD for every computer the city owns.
But the age old question arises: Do the applications exist for them to make the switch? I'm betting that they run a lot of custom/vertical market applications, so unless they want to pay developers and consultants to recreate their systems in order to run under linux, they've pretty much locked themselves into needing Windows based PC's to keep their basic infrastructure running intact.
Think if Microsoft did an audit of palm beach county... I bet they would find licenses for previous versions of windows and no licenses for the current version of windows.
But then again, they could call a "RECOUNT OF THE LICENSES"
First Post Using a Winmodem on Linux!! I finally got the damn thing working! Ok, i'm happy now, go ahead and give me (1- Offtopic), this moment deserves the sacrifice of some karma.!!
PD: BTW slashdot looks weird on Lynx :P
Not to add to much to the fire...but! (you knew that was comming)
With both *nix and Win* systems, you can restrict the user's capabilities. Under *nix, the restrictions come in automatically and are much more powerful. If you administer either *nix or Win* systems and don't have customized default restrictions, you don't have many client machines to manage or are crazy.
In a *nix system, if the person screws up thier desktop too much, you can write a script that resets the desktop at each login. On top of that, the /home directories can come from the network so they are easier to backup. The system and application files on the local machine should never be mucked with by a user, unless they are capable and are willing to take some responsibility when things go wrong.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
$99. will buy you Applixware, a good office suite. Maybe Linux developers should move from the fun stuff(another clone of tetris), and over to the practical-- business applications.
photosMy Photostream
Many if not most states have sunshine laws that means that any information they hold belongs to the public, with a few exceptions to protect the public's privacy (e.g. tax records) or sometimes to protect the government's position in negotiations currently being conducted.
It should be possible for a citizen to figure out how much is paid for software and what the software is used for. A simple comparison of the two tells you whether the agency is in compliance. Governments are sitting ducks for this kind of thing.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Wouldn't use a free system unless it had a very good implementation of Solitaire and MineSweeper.
Linux just doesn't cut it when it comes to those two apps.
If M$ will accept this money as being "sufficient" then I can imagine Virginia doing this. Digging up all the paperwork might very well cost them tons of time and money anyway. Without approving of M$ methods, how hard can it be to store your licenses in such a way that you can retrieve them if you actually need them?
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Than they should 129,000/826 = 156.17 per seat. But they spent 81,000 in the search. So all together 210,000/826 = 254.24 per seat. With all the bulk deals they could have got it for much less. I could see why they decided to pay now instead of waiting to find out they.
A large monopolistic company in the pocket of a candidate dedicated to the proposition that hard copy records are just too innaccurate and we should rely soley on the electronic tally - suing a government that can't produce the hardcopy record of the the number of 'ballots' cast for said software product.
Short term investment for long-term gain? Sounds like a sound business proposal.
I don't know many people who have been trained in MS products, they've just been given a PC and a phone number and told to get on with it. One of the many reasons why the for Dummies series is so popular.
MS are making a big mistake here, overtly abusing their customers. IBM made the same mistake when it was a monopoly and now it's just another player. The same thing will happen to MS unless they start treating the people that put them where they are with a little more respect.
Looks like this was bound to happen. They did say that they would do it. Good fun indeed...
> Multiply this by at least 1000 for the entire US, and you have easily enough money to write apps which do a better job of meeting the specific needs of municipal institutions while maintaining user compatibility with MS Office. Unfortunately, that will never happen because municipal institutions will avoid co-ordinating with each other if it kills them.
That's what I keep telling a friend who works in IT at a 2-year college. They license a big administrative app that costs a heap and works like crap. They have the code, so they find it easier to fix it themselves than to beat a fix out of the vendor. But whenever a new version comes out -- about once a year -- it does not include all the local fixes and enhancements, so they have to give it a major reworking before they can put it into production.
Other 2-year colleges all over the state use the same software, and have the same experiences with it. So my question is: why not ditch the vendor, let each school appoint one of their current maintainers as a full-time developer, and pool that talent between all the schools to create an OSS version? Not only would they lose the licensing fees, they would also reduce the amount of staff currently dedicated to keeping it running. And -- here's the shocker for S/W consumers -- they would end up with a project that actually did what they needed, rather than what some vendor Marketroid and clueless college purchasing agent thought they ought to have.
To many people still fail to see where their own best interests lie, when it comes to IT systems.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
More to the point, what do the 6000+ Virginia Beach workers need? Keep in mind that MS only hit them for a fraction of the licenses they should have; their total cost was roughly 9 times that, about a million dollars (that's just to MS; nevermind all the other software licenses they buy to make Windows useful). I honestly doubt all 6000+ workers absolutely *need* Windows to get their job done. Most people who use computers have general needs, and for that most any system (Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.) will do. Any organization that builds its foundation on a Windows-only infrastructure gets exactly what it deserves.
The councilwoman is posing. System administration is hard. You have to prioritize your tasks. Let's see: shall I put out the fire in the computer room or file some more license certificates?
System administration is easy, licensing is hard. Fortunately, licensing isn't really a part of system administration. It's a job for a procurement/finance department, which an organisation that size would surely have. They would also have an asset register, where they track things like desktop PC's. That takes care of 90% of your licenses. Then servers, that's the other 5%. Really, tracking exceptions is the hardest part, and that's the bit where desktop/server admins need to let procurement/finance know. I've worked in several large MS shops, and licensing isn't that much of a problem for them.
So what if sys admin, purchasing and procurement are difficult tasks? That's no excuse for violating a software license agreement that they SHOULD have been able to read and understand. They got sloppy and they paid for it. Next time they should arm themselves with the requisite knowledge that keeps these things from happening. Apologists like you can't survive in the cold, hard, cruel world of law and business.
Very few of the people with *nix machines were big unix geeks. Basically, you put the applications they need on the root menu and show them how to use it. That's about all they need to know.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
Yes, but that would be a waste of another $129k. People who say - 'don't buy Windows, use Linux' are being unrealistic.
Give me $129k and I will build a very practical, very handy, very secure Free Software based solution for your whole county.
Give me all the money they have spent on buying those damn licenses on top of that ($1M?), and I'll give you something even better.
--
Yeah it doesn't take much to confuse the average user (pictures Homer curling up in the fetal position because he has to dial extra digits for a local phone number), they were actually getting to the point on our DOS based business sytem that they knew to hit ESC 3 times, then like H, then enter twice or whatever to move between modules...than we went to a GUI interface...
I have nothing against linux...but i am a windows programmer...bill feeds my family. We are all stuck with it--for now. these people have a lot of software that is only going to run on windows. and most of their employees can probably barely use windows, much less something else... you linux guys remind me of the german army in ww2...better trained, better equiped...but vastly outnumbered in tanks by the russians in the east, monty in afrika, and the u.s. in the west.
Yep,
The have the right! Ever READ the license agreement you signed? Buy ONE thing from them (or down load one thing etc) and they can come in and look. It's rare, but they do
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
I would hardly be surprised if 10-15% of installations in an organization this size actually were 'apparently illegal'. This does not mean that the city had any tacit policy or tolerance of 'stolen software' (or did not purchase/track properly licensed software). It refers to the practical details of life in an office environment.
1. Registry corrupt. User (or tech) installs from nearest convenient CD and number
2. An app is installed for a single or time-limited use and never uninstalled.
3. Due to a hardware failure (even a single component), a system is returned (in whole or in part) or "parted" our to repair other systems on the bench. The software may be kept (may not be refundable), but tracking what went where may be a nightmare after a few years. The "items" (e.g. complete system packages) invoice no longer reflect the systems actually in use.
4. Tracking/accountability systems are complex, and often reveal unexpected weaknesses when data is accessed in unexpected ways, when data entry practices mutate over time, or when users do not fully understand the intent (and distinctions) of every single field
Any one of these could result in numerous (long-lived) apparent violations
I am not against commercial software (or MS), but we should recognize that the law lists countless situations where the courts have altered general legal principles, ruled clauses unenforceable, or otherwise made explicit (and even unexpected) allowances for the fact that a given law/clause was an undue hardship in "ordinary use"
Such rules occur even when the "rights" of the individuals are clear, when society has a compelling interest, and where (il)legality is uncontested. Sometimes the courts just throw up their hands. Examples (varying by jurisdiction, of course) range from "no pets" rental clauses to adultery to certain situation in child custody to [fill in your favorite]. Often, the "unworkablility" of the provision seems very tenuous to the party on the other side of the case.
The current mechanism for software licensing may turn out to be precisely such a case, thought the software industry has fought to keep it from being declared on until now. If audits like this become commonplace -who knows?- it may just turn out to be more of a burden than the courts want to take on. Or perhaps they'll take pity on the beleagered small-medium-large office. (Don't hold your breath)
My point is: keeping track of use of intangibles is not easy or straightforward. Keeping track of parts is at least as hard [even in mision critical settings such as military and aviation; as many news items have attested]. Keeping track of *intangible* parts (like software) may be next to impossible in a large fluid organization. If it turns out that eseentially every office has some apparent violations, it would be hard to argue that perfect compliance is possible or reasonable.
I don't like exceptions that 'bend the law', especially when they evenutally cause a law o be unenforceable. But the law has been around a long time, and has learned that sometimes, you simply have to let people do what they set about doing (run a business or a personal life) and cuts exemptions for them as a practical matter. Perhaps software licensing may be affected by this in the future.
For the disbelievers, here's an excerpt from the FAQ:
And people wonder why Theo has a reputation for being a dumbass!All generalizations are false.
--
I like to watch.
for the sound that the UN black helicopters make when they're hovering over your house while aiming the mass delusional raygun at you. Didn't you get the secret memo on that?
yeah, and they'd almost have enough left over to hire one competent andmin... for a year.
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/bin/fortune | slashdotsig.sh
Changing the server's WINS server.
Adding an IP address to a multihomed NIC.
Changing DNS settings (although this can be ignored)
Installing and activating LPR printing
And so on, and so on. God forbid that you need to do something on a critical box, like a WINS server - the network will flake for a long (>1 minute) time. MS' implementation of broadcast-then-query-then-broadcast for name resolution sucks.
THIS is why people hardcode everything on their desktop boxen, and if something breaks, re-ghost the whole damn thing.
Install software in the wrong order? Reinstall the OS.
Install a new media subsystem, to find that its buggy? Reinstall the OS.
Install a web-browser? Reboot. If it breaks, reinstall the OS.
Try to "upgrade" productivity software? Reboot. Then reinstall.
Some of this is true in the Unix (Linux) world. But having the system services (paenguins) completely independent of the OS is a Good Thing (tm). Give me SSH and NIS over sneakernet, SMS and WINS/NT-Domains any day. At least you can look in a human-readable file to see config details, and a human-readable text file, verbose as you like, error log.
Just because people use MS at home, and like the Paperclip, and play Minesweeper, doesn't make Windows a better office App. Suite.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Aren't there more effective ways to buy votes with $129,000 than forcing everyone in the city to use linux? Oh wait, never mind, wrong story.
--
The shareholder is always right.
...it were a bunch of Oracle licenses? Somehow, I doubt it.
Honorary Member of Jackie Chan's Kung Fu Process Servers
You can make money off of their technological incompetance.
You can turn them in to the BSA, and in some countries even collect bonuses.
just think, another tool to push *your* political agenda.
Start today!
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Ummm, this was a little screw up?
I'm sorry but any mess up that costs over 100 grand instantly becomes a major deal buddy.
I dont know about you, but the real world is a bit more realistic...
and the part about being my boss, you would never have the chance... you have to uderstand business first... and the first lesson is that a $100,000.00+ screw up will get you ass fired.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Of course, somebody has to set up the box and it's probably not Granma. But granma can be shielded from the gory inniards of a U*X type box nowadays.
Yes, she (or anyone else) can use U*X if she has a properly designed interface that reflects some user-testing usability. It's called MacOSX.
Of course, that much money (just the money they're paying to take care of uncertain licenses) could probably also buy CD burners and enough blanks to create no-license-hassles copies of Linux or Free / Open / NetBSD for every computer the city owns.
Of course, that much money wouldn't come near paying the annual salaries for the army of tech support people they would need to add to the staff try to keep Linux/Unix running on the city's desktops.
These OS's are NOT free...the software itself just doesn't cost anything. You can slam MS products all you want, and they aren't perfect, but they do the job with lower total cost of ownership.
Because we know all the good legal buzzwords over here. "Sue", "Settle", "Defense", "Prosecute" and "Chad" are just a few.
Hammer of Truth
I have read many comments about it being too hard to replace windows with Linux, how IT departments would balk. I thought I would pass on this little anecdote.
One of the IT managers where I work saw a computer on my desk running Linux(a skunkworks project in the works). His comment:
"Man, I wish management would let us chunk Windows and use Linux. Windows is so hard to manage."
Maybe not representative, but, funny anyway.
I swear, being a Microsoft advocate and reading slashdot is like being a Democrat and reading the Drudge Report.
In the last article about VA Beach VA's travails is that someone posted that the reason they were against the wall here is that because the IT Director position had been open for more than a year. The reason - they were only paying $40K.
So, $130K might sound like peanuts to you, but to them it's obviously is big money. (If they would have paid the IT director that kind of money, they wouldn't be paying MS, but that sort of thing sinks in slowly for some people)
M$ has all of this money generated from software, but how do we know it's not laundered drug money? :)
/*drunk.. fix later*/
Well, I wouldn't say you would need a person who does nothing but track licenses. This is something you can spread across a few people who are already doing similar jobs. If you are in an Enterprise or Select agreement all you need to do is call MS everytime you install something and tell them. They will bill you for it. Then all you need to track is the financial aspect of it.
forge
Let me start out, i'm platform agnostic, in all that that implies.
There is a falsehood that is constantly pepetuated that windows networks are some how easier to administer.
As server machines, no. They're actually about equally as hard. The learning curve for setting up services correctly and properly tuning a machine for windows and for linux is about equal.
Now, something odd... as a desktop machine... windows is much harder to administer. The average user on a windows machine has a much higher chance of fucking up their system than that same user would on a linux machine. Additionally, the remote admin features inherit to any unix (telnet in and fix it) makes life much easier on tech support.
The ease of administration, and the TCO arguments for windows, are complete crap.
-T
Old truckers never die, they just get a new peterbilt
How can Microsoft keep track of the licenses. Not everyone registers their software. If microsoft forced everyone to register their software in order to get some kind of code to enable the software you'd have consumer activists up in arms. As for tying a license to a MAC address, it doesn't work well when those computers aren't on a network.
It's been about 5 years since I had to deal with keeping track of licenses for a large organization, but in my experience Microsoft was pretty reasonable to deal with. Since they actually told Virginia Beach to prove they owned what the have, I expect they got a pretty believable tip from a disgruntled civil servant (or former civil servant).
It is true that a lot of self proclaimed M$ experts don't know anything, but that's the case with any computing system including mainframes. I worked with a guy that said he was an expert on AS400 and after working with him discovered I knew more than he did and I only had one class during school on the AS400. Okay so say you bite the bullet and switch out the desktops to Linux and you pay for all your employees for training and you calculate the loss of productivity for several months as users adjust and become familiar with it and speed up gradually. Now you need all new apps. That database front end won't work with Linux so hire a U*X/DB guru to design/program a new one. All the marketing graphics programs (throw em out) and all the other marketing stuff as well. Oh Accounting needs new apps to. And how do you get the old data converted and into the U*X based accounting package. Sales department next, if they had any specific sales software, get rid of it too and get new stuff. Also retrain them with e-mail because now they can't use their precious Outlook that they have come to love. And if you have any other specialized departments that have win apps, you need to replace all that as well providing there are apps that do the same job and run on Linux, also what if they need to retrieve old data from the win apps, the linux app will have to be able to import the old data into it. So do you still think it will only slightly harm a budget? I don't think so. Oh yeah fire your helpdesk and pc techs that you had to work on Win problems and hire "Linux experts" if you can find them in your community. If not pay someone from another town a ton of money to relocate. Budget is in the negative at this point.
In this case, it is almost a scam by M$ to get money for nothing. It's pretty simple to have a lawyer send a generic threat to an organization, then expect that organization to get scared because they made running a city a higher priority than doing Micro$oft's work. I say screw M$, and I only use their software at work because I have to...although I'm about 90% able to use Solaris instead, which I like a lot better for doing work (well, and running xsnow right now.)
Mas vale cholo, que mal acompañado.
However, based on my experience (as a one man consultancy show) I would not hesitate to set up a department by using Linux entirely. Granted: It depends on the amount of external document exchange. But if the department is more or less self-reliant: why not.
The only reason I do have Windoze 2000 installed on (20% of the hard disk of) my laptop is that I sometimes work on customer documents when riding the train home. Else then that I run a pure Linux shop and that very happily.
Oh, the fact that W2K for which I paid on OEM license came as one of those dreaded "recovery CD's" which is completely useless for a dual-boot configuration and the fact that I feel extorted and robed by the evil empire (by being forced to buy the full version) makes me think twice if I really want to make business with such cowboys if there are painless other routes.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
OK, next time you get pulled over for a speeding ticket, tell the nice officer that you have no proof that you own your car, and you should have no reason to. Ford/Chevy/Toyota should keep track of that for you. I dare you, dumbass.
In a *nix system, if the person screws up thier desktop too much, you can write a script that resets the desktop at each login. On top of that, the /home directories can come from the network so they are easier to backup.
If you did an iota of research, or put as much effort into learning the scripting abilities of Windows as you doubtless spend fiddling with your config files and reading man pages, you'd have found that all these are possible on Windows too.
The system and application files on the local machine should never be mucked with by a user, unless they are capable and are willing to take some responsibility when things go wrong.
This is a basic management issue, and last I looked, Unix doesn't make qualified sysadmins out of users any more than Windows does.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Intermediate: I can't remember
Expert: 1:59 (That was a typo)
So, NOW who has too much time on his hands?
This kind of security and usability is fine for geeks and admins, but just isn't the kind of thing that my Grandma could use.
Using chmod 644 is not necessary to set file permissions; for individual files I just do like any Windows user: right click on the file and access Properties. I'm running KDE, but you can do the same with Gnome or any other X Windows system.
I set up Unix accounts for visiting 8-10 year olds on my home network, so I'm sure your Granny would have no problem.
Even my girlfriend who:
a) has almost no computer experience
b) isn't intellectually the brightest tool in the box,
now understands what the root user on my system is for and can perform some limited admin tasks on my network.
Unix does require a little patience to explain novel concepts to Windows users like security, but after people have overcome the intimidation factor they understand the advantages.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
You forgot the part where he has a dream about having sex with his therapist then setting himself on fire.
Sorry, I know it's offtopic, but I can't wait 'til the Sopranos come back on.
Hammer of Truth
Windows itself, however, is of debatable quality. I know if Windows had worked as well as I thought it should have, I would never have bothered to learn how to use Linux
1. What can Linux do that Windows cannot?
2. What can Windows do that Linux cannot?
NEVER buy single copies unless you have less than 20 computers. ALWAYS buy a blanket copy from MS.
Or never buy an operating system that needs two licenses - one for the software itself, and one for each computer connecting to it. The company I described in my original post got suckered because:
And remember, this was the time when all big-brand PC suppliers shipped with Windows as default. Even if we wanted SCO or Novell, we would have had to pay extra on top of the Windows tax.
Chris
I work for a municipality with much fewer employees than Virginia Beach (around 2000). License tracking is not a simple exercise. All of the PCs that our city orders come pre-burdened with some version of windows. But as a time-saving measure, each of our PCs is reloaded from an image CD so that it has the configuration that the particular department requires. But putting on a different configuration of a (possibly) different version of windows can throw a monkey wrench into the licensing machine. We do attempt to follow licensing requirements, but on a good day they are confusing. And it can only get worse as the number of affected PCs increases.
Unfortunately, due to twisted licensing practices by many industry players license tracking can be a time-consuming pain-in-the-arse. (Microsoft does seem to be an industry leader in confusing license agreements.) And this article relates only to Microsoft licenses. Municipalities run a variety of applications that Microsoft does not provide. (Water systems control, computer-aided dispatch for police, emergency services tracking for fire, parks and recreation resource mamagement, and utility billing are a few.) And having a mixture of software is certainly not unique to government
While there are certainly plenty of questions to go around regarding this city's acquisition of technology without involving IT, the fact that software licensing has become as awful as Vogon Poetry should not be ignored. And as far as the councilwoman's comments about "simple record keeping," I wonder what she would have said if IT had asked council for an FTE to track software licensing for 6000 users? We make an effort to ensure compliance with software licenses, but I'd be surprised if most businesses or governments are completely compliant with all license agreements of all software in use.
Well, no, it doesn't. It does show that it's a good idea to keep track of your licenses, though.
After a while, they might even start to appreciate that they can keep other users out of their files.
Try running Office, or VB or any other MS tool that most entities running Windows uses. Linux is not the answer all the time, especially if you can't run the tools that run your business (or government) on it. And don't try to tell me "you can convert to StarOffice, blah, blah, blah" because if you have thousands of documents to convert, you'll end up spending a lot of money. And, if those documents have macros embedded in them that are written in VBA, you're really into a dilly of a pickle.
Face it, Virginia Beach got caught with their pants down and they knew it. Rather than face up to illegally (sp?) using Windows and other MS stuff, they paid the fiddler and called it even. Rules are rules. The GPL has rules and MS licenses have rules. Whether you like them or not, if you don't follow them, you'll get smacked!
IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
GOBACK.
"But, if you take someone who has never used a PC before, and therefore has not been tainted by Windows, and you give that person a Linux system (just for example, but could be any OS with a GUI) then you don't have to worry about their preconceived notions of how Win9x works, you show them how to perform operations w/ this machine." Okay so your saying to fire all of your current employees and hire new ones that have never even seen a computer (where would you find these people, West Virginia maybe). And then spend tons and tons of time training them in the OS, the Apps, What the He*& e-mail is. Show them that turning the monitor off is not turning the PC off etc... Yeah this sounds logical... Are you on something.
Good point, but I would dispute that:
> there isn't a Word equivalent editor, or a presentation tool like PowerPoint...
I'm not sure what you mean by 'equivalent'... my office suite of choice is Sun StarOffice 5.2 on both Windows and Linux and that has both tools mentioned above and alot more besides.
Other industry standard software that I need to run my business such as the likes of Quark XPress and Macromedia Freehand, aren't available for Linux. But I can get my admin. work done fine on Linux.
Take a lesson from M$, you don't have to like them, but still you should learn from what works
Only because they glibly installed software without keeping track of their licenses. It really isn't that difficult a thing to do, storing and filing is something that business people have been doing with financial data for a very long time, and they don't generally lose financial information often.
They did that 3-5 years ago according to the article. Don't forget that not allowing a user to just get and install what is needed means adding red tape, paperwork, an administrative authority for approving and tracking purchaces etc. etc. In other words, that software costing $200 that would save you $1000 worth of hours you dont have if you get it today will do you no good next week after it is approved and purchased through channels.
Remember the paranoia about that tag on the matress (do not remove under penelty of law)? That was all a mis-understanding (doesn't apply to end user). Well, that little certificate that comes with Windows is the full realization of that paranoia. Don't have it? Pay again! Loose the key? Pay again!
Compare that to a Linux shop. Central distro server. Need software? Just select it from the menu and it's yours.
I'm just waiting for the grand irony of a company that tracks their licensing in Excel and Access, then has to pay again because the data was lost after an incompatable upgrade (or when access merged too many different record's data together).
Many companies WOULD be hard pressed to pull up financial data from 5 years ago, because they didn't realise that they had to update the spreadsheet formats with each 'upgrade' or risk losing it to bit rot.
There were posts from employees there on the last article. The IT staff apparently wasn't just undereducated, they were non-existant, with the IT Director position being unfilled for more than a year. Plus they had a "WordPerfect is the standard" policy that was bogus and unenforced.
So, users and departments 'obtained' their own copies of MS Office. Which pretty much ensures that they was a little piracy and that they would never find all the paperwork. And thus they were screwed.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
That is the most horrible lie I have ever heard.
If keeping track of pieces of paper were easy I might have had a 4.0 GPA in high school.
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
I believe you have a valid point, but it likely could have been made without the personal attack. But again, your point is certainly one worth considering.
Hi, I'm a pretentious cock who will make some gay comment about ignoring AC posts here.
Yup, or you can use programs like Exceed, X-Win32, etc. to host apps or full sessions on Windows. I usually run Exceed, with X traffic forwarded and compressed through an ssh session - works rather well. Exceed will also allow you to run a full desktop session, instead of just selected apps.
VNC works well (I use that, too), but an X-server allows you to connect to more types of hosts and only send the individual windows that you want... of course, I run the Citrix stuff at work, since there isn't a supported version of Notes for AIX (although 4.5.2 runs...).
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
For example: Of course you will (probably) have to have new database client applications, but there's no need to migrate the database data per se.
Also, users might be pissed initially about not being able to use Outlook. OTOH it's harder to wreck total havoc in your company for a sixteen year old boy in the Philippines.
Granted, it's not that easy a switch but it's doable and - depending on the situation - it might be profitable in the medium to long run.
It sure as hell was my best business decision to run Linux, but then I had the ability to start from scratch
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
The fines for pirated software can be as much as $150K per copy so they are trying to pay microsoft so that they don't press charges.
"The secret of success is to know something nobody else knows." -Aristotle Onassis
Obviously the RIAA has those rights, why wouldn't Microsoft? We're talking about some of the largest businesses (or collection of businesses) in America.
Ourthing Radio!
Oh and it's just that easy right. You just take the end users Win box from them which they get around in fairly well (they are used to it) and then set a U*X box in front of them and no problems. Bull#%#$, You can just change something small on their Win box and they get totally confused. If you switch their entire system wait and see how many helpdesk calls come pouring in on things like how do I do this now or how do I do that.
.02 cents....
This thing that Linux or whatever U*X is the answer to everyones prayers is again Bull#@$&.
Even if you spend hours on end in training sessions with the end users they won't remember. The reason they are partially used to Win is because of the repeated use of it. After their first experience with Win boxes I am sure they had problems but then after extensive use of it they have become familiar with it.
If you switch them to U*X sure over lots of time they will get used to it, but until they do their productivity will become very slow. Do you think CEO's of companies will understand the loss of productivity so that you can put out U*X boxes that run better. If you went to a CEO with this you better have packed up your personal belongings.
Don't get me wrong here, I love Linux and use it at home instead of Win, but I am a geek and know how to work with it.
I set my parents up with a win 98 box and yes they call me to say "my screens all blue what do I do" I tell them to reboot of course (standard helpdesk answer). I would never even think about putting Linux on their machine, no matter how much custominzing I did to it they would still call with the "how do I do ______, before I would right click then so and so". I would never get any rest.
And this deal about be able to find the expertise to set up all these pc's, sure you can find them, but it's a lot easier finding IT people that know M$ stuff because it is so widely used.
just my
1) Netscape. Sure, the new one sucks. I think I have 4.7 or something old. It works prefectly fine for me on Solaris, and never crashes.
2) Exchange email. Unfortunately, where I work we are required to use exchange. The good thing is that there is a web based version that works in netscape. It has most of the same functionality as the Windows client, so I can send emails and do whatever I want, except those annoying macro virus things, and of course not view Word or Excel files (yet.)
3) AOL Instant Messenger. It's too easy to run that via the web. There is the java applet, which I like better than the Win32 client because it stores my list on AOL's server and I never have to set that up again on each computer I use. And yes, I am required to use that at work. At home I prefer ICQ/ICQnix.
4) ssh. I won't even go in to this one, but my job does require me to use ssh. I do like being able to do it in an xterm instead of the bulky Win32 program SecureCRT that I have to use at work.
There are other apps but those are probably some of the more common ones. I think if I had a decent office program for Solaris I'd be 99% completely using it, but I have not been happy enough with what I have found so far. Also, I think that with things like SunRay, you can set up terminals for your users that they can simply pop in a smart card and will be at their own machine. It would be very preferable than lugging a laptop around to the conference room, or to another person's desk to show them something on your machine. Plus, the CDE desktop is more suited to me than the Windows GUI. However, if it wasn't, and if the users preferred something else, I have been told that it's not that difficult to install another one like gnome. A sysadmin could do that on the server for all the users of the sunrays. That would also save time in system upgrades because you only need to install it once, rather than on every machine like you would with Windows 9x, NT, 2k, ME, etc.
Using unix in any form on the desktop is not realy that bad of an idea. I do think if you have a good sysadmin the users won't need to know the command line or how to edit their .profile or anything.
Mas vale cholo, que mal acompañado.
It isn't system administration. Any halfway decent shop will have centralized purchasing going through an administrative department (NOT IT). Their jobs would be to track all purchases (what a purchasing department DOES).
How screwed up are they? What kind of sane business policy allows users to purchase their own software? That's incredibly dumb. No wonder they have no idea what's going on.
And we've seen it again and again
That whenever you pay him the Danegeld
You never get rid of the Dane.
Rudyard Kipling, as usual, says it best.
In other circumstances this would be demanding money with menaces.
So, on Windows you don't open an DOS command window and type 'dir|more'? Maybe you should look for a file explorer for Linux. I heard there was one or two available somewhere...
> demand that you provide an actual inventory of
> what products you use, and proofs of purchase.
But the cool thing is that if you stole ALL of the MS software installed on your machines, you've surrendered no such right!
So then the users don't purchase their computer systems through corporate IT, but instead go to Best Buy to buy their computers.
I've been there, I've done that... Corporate IT can not win battles by ignoring the needs and desires of the end users. At my current company we have a whole division which refuses to use IT resources and instead has their own server admins, desktop guys, etc. All because they think it's ridiculously constrictive to abide by the guidelines our IT staff has put in place.
Now the one difference is if the endusers go off and buy their own services and refuse to rely on the corporate IT, they are at least lawfully abiding by licenses and such.
The danger is, this dramatically decreases the power of the IT department and the entity as a whole loses the benefits of scale. i.e. the ability to purchase bulk licensing contracts, etc.
"Speaking of idiots, what makes you qualified to speak? You aren't even employed or graduated from high school yet
(with apologies to other high school students.) Setting up a router in your house does not count."
Okay, I'm feeding the troll. What makes you qualified to speak? You're too fucking lazy to make an account. Who the hell cares about your opinion?
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
I think you miss the point. To a large number of the users Microsoft Office was the best solution. As some comments from the original article indicated, the endusers almost overwhelmingly rejected the WordPerfect suite forced upon them.
The solution that they devised resulted in costing twice as much because they required each department to effectively buy two different office suites... One imposed by IT, the other that they actually wanted.
That's not cost effective.
There are definately some things users want that are harmful to the company, and it is possible to explain and document that. Obviously unfirewalled Internet access would be bad, and there are technical reasons for that.
But in this case there was no technical basis for the WordPerfect choice, it was only financial, and as it turns out the financial decision was totally ill thought out as the final cost was much much more.
I bet they haven't paid for their licenses twice yet though....
Another Microsoft visit in six months then ?
Um...perhaps you didn't realize, but the issue at hand is not home use, where you are free to download and decorate as much as you like. This is a municipal government. If I caught one of my employees downloading wallpaper and touching it up, I'd reprimand them on the spot. There are better things to do when you're on the clock.
Now which are the pirates, Virginia Beach, or Microsoft?
Doesnt this just show its time for governments to fund open source projects? If governments collaborated on software, that im sure they all use, society would be better off. There would be new, freely available applications, and governments budgets would be so much lower.
-- Cheer, Cheer, The Red and the White.
I wouldn't exactly call a license agreement that doesn't hold water low maintenance. IAAL, and I can tell you that if anyone ever sued based on the GPL, you'd find out just how low maintenance that POS really is. Keep on dreamin', though.
FreeBSD is fine with me, I run it here also. 2.2.8-RELEASE to be more accurate.
Its been up some 40 somthing days. The linuxbox up 104 I believe.
The willingness of humanity to follow without question is the fall of them.
In all the years I've used Windows, I've never once had a screwed up registry. I don't like the registry, and it's an obvious failure point, but it hasn't caused me any problems. The myth of the fragile registry needs to go away.
(If BillyG decides that 129K is enough). Do you remember how Budget car rent company got busted? They paid more, and got bad publicity.
The sad truth about licensing in companies and government/municipal agencies is that IT IS A BLOODY MESS! I've developed a software licensing system for my previous job (mid-sized corporation with about 2500 employees). Developing was hard, but even harder thing was making the data conversion from several Excel spreadsheets that I would rather call spreadshits. This is how bad it was: tonns of software (about 350 different packages), millions of different versions of the same software, and complete inability to inspect all PCs to find what they really had there (our guys were using a special tool called Express Meter).
And our company had an Enterprise agreement with MS, thus pretty much taking His Billness out of the picture (because everything MS was covered).
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
Not the 500 users I'm responsible for. Most can't even navigate a hierarchical file structure or rename a file.
And can you imagine what will happen when in a few years' time, productivity across Virginia Beach will come to a complete halt when their Office 2000 subscription runs out? If they can't keep track of regular licenses, how in the world are they going to handle maintaining a subscription-based office suite? And I can guarantee you that the technology situtation in virginia beach is not that far off from that of many, if not most other state agencies across the nation.
But I thought if you have a CD Burner you must be pirating. So that money would still go to the Music Co anyway.
Ahh, so good software can't be free, but work by people to keep track of liscenses somehow is. Hmmm...
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
I mean, come on - it's not rocket science for a corporation (a city is a corporation) to keep records of purchases. If they had had records of giving Microsoft the money for the licenses, Microsoft wouldn't be giving them a hard time about it. I think it's fairly likely that the city just didn't have licenses, and Microsoft caught them.
(Surprise software audits aren't very common - a disgruntled ex- (or current) employee probably tipped Microsoft off to trigger it).
- SteveX
Of course, that much money (just the money they're paying to take care of uncertain licenses) could probably also buy CD burners and enough blanks to create no-license-hassles copies of Linux or Free / Open / NetBSD for every computer the city owns.
Sure it does. Does it also cover the expenses required in order to get the expertise to get those 6000 systems running and keep 'm that way? With all due respect, but I still think a M$ network is easier to maintain than a *Nix one. And as a previous poster already mentioned, we have to care for our Minesweeper-addicted public workers, don't we?
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
And if this was an NT/W2K box, with Administrator only giving Read to Everyone and no other access to the file? The average user would be able to (knowledge wise or physically) change it?
Lets see how much they're paying. $129,000/800 = $161.25. A company's largest expense is the salaries they pay their employees. Virginia beach has 6000+ software licenses for MS software. Training their people to use free software just isn't cost effective. Even if you have to pay a few people full time to manage and audit software licenses, it's still a lower TCO. If you've got as many users as they do they should be buying a site license from MS and paying the maintenence. For the software that everyone has on their PC, Windows and Office for example, they pay a set fee per person, and those never ending upgrades are included in the maintence.
But when it's all said and done, you're not paying through the nose for updated MS products as often as they deem fit to bump a version number.
Free software also gets updated, in most cases even more often than MS upgrades theirs. Those revisions need to be tested in the user's environment. Some consistency between the software on different user's PCs has to be maintained for compatability reasons, and the simple fact that you can't afford to train your support team to know the quirks of every version of every software package that one of their users wants to run.
I feel governments should be encouraged to adopt more Open Source software. $129,000 doesn't sound a lot, but that is for a mere 800 of 6000+ packages. Multiplying up means Virginia Beach Municipal government has spent $1,000,000 with Microsoft, and replicated across the States that is a huge figure. They aren't necessarily even getting great support for it since MS licenses are infamous for protecting them from everything and anything resembling responsibility.
If the appropriate Open Source software existed then their software expenditure would be for 1CD plus a few blanks, and then employing the requisite support staff [which they have to do anyway to run their Windows systems].
Slashdot posted an earlier article concerning setting up a company to markety Open Source software to government, and after reading and thinking about this I realise that it is a Good Thing (TM).
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
``I don't know if this satisfies Microsoft, but in my role as a council member it doesn't satisfy me,'' McClanan said. ``The fact that we can't produce records that simple is disconcerting to say the least.''
Exactly. With that amount of money changing hands for licenses, you'd think they'd keep track of them a little better. What other records can they not find?
This reminds me of the FAST visit one of my former employers suffered. FAST (the Fedaration Against Software Theft if memory serves me well), sent a polite note to the head of IT offering an `instructive talk' about software licensing. This really constituted a fact finding mission from a FAST operative, as he carefully milked our IT people (including me) for our knowledge on licensing issues.
...
A few weeks later FAST `offered' to audit our license situation. This was a thinly veiled accusation that are licenses were not upto snuff.
It turned out that unscrupulous or unknowing resellers (including Compaq) had failed to sell us the required licenses. They knowingly sold us systems with NT installed on them that we couldn't legally connect together on a LAN (no client licenses). In Compaq's case, they had sold us the licenses, but conveniently forgotten to ship them with the computers.
Another problem was that too many staff had access to the software lockers, and many of our Windows 95 licenses had gone walkabout along with the CDs
The upshot of all this was that we had to buy several hundred licenses, many of which we had legally bought already. My boss also started to read those shrinkwrapped licenses *very* carefully. The client license problem was happily resolved by installing Linux on the NT file and print servers.
Chris
That's pretty darn naive to think $129K USD could cover the cost of switching operating systems. As much as you all think TCO is a a silly PHB term, even with administration aside, there's a very real cost of logistics (desktop technicians reinstalling OSes, reconfiguration of everyone's PC) and training (sending everyone out to retake courses in their applications). Just go and find out how much a Office training course costs-then multiply by those 6000 users. Not to mention the porting costs and project management requirements to migrate front end software like custom VB applications to UNIX.
How much the OS costs (even $129,000) is a very small component of the total IS budget.
Calum
Now, that was easy, since hardly any organization had thousands or ten thousands of VAXstations that must be licensed.
This is very different in todays world. Even if there is such a thing as a central purchasing department they have to deal with just a helluva mess regarding software licenses, upgrade licenses and client licenses.
To make matters worse there very often is no such thing as a central purchasing department but every department runs its separate purchasing. This is especially evident in larger communities.
Considering that the blokes could have bought exactly one copy of - say - SuSE Linux and deploy it (including most applications) as they saw fit. That should have left a bunch of cash to hire good Linux administrators, especially considering the manpower you need to maintain and administer an NT network.
Unfortunately this eposide does nothing to impact Micro$ofts image, since this is so much down the toilet already that I really don't think playing bully towards communities can impact it any further.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
You're kidding right? Nothing anyone else makes can stand up to M$. They're too good.
Aw, No one said "Yes Microsoft, Virginia is a Santa Claus". And its the first of december and all.
Slashdot: Proof that a million monkeys at a million typewriters can create a masterpiece
Yes, there is that... But given that license documentation for software is often not properly shipped or not followed, or that the users go ahead and install unlicensed software anyway, you will still run afoul of legal troubles. The Software Conspiracy has one example of a disgruntled employee installing a bunch of unlicensed software on a company's computers, then tipping off the "authorities," costing the company incredible amounts of money in fines.
With proprietary software, in my experience, its a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation.
-RickHunter
Yeah, come on do you really think that government employees can use Linux? That's just asking of anarchy.
I wonder what an audit of my Virginia county's too rich government center would bring. Come on MS bring it on!!!
_________________________ Visit me at http://pornforcomputers.com
Both windows and exchange are very very scriptable. One trick is to export your exchange account settings into a delimited file, make your changes to it, then import it back in, for example.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
I've often wondered whether the GPL will eventually replace proprietry licences, simply because its such low maintainance. You don't keep getting a bunch of BSA Nazis calling on you.
This isn't anything personal. I am just tired of all these people believing every damn thing they hear as gospel.
Personally i find it easier to edit a text file in the
End Rant. Please modify down to -69.
Of course, that much money (just the money they're paying to take care of uncertain licenses) could probably also buy CD burners and enough blanks to create no-license-hassles copies of Linux or Free / Open / NetBSD for every computer the city owns. - But the point is that they do not want Linux. Microsoft Windows is the only adequate operating system available. No real place of business can use Linux based machines. It just does not happen.
First of all, Microsoft select license agreements are designed to confuse and distort reality. IAAL, and I can't read the damn thing without getting a headache. Add to that the licensee's administrative burden in managing the thousands and thousands of enrollment forms and the pernicious audit rights that M$ reserves for itself. There's no hope in negotiating the agreement, since M$ is a truly a 1600 pound gorilla.
I would tell you what to negotiate out of the agreement if you are about to spend some real money with M$, but no one on slashdot is in any position to control a spend on the magnitude that can dictate terms to M$. I've done it myself, on behalf of very, very big clients.
Judging by the conversation here, people seem to think that this $130K audit settlement is a big deal. Remember, some of M$'s customer's sneeze $130K on a slow day. I've seen license agreements with M$ that contemplate a few million $$ recurring monthly in maintenance fees. The one-time license fees figures are staggering. How do you think they got so rich? It wasn't VA beach's measly little 129K. VA beach was just being used as an example, because it has public books.
WOW! What a Great New Marketing Angle! Open Source vendors can now proclaim a new advantage over their Closed Source Commercial competitors: "No Hidden Liscensing Liabilities for using Open Source"! Linux, BSD, and GNU advocates can wield the "Fair Use", and "First Sale Doctrine" issue too, and Unscrupulous Commercial Vendors will be punished by the clearly unpopular position put forth by UCITA. Maybe Virginia will rethink their strategy and repeal this law!?!
I want to applaud Microsoft too. Auditing and threatening customers is such a disasterous marketing strategy! Good Going Microsoft!
oh....my!
Well, it's actually not that simple when using MS Apps.
At the company that I used to work for, we were a primarily MS shop. Every new PC came with NT4 pre-installed. With that comes a nifty little booklet that teaches you how to point and click and also has the OS license/certificate of authenticity attached to it. There would also be booklets for Office, etc.
For our recordkeeping, when a new PC was ordered for a user, there was a requisition and interview process that generated a paper trail that documented what licenses needed to be ordered (CAL's, Office, etc). When the new PC arrived, the physical license had to be torn off of the booklet and stapled to the paperwork for the PC.
However, on top of that we also had one of the "blanket plans," aka Microsoft Select. That works reasonably well because MS ships us installation media for everything that they make on a regular basis, and we just call our software vendor (and MS partner) and say, we need 10 more licenses of product X. They start the paperwork to send us a bill and we install from our media kit.
If the MS-Gestapo ever came in for an audit, we'd simply pull up our copy of the licensing records (which were also maintained by the vendor and updated when we purchased new licenses) and then count paperwork licenses from the OEM installations.
It used to be worse than that though before MS changed it's policy about re-imaging/re-installing an OEM installation from Select media. Untill this past year, if we wanted to re-build a PC image, we legally had to either a) start from the restore CD that came with that model or b) buy a second license for the new image and build it from scratch, then buy additional licenses for every PC that we imaged with it.
Fortunately, MS realized just how incredibly shady this was and "magnanimously" changed the rules to give companies like the one I used to work for more leeway.
At any rate, my point was that it's not that simple to just buy a "blanket plan" because so much crap comes pre-installed and licensed that it's easy to confuse the count.
Hate to sound snobby, but being able to read a software manual should be a job requirement if you use any software. Then again, many never care to figure out how to program their VCR, let alone solve the blinking 12.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I would love a PR announce on Nov. 27 from Beach which tells:
With all due respect, but I still think a M$ network is easier to maintain than a *Nix one.
This is going to start a flame war, but you're partly right. As a former resident of Virginia Beach, I can tell you that M$ net admins were a dime a dozen in that market. We were paying over $200 an hour for Linux admins on contract, because they refused to come on board full time. (Rightly so - there was just too much demand and not enough supply.) At that rate, $129k only buys you 645 hours, less admin costs and taxes. Two guys working for eight weeks aren't going to manage the switchover for six thousand workstations and servers. (No two guys I know.)
Plus, remember that this is the government we're talking about. If they switched operating systems, they would have to retrain all existing network admins. You can't just go and lay off your admins because they don't know Linux: these small-government employees are lifers, and it's about as close to job security as you could ever get.
What's your damage, Heather?
Okay I agree. I am on the Pessimistic side aren't I.
But you probably would need access to past database info for reporting purposes such as quarterly and annual reports. Our clients demand these reports from us, we couldn't tell them " oh we can't get those to you this year because now we use new operating systems".
I do agree that getting rid of Outlook would increase security a lot.
And I agree that if you are a startup company and you have been able to find all the apps that you would need that can run on Linux, it would be worth the training costs to train each incoming employee on the use of Linux and the apps. And even using it on all the servers as well.
But I don't think it is a good decision to throw away hundreds of thousands of dollars on Win apps (including all your M$ server apps) and then have to buy all new linux apps and deal with the problem of if you ever need to access the old data, and then on top of that cost to retrain your employess on the new OS and all the new apps.
Do you agree with this?
Even if Virginia beach told M$ to go away, what says that they would have to 'produce evidence upon demand'* even if M$ had bought a search warrant based on the suspicion that VBeach was running pirated copies? Wouldnt the auditors have to sit down at each computer and find evidence that there were illegal (unlicensed) copies on that computers?
What happened to concept of innocent until proven guilty?
Virgina Beach has done themselves and everyone else a disservice by just taking this bend-over from Micro$oft - Does anyone not see how wrong this is? Why dont we just put police stations and courthouses and legislators under direct accounting to American Big Business? And forget about all this 'liberty' and 'free will' of the citizenry mess - its just a waste of time apparently. For gosh sakes - this is a Municipal corporation no less - they should be the first to tell M$ to blast-off. Apperently the citizens of Virgina Beach (via its municipal employees and elected officials) are answerable to M$. What a fine system you have down there friends - this whole 'idea' of what is happening in Virgina Beach leaves a bad taste in my mouth, what next? Will the electric company be able to audit your 'electrical devices'? Will Maytag be able to 'license' the contents of your fridge to Kraft? Will buying XXX brand of running shoes mean you cannot wear a YYY brand of Tshirt at the same time? Will the 'duely appointed forces' of these companies be able to 'audit' or 'arrest' you if they suspect you are in violation? What civic power has been granted to these entities?
I think VBeach is just as much 'at fault' here for being spinless and devoid of any real morals (not to mention any 'nuts')... no one likes a coward.
*IANAL & I recognize that demand may be in the contract itself... but that is a non-issue I believe (for other reasons of monopoly and un-reasonable 'license agreements' by those monoplies)
The burden of proof here is on Microsoft et. al. to prove that the Council where breaching the licence terms. If they where as legit as they make out, they would have no worries. However they seem to have panicked, which to me implies they DID have something to worry about.
I'm certainly no fan of M$, but I have to be very suspicious about the Councils actions here. If they use M$ software they should honour the licence terms no matter how onerous.
Open Source advocates SHOULD remember that burdensome licence terms of closed source commercial software is yet another argument in FAVOUR of the Open Source software/movement.
Of course, that much money (just the money they're paying to take care of uncertain licenses) could probably also buy CD burners and enough blanks to create no-license-hassles copies of Linux or Free / Open / NetBSD for every computer the city owns.
And then they could spend five times that on support. The licence fees are often the cheapest part of an IT department's budget.
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated up.
But how does not having the license show that you don't have one? It only shows that you cannot find one. I realise we have a language barrier but take for example a driving license. I have to be able to produce it by law. Therefore not being able to produce it indicates not having one, same with a gun license. But with software licenses there is no law to say you have to produce it. There is no law to say I even have to keep it. If I want to throw it away with the packaging I am not breaking any law. And in my country, if M$ want to do anything about it then it is up to them to show reasonable cause to believe that I never had one. There is no onus on me to show one.
If they came to my college they would get told to go whistle. If they made a court case out of it I doubt we would even bother with the audit. We would wait until we saw the evidence that they had to say that we were infringing copywrite. If they had good evidence (normally a disgruntled sacked ex-employee saying that they know of machines they installed M$ on without telling anybody) then we would audit and blame M$ who are now in cahouts with the chap that did it.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
Oh, of course I have to install the FREE tools of the resourcekit.
On Unix I also have to write scripts to make my life as an admin easier. The same goes on NT. You can also install PC Anywhere, on NT. Works very ok. (true, it had some bugs over the years, but it's quite stable, as stable as X can be.)
So... where is your nightmare? I don't see it really.
--
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
There are only two things to say about this article:
(1) Virginia Beach brought it upon themselves. If they had bothered to keep track of their important paperwork as they damn well knew they were supposed to, then there wouldn't be any problem.
(2) I just have to respond to this ludicrous pro-Linux propaganda:
Of course, that much money (just the money they're paying to take care of uncertain licenses) could probably also buy CD burners and enough blanks to create no-license-hassles copies of Linux or Free / Open / NetBSD for every computer the city owns.Gee, and would that also cover the higher support cost for Linux? How about the cost of moving all their software over to Linux? Oh wait--what about the cost of buying a shitload of new machines that actually have hardware devices supported by Linux? And the cost of hiring more highly trained people to maintain and perform IT services for those new Linux machines? Hrmm... what about the cost of developing their own software when they can't find equivalent Linux applications to take the place of their Windows counterparts? Oh, don't worry about any of that... after all, it's only tons of money, and what's money got to do with things like operating a government agency or a business?
- "It's just a matter of opinion!" - PRIMUS
I have rarely seen departments who managed the deployment of software and licenses in a controlled and consistant manner. More often than not, I have seen absolute chaos reign when yearly audits of software inventory turned up many missing licenses. It may be a costly exercise to keep on top of such things, but when it comes down to a clearly legal issue, it's worthwhile.
I do think however that it is funny - a teacher at a local college has done analysis of companies, and in performed in-depth interviews with their staff and management and the results from M$ was interesting - honestly, they only expect to retrieve money from 15% of all installations of Windoze to make a decent profit. For the most part they expect government and government related contract companies to comply, making up a majority of the 15%. Small businesses are largely ignored. Medium-sized businesses are the target: 50-200 employees. My wife who was in this teacher's class said that Medium-sized companies are easily bullied.
Although, I would have thought that each installation of Windoze would have its own key or signature on the PC, proving that it was a unique install, or even an install from a site-license. That would reduce the requirement of producing the original CD or license on the spot.
On the other hand, we've all seen a bogus install that needs a quick re-install, so you turn to your neighbour, ask for their CD, and go right ahead with a new install.
Oh well, try your best, track software better, and avoid lawyers.
I donate all spillover Karma to the charity of my choice... Ada was still a babe despite what people may say...
No offense, to all of you that wasted time and money to achieve being a MCSE, but:
I disagree that it's so much easier to find Windows then U*X expertise. Sure, there are zillions claiming to be Windows experts because they're fully capable of double clicking a setup icon.
My experience is that a lot of those self proclamed Windows experts are totally clueless when it comes to the internals of a box and even more cluesless when it comes to vital concepts like a multi user environment, locking, concurrency and consistency problems.
That's certainly not to claim that everybody claiming to be a UNIX sysadmin can tell his ass from a hole in the ground. But I'm quite convinced that the overall quality of folks dealing in UNIX, Open VMS or mainframe operating systems is far superior then the quality of the average Microsoft "expert".
For the rest, I can see your reasoning and you might be right in the short run. In the medium term a company might save cash significantly. Even if there are initial expenses for training, learning curve and general screwups.
But of course, the butt of a manager making such a bold decision is on the line. It's sort of the "let's buy Oracle, I might not be the best database, but since 90% of the market runs it...", you're at no risk as the decision maker.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
They didn't *have* to pay anything. However, their internal audit uncovered that they couldn't find the license info for some of the products. At that point their options were to
a) Keep looking and hope they can find them.
b) Keep looking, not find them, then buy new licenses to make up for the ones that they cannot find.
c) Admit to themselves that they're not going to find the licenses and just buy new licenses to make up for the ones that they cannot find, saving the time and cost of having to keep looking.
d) Play hardball with Microsoft over it, eventually get it taken to court and admit to a judge that your own audits indicate that some of the software you use isn't licensed and then lose the case, be forced to buy the licenses to bring the city back into compliance, be assessed fines for piracy, and then have the legal costs to pay on top of it all.
They chose option C. It's all about bully tactics.
Since software licensing generally isn't a very high priority for most small-to-medium sized buisnesses (25-500 employees), it's a fair bet that at many companies the licensing records aren't kept well enough to endure an audit. Even if all the software is legal, it's easy to lose the records. So all Microsoft has to do is pick a company and "beat the bushes" about an audit. It costs MS the time it takes for an attorney to write a nasty letter. Then the "suspect" company has to do all the work trying to account for the software they use. If the audit shows that they are legal, it costs MS nothing. If the audit shows that the company may not be 100% legal, the company ends up paying the costs to make it all look legal without having to go to court, and MS picks up some extra money for little-to-no-effort.
It's quite a racket, absolutely unethical, and perfectly legal. It's the fault of the companies who don't keep good records that they get burned on it.
A suggestion that this city move to Linux with StarOffice is most certainly not the answer and shows a tremendous lack of understanding of the problem they had.
From the original story, the issue was that while the city IT shop had decided to choose Wordperfect Suite as their standard office productivity tool, that wasn't what their users wanted.
Rather than slog their way through using Wordperfect, the users instead just went ahead and installed Microsoft Office without permission.
So now they find themselves in a position where there is rampant piracy all because the IT staff did not listen to it's users when making a software buying decision.
And you think Linux/StarOffice is the answer? All that would result in is the users bringing Win95 CD's from home to get their computers to a point where they found them useful again.
IT has to talk to it's users, they have to listen to their users, they have to provide solutions taht the users want!
Of course, that much money (just the money they're paying to take care of uncertain licenses) could probably also buy CD burners and enough blanks to create no-license-hassles copies of Linux or Free / Open / NetBSD for every computer the city owns.
Yeah, and who will pay for the retraining of all the employees to use the new systems? Linux may be good for computer savvy ppl like the readers of Slashdot, but expecting everyone to use it is just unreasonable. Heck, how many average users can use DOS? and linux/unix is much more sophisticated. And why do you want more Linux users anyway? The more users, the lower the average IQ...
"Like most software companies, Microsoft includes contracts with its merchandise that explain that the company reserves the right to ask consumers for proof of purchase and an inventory of what it uses. The rule applies not only to governments and privately owned companies but to individuals."
After reading this article I have searched through some of our EULAs from Microsoft and I could find NOT ONE INSTANCE of where Microsoft reserves any right in the respect of asking for proof of ownership. Most EULAs I read mostly explained how you can't run more than one copy, you can't sue Microsoft if something goes wrong and Microsoft offers no warranty with the products.
Can anybody show documentation of where it states in any Microsoft EULA that you give up your constitutional rights? (i live in america)
This is a rare case, they went after a public entity. I don't believe they have that right for private entities. This FUD is what is turning our laws away from individual rights, into corporate rights, all in the name of money
If you need 6000 copies of software, why are you phucking with 6000 sheets of hologramed paper? Don't companies sell site licenses anymore? I even remember my school having (gasp!) and unlimited copy site license for Windows 3.11/DOS 6.22.
I'm not one to promote piracy, but this is just sickening. We are talking about a city here. Next thing you know Microsoft is going to be suing a childrens hospital for missing proof of ownership. This is coming from one of the most massive companies in the world who in my opinion is an overpowering monopoly. Not to mention the fact that Microsoft didn't pay one CENT in taxes last year. It is just sadistic for Microsoft to pressure cities out of their tax money. Money that comes from the schools, the hospitals, among many other important sources...and for what? So Microsoft can buy another lot of blue stress balls for their employees? This is merely pennies in Microsoft's infinitely deep pockets.
Just when I thought Microsoft couldn't get any lower, they go and completely prove me wrong. Please tell me I am not the only person that finds this disturbing.
The audit right was reserved by Microsoft in the damn EULA's for the software that VA beach installed. VA Beach was contractually bound to let M$ perform the audit. Their only defense would be that the audit right was an adhesionary term (not a bad argument against a monopolist.)
/.er's spend so damn much time griping and pontificating about these topics. It is to my chagrin that I have to endure the arduous, ambivalent and agonizing education of tunnel visionary, cubicle drone "engineers" in matters of the law.
Now, please allow me to rant. When I see a thread with such a thorough misunderstanding of how the law work (and license agreements in particular), I get so annoyed because
I have a suggestion for those of you who moan about free software vs. open software and violations of the GPL -- read Farnsworth on Contracts and then go read Nimmer on Copyrights.
Windows. Nobody buys that shit so it comes on the comp.
The willingness of humanity to follow without question is the fall of them.
Sullivan said city employees are now required to get permission from the information technology division before making software purchases.
Wouldn't adding restrictions on purchases encourage employees to pirate software if they can't get it approved, putting them back in the same situation they started in?
To be quite frank, MS gets a lot of money to sell something that cost hardly nothing to make.
In at least one case, that of client access licences, they are actually getting money for nothing. Not that microsoft is alone with doing this.
While I used to agree with you (and I DO read all my manuals (and howtos and man pages, etc. etc.), I no longer do. I shouldn't HAVE to read all that crap to get basic stuff done...and that is all that most people ever do! Furthermore, why should they bother to read the manual to learn how to use features that they'll never actually use? Which is all most software features are. Read it when you need it...
You also provided the perfect example of this: the VCR...most people don't care to figure out how to program their VCR because they only use their VCR to watch rental movies...and most of us don't bother to "solve" the blinking 12 because we
- don't need a 10th, horribly inaccurate, (or 20th or 30th....) clock in the house, and
- the power goes out frequently enough that it becomes a real PITA to keep fixing the damn clock.
It isn't because people are too stupid (okay, maybe I speak too quickly...most people probably ARE too stupidA proprietary piece of software requires tracking of it's licenses - an issue that has been routinely ignored by most companies.
Which also means that easy end user installation is a problem rather than a feature. If the user needs to get the sysadmin to install software then that makes creating an appropriate system easier.
Hmmm, M$ infiltrates... Just another attempt to try to dominate the market... Just makes me wanna use Linux (or any non-M$ OS) that much more... If the M$ police come to my house they're gonna be pissed, just an old 95 disk w/ license and 3 floppies w/ a DOS 6.22 license, along with tons on Linux install cd's that I burned as well as "official" software disks from RedHat. So I challenge Bill and his thugs, "I call you out Bill!!!"
------
Random, useless fact: I type in startx entirely with my left hand.
so all it takes is for Microsoft to alledge that you stole their software? then you are guilty? if you steal from a department store they have to catch you. if they don't catch you then do they months later visit your home, find stuff in your home that they sell in their store, and then charge you with theft because you threw away your receipt months earlier?? totally bogus.
Hmmm. I don't think they do 'unlimited' anymore. They wanna squeeze all the juice fro you... You know Bill... But they DO have site licenses, that's for sure.
I understand your point about more control over users, but with NT you basically get two choices.
1) Users can change anything.
2) Users can change nothing.
Now, mind you, we administer 240 PC's, and 120 X-terminals. While the amount of time spent fixing PC's is not catistropic, it is considerably larger that time spent on the X-terms.
That being said, the real plus to the X side of things is total control over the environment, total configurability and total application server transparency. Most of our business applications run on this platform. Solid, stable, easy to manage/confiugre, and runnable on PC's too with X clients. You can have the best of both worlds, the PC headace only where Office type apps are needed. Centralized/X/Web apps for all running the business" stuff. On top of that I'm toying with the idea of shoehorning in StarOffice for viewing MS Office apps on the X side of things
Arguments can be made for both sides, but an "open" environment model gives you flexibility for the future. It takes more work to develop, but it pays off.
Hmm...proving that accounting is not quite as simple as we would like to believe.
Microsoft is a private corporation. Do they actually have any right to check on whether the software you use is legal? I realise that the police/copyright theft department/whatever have legal rights to find out whether you're running licensed applications, but does the company that created them? Certainly they're not within their rights to come in uninvited. Could the city have simply asked Microsoft to go away?
Also, what effect will this have on the use of Microsoft software in the future within the city? I would imagine it'd have little affect, once the platform is chosen it tends to stay the same for a long time. On the other hand this sort of stuff causes much aggro. I say bring back site licenses.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
I ain't a zealot of any sort. There is no reason for me to get the Blue Screen o' Death when all I did was placed my copy of The Sims into the DVD-Rom drive and clicked on "Install". Of course the subsequent reboot fried my Hard Drive.
Microsoft claims that Linux isn't a real OS because it doesn't have this or that feature that Winows has, well when you think about how buggy those features that Windows has are, then Windows doesn't really have them.
Oops, I've gone on too long, I'm starting sound like a zealot.
Ok, then get this: I installed Y2K 10 days ago. Then I installed some Canon software to link a digital Ixus to my laptop and guess what: Somehow everything is screwed up now. The software can neither be de-installed nor re-installed and the laptop won't go into standby mode "because the 101/102 keyboard driver" is somehow messed up since then and I never even dreamed of messing around with the registry.
Granted, I don't have a clue about what's going on and frankly: I dont want to have a clue. The point is: I installed software, which was supposed to be installed and to run on the target platform, but it doesn't and it messes things up and that annoys me.
Of course, not everything under U*X works perfectly, but the major difference is transparency. If I install a Sybase Data Server and / or Replication server (which is by definition rather complex software) I know precisely what goes on on an Sun Solaris, an HP U/X or a Linux box. If something messes up I can clean the system perfectly. After cleanup there is no evidence that anybody ever attempted to install those products.
No such luck on NT/W2K. If something goes wrong there you might have a very serious problem and you might never be able to get back to a clean state, safe for a complete re-install.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Oh and it's just that easy right. You just take the end users Win box from them which they get around in fairly well (they are used to it) and then set a U*X box in front of them and no problems. Bull#%#$, You can just change something small on their Win box and they get totally confused. If you switch their entire system wait and see how many helpdesk calls come pouring in on things like how do I do this now or how do I do that
In which case it probaby dosn't matter if you move them from Windows (X) to Windows (Y) or from Windows (X) to U*X. Maybe someone should make a unix desktop and call it Windows 2001...
I disagree that it's so much easier to find Windows then U*X expertise. Sure, there are zillions claiming to be Windows experts because they're fully capable of double clicking a setup icon.
Well it's rather difficult for people to become experts without information being available.
Also, users might be pissed initially about not being able to use Outlook.
Someone might even rediscover the lost art of "systems analysis" possibly even the radical idea of finding/adapting/writing software to fit the organisation, rather than expecting the organisation to fit the software. Far easier with the software equivalent of "lego" than the current monolithing monsters.
Doesn't cost you anything. So... where are your arguments now? ah I see... you don't understand HOW to remote administrate NT server. Well. that's fine. But don't come with default Unix rethoric crap that NT lacks this and that. It doesn't. All tools needed are available and most of them free and installed with NT or with a free service pack (read: kernel update), or free resource kit. But whatever... you of course know more of NT administration than I do. :) (do you really ;)?)
--
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
I ain't a zealot of any sort. There is no reason for me to get the Blue Screen o' Death when all I did was placed my copy of The Sims into the DVD-Rom drive and clicked on "Install". Of course the subsequent reboot fried my Hard Drive.
The point is that in the case of a work machine clicking "install" should do nothing. Installing software is a job for the sysadmin, who should know what to do if it pukes up.
Microsoft claims that Linux isn't a real OS because it doesn't have this or that feature that Winows has, well when you think about how buggy those features that Windows has are, then Windows doesn't really have them.
Or the Windows features are there to cope with a Windows inadequacy. A bit like someone looking at a B2 and saying "it's got no tailplane, not a proper aircraft."
Proprietary software vendors attack free software by invoking "total cost of ownership." An expensive operating system will pay for itself because of zero-administration features, because it's more stable, because it's the standard.
Have you ever talked to a salesman who said, "And how will you account for all your licenses?" Microsoft's raid on VA Beach vividly demonstrates an addition to the TCO of proprietary software.
Didn't we make jokes a while ago about this? Cities paying microsoft money? Microsoft buying small countries/islands/cities/hamlets... ugh.
How many Linux/BSD/OtherFreeOS fans out there, with their proverbial faces pressed against the fishbowl of corporate ignorance, screaming to unleash the penguin? How many of you are forced into using MSCrap V.2000, because your boss just doesn't believe that if you build the right distribution, and the right file/print/directory architecture, you can distribute software to the desktop, server, etc., with a few simple perl scripts, and pocket change? End users need six things. 1. A pretty desktop with a JPEG of thier dog/cat/kids/car/boat... 2. E-Mail 3. A calendar 4. Word processor 5. Spreadsheet 6. Browser KDE's apps already fill the bill here (although I am not a KDE fan.) Gnome works. Enlightenment is getting pretty stable. WindowMaker is cool..... and so on. The only real hole here that I can see is Mozilla's bugs, and the big chunk of the net that "only works with IE". Scream at your boss... Have a nice day.
Monkey lover...
I disagree. Let me back that with a story. An ex-colleague of mine worked as a sysadmin for the second largest computer company world wide.
They first tested Micro$oft Exchange within a group of ~ 40 people and then decided to deploy it world wide.
That was bad news from the admins point. The reason being the GUI to maintain all acoounts.
The key word here is scripting. When you have to change the properties for 50'000 users it's sort of more efficient to work on a script for half a day and then just run it. With a GUI you click on a user, change her properties and click OK. [Repeat 50000 times].
Sure, you may argue, but there is perl. True, but the internals of Windows is so screwed and intransparent, that it's very hard to apply scripting. And M$ native script capabilities are a badly documented joke
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
BSA: Show me all your licenses. You have a week.
Company A: I have none. We all use GPL'd software.
BSA: I don't care, gimme a check if you have none, and we'll see if you'll get sued. Good luck.
Company A: Ok, here's your check.
And this goes to the papers.
Company B Employee: Let's use opensource software.
Company B Manager: Do we get licenses for that?
Company B Employee: No, but it's not needed.
Company B Manager (reading the newspaper): Hm...let's go for M$ software instead.
In Texas, you are perfectly free to shoot the living shit out of anyone who is tresspassing on your property. Tresspassing is defined as any person being on your property that you don't want there, unless they are performing an official government duty (police, fire, paramedics, serving of subpeona, etc). This is a fairly technical interpretation of the law, i.e. don't expect to off the gas meter lady and waltz free. But still hopefully it'll give those M$ bastards pause, being mindful that something like 65% of texas households have 2 or more firearms... ;-)
A slightly more realistic reading of the law would be that if they asked to come in, and you said no, but they tried to force their way in, then it becomes Open Season On Microsofties Day, and let the fireworks begin... :-) I've often wondered if my .300 Winchester Magnum would work on a Microsoftie with normal bullets or if I'd need to lay in some silver...
(Note for the humor-impaired, I'm not actually advocating the shooting of M$ employees. Unless they're assholes, in which case the Asshole season in texas is Jan 1 -> Dec 31, with no bag limit.)
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News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Of course; and moreover I really enjoyed our exchange.
Have a most delightful weekend.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
And maybe Linux developers would like to get paid for coding boring shit like office twaddle. Games are more fun, and text processing is a solved problem (i.e. vim || emacs && (La)TeX).
:-)
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News for Geeks in Austin, TX
The company I work for now (I am sure they would not appreciate me mentioning thier very conservative name, so I'll call them company X) recently purchased company Y for a big chunk of change. Company Y had XX,000 lic' for win95/office. When company X purchased company Y, your frendly neighborhood Software Nazi called and asked for a check for XX,000 win95/office lic's! Win lic's are NON-TRANSFERRABLE! We settled and paid for about half of lic's. I seriously could not believe it. Has anyone else heard of this tactic? Company y was purchasing lic's through some sort of corporate program directly from MS, so all they had to do was read the financial papers, make a phone call and rake in the dough...
Monkey lover...
Whether for licenses or not, this seems to be more an issue about record keeping. They didn't so they had to pay. Recordkeeping is a good thing, hopefully people learn something from it.
Have you read my journal today?
Is legal to
Two factors are at work here:
Whether a shrinkwrap license is an enforceable contract is a subject of considerable debate. However, because Virginia has passed UCITA, cities (and other customers, including individuals) in that state would appear to have little recourse.
So, it appears that "that" is legal.
MacOS, Windows, BeOS, GNOME, KDE: they're all just Xerox copies
COBOL/MVS wrote: "Face it, Virginia Beach got caught with their pants down and they knew it. Rather than face up to illegally (sp?) using Windows and other MS stuff, they paid the fiddler and called it even. Rules are rules. The GPL has rules and MS licenses have rules. Whether you like them or not, if you don't follow them, you'll get smacked!"
...
... this is hard to prove, but my conclusion based on very limited knowledge is that most documents written in Office shouldn't have been;) -- it's the expanding memo theory. KOffice has kinks, but ask a long-time Word user (I was in a former job) whether Word has any showstoppers, and boy does it. (Starting with viruses.) But most of these documents containing scripting and such are written with no maintainability in mind and shouldn't have been written that way. I know, that doens't change that they exist and may still be useful, but at what point do you say "Hey, this might not even work for the next version of word, guys, so let's not embed quite so much complexity in our office docs."?
two responses to that part of it;) 1) some of those unfindable licenses are probably actually illegal -- burned CD-Rs of Word etc. However, there are probably lots of licenses unfindable for the reasons which other people have already pointed out -- re-installs using technicians copies rather than the per-machine copy after system failures, simple bad record-keeping, etc. 2) Agreed. I'm not saying they shouldn't pay -- if they entered the agreement, they ought to pay according to its terms. 129,000 is pocket change for VA Beach, at least if their overall budget is any indication (go read the speech by their Mayor about where they're spending money!).
More important, though, is the stuff you said first: "Try running Office, or VB or any other MS tool that most entities running Windows uses. Linux is not the answer all the time, especially if you can't run the tools that run your business (or government) on it. And don't try to tell me "you can convert to StarOffice, blah, blah, blah" because if you have thousands of documents to convert, you'll end up spending a lot of money. And, if those documents have macros embedded in them that are written in VBA, you're really into a dilly of a pickle."
Ok, we may be looking at a half-full glass and saying "Oh, it's a plastic cup!" but
IMHO, the real problem with using (most)(proprietary) software is file formats. Like you say, switching is expensive. Import filters for Word --> StarOffice etc exist but are flakey, and will always be subject to leapfrogging by MS.
This is why I think it's a bad idea to be dependent on file formats which are subject to such whims. If VA Beach had required long-term document storage to be in (say) RTF or SGML, it would be a lot easier for them to convert not just to Linux or another Free OS, but also for instance to Sun etc. Document portability that way works easier with well-standardized, open formats not only between sw vendors but between hardware tiers -- if you're running UNIX servers served by guys running Solaris or Linux workstations, and Windows clients elsewhere, you need either 2nd machines or other workarounds for the UNIX guys to read the same documents that everyone else can, if they're in Word format. Will cops have iPAQs or similar?
And about using Office, VB, etc
I work on a Linux box every day, and plenty of people who read Slashdot do too. That doesn't mean it's "ready for everyone" but I'd certainly recommend Mandrake over Windows to a computer newbie for both ease of install and included applications. Most software is horrible, but on a relative scale, I don't think Windows is "easier than Linux" necessarily, as it's been painted.The problem is, Windows isn't "ready for everyone" either! But workable, slick WYSIWYG word processors? KWord is nice, AbiWord is better in some ways but has some bad flaws, too. Plenty of browsers, etc. (I used konqueror last night and was duly impressed; does IE have any tangible advantages over konqueror?).
Sigh. I'm rambling, I know, but my point in saying that you could get an awful lot of Open Source software for 129,000 is not that this will magically make the city able to replace all it's MS stuff overnight, but that in the long term it's smart not to be beholden to proprietary and expensive formats. (And it will get worse with "rental by the month" software.)
Cheers,
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Unless I am mistaken, Virginia is one of only 2 states that have passed UCITA. UCITA is the bill that gives a great deal of strength to shrinkwrapped software licenses. Did this impact MS's choice of Virginia Beach as a target?
Sigs are awesome huh?
Whoops - typo. Meant to say "that's another 5%...
The 'short-term' investment isn't a 'short-term' investment. It is difficult enough to get a new employee from a Mac environment caught up to a Windows environment. If the office spent the money, tanked all the other projects (losing several contracts with clients because the resources wouldn't be there to fulfil the needs), and then each and every employee would have to have to be specifically trained. Local temp agencies don't recruit StarOffice users and the local city colleges don't have convenient night courses in StarOffice and Linux. Basic jobs, like Department clerk, now require someone with more specialized knowledge instead of someone who had to write their papers on a word processor in school. The hidden costs could be staggering. Try to convince the VP-IS and the PotC to do this. In a mainstream company I'll tell you this proposal would go over like a brick.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
When they come back 12 months later the situation will be the same and another 10% of systems will seem to have no license. etc etc
Why bother with the difficult job of writing s/w when you can milk your customers and sell them stuff they have already paid for.
<scene location="some IS dept., some city">
<voice type="hoarse" accent="Italian">
It has come to our attention that some of the software you posess may not have proper licenses. This wounds us deeply, as it shows a lack of respect for us.
However, we will give you a chance to make
It would be most unfortunate, if you fail to make amends. In this business, unfortunate, accidents, happen, accidents we could help, prevent.
I am sure you will do the right thing, for I know you respect me, Don Gates.
</scene>
</voice>
</music>
With apologies to any responsible businessmen or Italians out there.
www.eFax.com are spammers
According to the article, "Microsoft sent a brief letter to the purchasing agent in the city's technology department demanding that the Beach produce a list of the company software it uses along with proof of purchase." Because MS isn't the police, it didn't have to say, "You have to right to be silent."
If VA Beach was smart, it would have (and may have, for all we know) sandbagged. Maybe it actually uses 10,000 copies of MS software, but only 'fessed up to 6,500, and didn't have time to find even that many licenses.
I would really have liked to tell MS to go away. On the other hand, VA Beach is a city. Microsoft is a country. I can't say I blame them for rolling over.
At least try to get your facts straight...
In FY2000, MSFT paid $4.2B in taxes, which is quite a bit more than one CENT - in fact, it was 34% of their pre-tax net income.
If you're going to harp on them, at least do it with facts...
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside a dog it's too dark to read. - Groucho Marx
Exactly, hence the quotes around magnanimous.
I guess you're referring to MS's impressive performance on TPC benchmarks. I don't mean to detract from Microsoft's accomplishment in setting new speed records, I think these scores have less linkage to reality than MS suggests.
These results have little relevance to the average enterprise - I don't think the City of Virginia Beach needs a 24-way SMP machine to process their parking tickets or whatever. The basic reasons linux doesn't show up on these benchmarks are lack of scalable SMP and lack of funding to participate.
These results have little relevance to the high end, because people who architect this stuff are quite conservative and prefer proven platforms like Sun E-series, HP's, Sequents. Neither Linux nor NT really has anything to offer this market. Lower cost per transaction? Great, until the first avoidable outage. Then the machine will eat all its savings in 30 seconds.
No offense, to all of you that wasted time and money to achieve being a MCSE
That statement is extremely offensive. Do you somehow think that the number of MCSEs somehow affects the level of the education provided by the certification? I found it invaluable. Aparrently somehow it is a waste of time and money to advance your IT skills, but it has done a lot for my career.
What applications are critical for the Municipal environment? Perhaps someone could package a distro for that class of users. The major requirements that I see for such a distro are:
1. COST
2. Ease of ADMINISTRATION
3. Ease of Use
4. Office Tools
Just a though.
linux.. they can't *give* that shit away.
-linux... they can't *give* that shit away.
Actually I have over 50 spam filters to protect 30 users. You should try it sometime. like NOW.
The willingness of humanity to follow without question is the fall of them.
My friend owns fuckmicrosoft.com, Maybe you should visit it and see just how shitty your OS actually is.
The willingness of humanity to follow without question is the fall of them.
The councilwoman is posing. System administration is hard. You have to prioritize your tasks. Let's see: shall I put out the fire in the computer room or file some more license certificates? The Microsoft gestapo could audit us ... nah.
Keep in mind that most of the software we're talking about here is client software: 6,000+ products over almost 4,000 computers. A department should be able to buy software from Microcenter or direct from foo.com. Now, "city employees are ... required to get permission from the information technology division before making software purchases."
Obviously, VA Beach can and will keep better records, although having the appearance of doing so ensures they'll never be audited again.
You're a fucking idiot. IT professionals don't have to know or use linux to be good at their job. I'm sure you would have zero experience with some of the systems I use in my job, but does that make you bad at yours?
every pc that comes in the door here is instantly imaged to company standard. I made a 3 cd set with a boot disk that automagically configures the pc upon boot-up to my standards and everything is happy.
Buy a pc, order more licesnses, re-image the drives. if someone installs unauthorized software I re-image from the network with a floppy (soon the fresh installs will all be server based!)
So it is that easy, just erase the fodder that comes with the computer (Or order from a company that will image to your standard, most that are worth it will.)
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
- sudo - Nobody should have root on any workstations. Sysadmins should have appropriately tailored sudo rights. If you have heavy-duty applications, the application administrators should be different from the platform admins. Naturally, the vast majority of boxes will never be logged into.
- snmpd - Your central monitoring server can constantly sweep the workstations and collect memory, load and other stats. Proactively solve problems before a user notices.
- ssh - With appropriate keys, it can be used by automated scripts to collect info or change configuration on all the workstations.
- rsync - Rides on top of ssh to distribute new software.
- remote re-imaging - there are several ways to automate this. If a workstation gets utterly hosed, it's not worth troubleshooting. Sorry if that sound un-unixy. You want to easily re-image without user intervention. Ideally, you want the hell-desk to be able to do this from a web page. This is a good reason to mount home directory over NFS, but I know you're asking about the un-nfs solutions.
- strong central database - your 6000 machines won't be uniform. You'll have different ages, models, configurations, OS levels. The database keeps track of what build of every software package is on each machine, hw configurations, and history. Without this you're flying blind.
- test pool and pilots - You need a lab with representative workstations to test new software on. Then roll out to a small subset of the population - 'pilot' users who are good at reporting problems. When that works, you can roll out to the whole machine population. That database keeps track of the rollout state so if the script is interrupted partway through, you know where to resume.
In real life, you don't get to plan installations like this and make them perfect. You inherit what's there and try to improve it.What the heck is a large IT department doing with discreet licenses? Only a moron would buy it that way, you pay way too much and it's a nightmare. (Let alone software police dream... instant infraction.. there is no way in hell you can pass it with single copies.)
Buy a blanket license from MS, then they will keep the Softcops out... butthen isnt that alot like the extortion rackets? Pay us X amount and we will "protect" your business....
Hmmm...
oh well... I have one piece of paper for each app. and the paper states the number of copies I can run. and if I am audited (twice a year by corperate) it's easy.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Wake up, set yourself free
Good morning America
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Why does everyone assume that it was M$ Windows that was causing the problems? This audit was for ALL Microsoft products. Very few users (of M$ products at least) actually install their own operating system. Rather, they're more likely to have bought the M$ Office Suite, Encarta, and similar products. Although using Linux has its advantages, there isn't a Word equivalent editor, or a presentation tool like PowerPoint that could be used by any braindead city employee.
The scary part about this story is that:
"Like most software companies, Microsoft includes contracts with its merchandise that explain that the company reserves the right to ask consumers for proof of purchase and an inventory of what it uses. The rule applies not only to governments and privately owned companies but to individuals."
And it appears that no one has challenged this provision. This means that M$ could go into your house, and demand that you provide an actual inventory of what products you use, and proofs of purchase. If you've ever bought a laptop or any hardware that came with the M$ operarting system, or anything else from M$ you could be up next. Got to love those shrinkwrap licenses!
Thalia
I realise that American law is weird but why did they have to pay anything unless there was some reason to believe that fraud had taken place? Surely it is up to M$ to show that the licenses were not bought (burden of proof) rather than for the council to prove that they were.
If I were one of the taxpayers I would want to know why the audit was so poor that they could not defend themselves but I would also want to know why they were wasting time defending themselves if there was no case to answer.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
You want someone to blame, someone to sue? I'm sure you didn't actually mean that, but it sure sounds like that's what you meant.
Our government, who is trying to shut down Microsoft, shouldn't be STEALING MONEY from Microsoft, too.
The problem with your argument is that Microsoft doesn't do shit to be accountable. If there is a bug in the software, it takes them forever to make a patch, and their software is very unstable and bloated...furthermore, because the software is not open source, less security holes are noticed and fixed by users and companies; however, those securitie holes are noticed and exploited by hackers who use reverse-engineering software. On the other hand, OS' like Debian and OpenBSD are extremely stable; because they are open sourced, bugs can be fixed, and security holes closed quickly, as they are. Security flaws in the BSD's are usually fixed very quickly. To be quite frank, MS gets a lot of money to sell something that cost hardly nothing to make. Compare pay-for software to pay-for hardware, and you'll find that pay-for software is a rip off. For both software and hardware, their is the research cost. However, for software don't have to pay for material resources to sell it...for hardware you do...now, consider WindowsNT, which can be *very* expensive, and also MS Office 2000 Professional, which is about 500 dollars.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
You have no legal right at all to enter my house as you can clearly see I run stable OSes based on Open Source code. *Hides the pirate M$ CDs*
Sorry about that Mr. M$ Rat, I am sure you were thought you were going to have an oppurtunity to try and force me to pay bloated prices for your buggy barely functional 'software.' Tux sends his regards!
*Slams door shut in face of M$ Rat and heads back to reinstall Winblowz on M$ compiler machines and restore backed up data*
-My thoughts on M$ trying to nail me for piracy.
First you got to get into my house, but by then
this is what they would find happening.
-1 Overrated (Too many big words for me to comprehend)
well..depending on your users needs and how much you want to spend for servers you would setup dump X terminals (old PC's are easy to convert into remote boot/nfs-root/readonly filesystem/X terminals). you would need one application server with lots of RAM and CPU power for about 20 to 200 users.. depending on their needs... the Xterms basically need no maintenance once setup.. then you have about 100 application servers.. basically those can be remote amin'ed.. they could share most of their files and setup on a common NFS server. or if it is in a remote location you would mirror most of the basic setup.. basically: a hand full of good admins can run that place including a few dump Xterminal replace technicans in case of broken hardware..
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
Of course, that much money (just the money they're paying to take care of uncertain licenses) could probably also buy CD burners and enough blanks to create no-license-hassles copies of Linux or Free / Open / NetBSD for every computer the city owns.
Or that $129,000 could have been used to buy some filing cabinets (probably pretty nice ones for that much money) so that they can keep the licenses in there in case of future raids.
-- toolie
But, when Granma logs into a thingie that resembles a PC. Enlighenment opens and Granma knows that when she clicks the left mouse button she can open all applications she loves. She can save her documents with ease, because everything defaults to /home/granma and it's totally transparent to her.
Granme will even see analogies to the c:\ directory on a Windows machine and realize that she can organize her filesto her hearts desire.
Of course, somebody has to set up the box and it's probably not Granma. But granma can be shielded from the gory inniards of a U*X type box nowadays.
Oh, and after Granma turns into HackerGranny she can open those cool, transparent Eterms through which she sees the wallpaper - A photo of her grandchildren.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
It doesn't matter if you only run GPLed systems, the BSA nazis will still kick down your door and force you into an audit. Even if you play nice with them and show them all your BSD/Linux machines and servers.
I know of one development company, entirely unix oriented, who was raided by the BSA nazis backed by local law enforcement. They had refused to allow the BSA to take over their entire network for 2-4 days because they couldn't afford the hit to their release schedule. After only a few letters to the BSA and one meeting, they were raided.
During the raid, everyone had to leave the building. All of the servers were powered down (so much for long uptimes) without even a shutdown command. Since the machines were BSD and Solaris based, the disks were removed and placed inside of special "audit machines" to be scanned. The auditors weren't completely clueless, but their first questions were "What version of Windoze are you using on this sparcstation?". When it was discovered by the raiding team everything was *nix, they had to call in a special *nix team the next day to perform the audit. The *nix team tried very hard to restore the systems, and eventually allowed the admins to help out. Even the cisco routers had their configs wiped, which is why I was called in.
The raid didn't produce one instance of a license violation, and now the BSA is fighting a lawsuit to recover costs for all the damage they did to the machines, servers, and network, plus lost productivity and market share. The BSA lost the first court case, and are now claiming to have no money, since they are just a non-profit pseudo-law-enforcement organisation. I'm not naming the company since they want to keep a very low profile until they get their money. The BSA has a history of trying to tarnish reputations when things get public, and this company is getting ready for an IPO.
So don't think the GPL will save you, the BSA will still want to audit you just to make sure you have paid your M$ tax.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Have you used Star Orifice??
Yes. And I didn't forget to install truetype fonts, so it works perfectly with documents that were written using the same fonts by Microsoft lamers like you (Microsoft formats are so shitty, minimal change in font totally screws up the layout, so if you run StarOffice with minimal set of X fonts, most of documents will be be barely recognizable -- but then, I dare you to run Word on Windows with deleted Arial and Times New Roman fonts).
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
That's a gross understatement. Even at $1 per CD for 10K machines that's not a lot of money. And why would you want one CD per computer? You could always use one CD on multiple machines, or better still, install over the network anyway. The costs just don't bear comparison.
Of course I'm trying to imply anything about the Total cost of ownership here.