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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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
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?
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 $129,000 than forcing everyone in the city to use linux? Oh wait, never mind, wrong story.
--
The shareholder is always right.
You can make money off of their technological incompetance.
You can turn them in to the BSA, and in some countries even collect bonuses.
just think, another tool to push *your* political agenda.
Start today!
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Of course, that much money (just the money they're paying to take care of uncertain licenses) could probably also buy CD burners and enough blanks to create no-license-hassles copies of Linux or Free / Open / NetBSD for every computer the city owns.
Of course, that much money wouldn't come near paying the annual salaries for the army of tech support people they would need to add to the staff try to keep Linux/Unix running on the city's desktops.
These OS's are NOT free...the software itself just doesn't cost anything. You can slam MS products all you want, and they aren't perfect, but they do the job with lower total cost of ownership.
In this case, it is almost a scam by M$ 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.
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.
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
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
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.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
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.
I agree. Not neccessarily that Windows is the best quality software available, but that you should buy what is best suited to get the job done. And in many times, Linux is NOT the answer. Looking at the probable average computer experience of a civil servant workforce, something like Linux is probably above their heads.
HOWEVER, if someone were to sit down and write a specific application (CivilServant 2000) for that community, and distribute it as an application under linux, that takes into account the userbase, then it might be useful. Especially one that turned a linux desktop into a CivilServant terminal, like those computerized cash registers you see.
My 2 pesos
I sig, therefore I am.
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.
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?
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, $129k only buys you 645 hours, less admin costs and taxes. Two guys working for eight weeks aren't going to manage the switchover for six thousand workstations and servers. (No two guys I know.)
Plus, remember that this is the government we're talking about. If they switched operating systems, they would have to retrain all existing network admins. You can't just go and lay off your admins because they don't know Linux: these small-government employees are lifers, and it's about as close to job security as you could ever get.
What's your damage, Heather?
Even if Virginia beach told M$ 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)
You're right in one point. Administering a Windows system (let alone thousands) is hard. I disagree with the other part of your statement however.
You have a point that setting up a Linux box is hard for Average Q User. Expertise that can set up a reference distribution exists and can be bought. When a Linux box is set up well it runs and runs and runs. From that point on adminstering a UNIX type box is significantly easier.
You don't have to deal with everybodyisroot. Remote administration is easier and you have no such thing as a screwed up registry within a couple weeks.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
I'm not going to stop glibly saying that because I think it's in everybody's best interests to destroy the monopoly that produces the garbage that is Windows. This goal of monopoly destruction is well worth a temporarily slightly less than optimal solution to a particular problem. And whether or not it's slightly less than optimal is rather debatable IMHO. I think you're just afraid of a world without customer lock-in and propietary liscenses because you can't figure out how to make money by doing things other than stealing from the public domain and selling it to your customers.
This liscensing thing is a ridiculous abuse of the system on Microsoft's part. People should abandon this liscensing scheme. I'm happy this is being so well publicized so people truly realize what an evil trap they're getting themselves into when they buy into the Microsoft ideal.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Actually, the post was about quality, not features. However, since you asked, I will give you features of Linux that I _think_ aren't in Windows (I know, I should check my facts, but I don't have an NT box anywhere near).
1) Logical Volume Management - The ability to
a) have "virtual" partitions that span disks
b) be able to grow or shrink these while the system is running
c) be able to make a "snapshot" - this allows you to make a copy of the system as it stands on a particular second, while the rest of the system keeps running. For example, the "tar" command will back up files as it comes across them, and if there are interfile dependencies - these will be toasted. But the snapshot feature allows you to back up everything simultaneously without stopping your system. This is actually a 2.4 feature, but it is very spiffy.
2) Standards-compliant and pluggable authentication. If I understand correctly, the only way Win2000 computers can authenticate is to other Windows servers. With Linux, the authentication methods are entirely pluggable, so you could come up with your own authentication method if you wished.
3) Ability to run without the GUI. I've actually heard of being able to do this with NT4 (by setting shell to explorer.exe in win.ini), but I imagine that you can't do much once you're there. No matter what kind of machine you are running on, it will run faster without a GUI, and will run much stabler (or whatever that adjective is) because graphic drivers cause much of NTs problems.
4) Run diskless X-terminals. As far as manageability and TCO, nothing beats terminals. Windows has started to have this, with Windows Terminal Server, but I'm told that there are lots of problems. X was made to run this way, so you don't run into the same problems (until you start doing games with sound or 3-D graphics, but then you wouldn't care about TCO in those situations anyway). Also, note that it doesn't take a lot of horsepower for Linux to do this. I do this on my home computer, where the server is a PII-200 with 64M, where it is running both my wife's stuff (the server is actually her desktop), and my stuff that I'm running on a diskless machine.
Windows has some advantages, too. For example,
1) They've made it easier to manage the network from a single console. Netware actually has had this forever, but I'm told that Microsoft's has started to work well.
2) It is easier to set up the most common case. However, this has a converse, in that slightly more complicated cases are a real pain to set up. With Linux, in just 3 days I was able to set up a system for my boss that did Web hosting for multiple domains that he could run himself (no experience except Win9x). In fact, I've been gone from the company for over a year, and he hasn't had to find a sysadmin yet.
Anyway, I'm probably missing arguments from both sides, so please add your responses with the stuff I missed!
Engineering and the Ultimate
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.
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...
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!
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.
A 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.
However, if you can't find your ownership papers anywhere (can you say inquisitive 2 year old?), then after a small inconvenience, I'm sure you can find proof of ownership from the DMV, the dealership you purchased the car from, etc.
Making both parties keep track of any transaction is not only good for accounting reasons, it creates redundancies in case one party happens to (oops) misplace the physical proof that they actually own the software. Any time I've been involved in any purchasing for a company, there have been at least four copies of the purchase order, and at least four of the delivery slip. Plus, the companies we purchased from all had records of our purchases. Granted, it was all hardware, but c'mon folks, really. How hard can it be?
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
You have a point that setting up a Linux box is hard for Average Q User. Expertise that can set up a reference distribution exists and can be bought. When a Linux box is set up well it runs and runs and runs. From that point on adminstering a UNIX type box is significantly easier.
This is about a corporate set up, John Q user shouldn't be setting up their computer, any more than they should be doing maintenance on their company car.
The only reason it's become an issue is that Windows more or less demands that the end user perform sysadmin tasks.
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
People need to stop glibly saying that you should just use Linux - Windows is the best quality software available, and people should pay for it accordingly.
Incorrect - the software that runs on top of Windows is the best-quality software available. 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. Windows has probably been the best marketing tool Linux could ever ask for, and it's usually software other than Windows itself that keeps people tied to the platform.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
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.
No doubt cigarette companies can find healthy smokers in their 90s... The Windows registry is fragile by design.
Why waste time finding the cause? Support departments reinstall because it fixes the problem, and saves days and weeks of screwing around. You can have a customer up and running again in less than 10 minutes..
Except that that 10 minutes (which sounds more like a reimaging than a reinstall) can easily mount up over time. Anyway it's not just that 10 minutes, other time is lost whilst the thing wasn't working.
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."
I have never met a user who has a particular problem with a setup where they have a home drive mapped. In fact it makes sense to them.. home is in H:
Assuming the admin knows the right incantation to get each app to use H: as it's default load/save location.
With roaming network profiles it gets saved to a network drive, allowing it to be retrieved from any machine on the network.
The problems with these Windows profiles are a lack of admin tools for them and what amounts to a very lazy writeback cache algorithm, which means login twice and all hell can break loose.
Incorrect - the software that runs on top of Windows is the best-quality software available.
Or possibly the only software available, objectivly it can be of utterly dreadful quality...
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.
or (and I KNOW we've all heard this one) "I'd switch, but everything else besides Windows isn't really that good for gaming!"
This is about corporate systems, if the staff are playing games at work then there si a serious problem...
But this is a professional environment where PCs will have a standard configuration and the user will not have to do the work.
Too many people confuse home and work situations. Indeed the end user explicitally should not be installing and configuring their computer in a corporate set up of any size. Problem with Windows is that it both tends to expect to be end user administered and to make things difficult for any proper sysadmin. (e.g. requiring physical access to the machine to do things.)
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.
Back a few decades ago this was exactly how computers were used. It's pretty much the classic "Systems Analysis" process. Start by finding out what the end user needs to do, then work out the best way to do it.
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.
Except that for many things with Windows you either require physical access to the machine or extra apps. Which can make the Windows server less easy to use than the Linux server.
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 ability of the end user to mess up a Windows machine is even toted as a "feature". As in "they can just install XYZ...".
The other point is that with Windows lacking remote access the admin has to come along, push the end user out of their seat, log in, try something have the user log in again, possibly repeated several times...As opposed to connect from wherever they happen to be and see what is going on.
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.)
--
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
End users SHOULD NOT need or be able to configuring OS Software, this is something you can't really prevent with Windows Software. IT should only be done by a trained/Qualified Admin.
Or for that matter application software either. Also unlike with Windows, even if application software needs to be installed on the local HDD, the admin can install it whilst the end user can still be doing other things on the machine.
A sysadmin's job is not to do employee's work.
Nor is it the end user's job to do the sysadmin's work. Which appears to be the problem at the heart of this issue. Apparently end users were installing software on machine, this is a task for a sysadmin. Install it, make sure it works correctly and if there are licencing issues make sure they are addressed. (The latter includes saying "you'll need to wait til the licence arrives before you can use this software.")
Half the problem with Windows is that the end user is expected to be a sysadmin.
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).
:-)
--
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
I live in Virginia Beach and have parents who are both teachers in the school system. Linux would not be the way to go. VB schools have *NO* IT department or anything even closely resembling such.
IN which case they don't want Windows either. Indeed they'd probably really want something like an Acorn, which has the OS in ROM...
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?
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?
OSAS? Peachtree? Most POS, accounting and inventory software was written for UNIX and VAX because they had networking and Enterprise level performance when DOS was king in the PC world. Much of it has been re-compiled for SCO or Solaris on the x86 platform. Linux will handle those just fine, often w/o a re-compile. POS, accounting, and inventory hasn't changed much since the early '80s.
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 .doc resume. I
tried wordperfect first, but it's crap when it comes to reading my older resume.doc.
The sort of Headhunter that insists on Word format is also the sort that will find only Windows jobs (I don't do Windows), and probably ask if I have 10 years experiance with HTMLCC++VBJAVA (It's all one word to them). I want the sort of headhunter that knows there is more to the world than Windows.
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
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.
I agree, all the Linux supporters are always going on and on about the virtues of Linux, but for a typical business desktop it's pretty much useless. Everyone uses MS Office; accounting would riot without Excel, and Access is a valuable tool as well. Word could probably be replaced without too much fuss at least. Our primary business software is Windows only as well (and forget those Windows emulators, that's all I need is even more potential for incompatibility). I may hate Microsoft's opportunistic licensing but until something damn good comes along to replace many of the apps, Linux won't be on our desktops...serverside perhaps, but there's still special requirements that Linux doesn't have yet. P.SQL for the business system, MS SQL for the labelling/hazardous materials system (if you think MS has a monopoly, check out Atrion- they've been merging non stop and there's basically only two similar systems left...) Does Linux have an equivalent to Citrix? Maybe one day Linux will be on every desktop, until then (or until something better comes along) we're pretty much stuck with Windows. Well that's my rant for the day, Linux is not our digital saviour.
<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
But this is a professional environment where PCs will have a standard configuration and the user will not have to do the work. Linux may not be ready for the home environment, but I dispute that any complex OS is. Or are all those sales of Windows for Dummies just a myth. All OSes have to be learned and I don't see why a standard Mandrake 7.2 preinstall would be any harder to get to grips with than a standard Win98 setup for a newbie.
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.
Yeah, and who will pay for the retraining of all the employees to use the new systems?
And no retraining is going to be required if they ever change to a newer Windows?
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.
Maybe the question should be "does every fixing need to be a nail" rather than the merits of Windows vs Linux as "hammers".
Wonder what they did 6 years ago anyway...
disturbing... yes. surprising? not really. I hope they continue this way because this has a better chance reaching the news than some 'evil communist linux hackers' campaaigning for linux.. this is ms campaigning against themselves. I like that in a monopolist ;)
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
> You have a point that setting up a Linux box is hard for Average Q User.
And of course, how many AQUsers set up their own Windows boxes? Particularly public employees' boxes at work?
This is a null issue.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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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
> Linux may be good for computer savvy ppl like the readers of Slashdot, but expecting everyone to use it is just unreasonable.
And just where are all those savvy Windows users? Back when I had a job in VAX support, the PC users used to hit me up with the most ridiculous kind of questions. In most cases I could figure out the answer in about a minute and a half, even though I didn't run Windows myself either at work or at home, and darn sure didn't run the applications they were always asking about.
Why should we expect public employees to be retrained to a high level of competence on Linux, when they never have been on Windows?
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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
Mantrid writes:
accounting would riot without Excel
If Accounting is doing anything serious with Excel, there is a problem there. Excel doesn't support even basic accounting functions well. Get a real accounting package, even QuickBooks Pro is better than Excel for that. Better yet, run something decent on a decent operating system, (eg. AccountiX or Proven DK running on Linux)
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Open mind, insert foot.
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.