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Norwegian Government Expires Microsoft Contract
Jeppe Salvesen writes "The Norwegian sites are bristling with the news, and hopefully this will leak worldwide. The Norwegian Government has dropped their contract with Microsoft. Microsoft had an exclusive deal with national and regional government. Administration Secretary Victor D. Norman states that 'we feel that our contract with Microsoft in reality has given Microsoft a monopoly in a field where competition would serve us better.'. My translation. The race is on."
Not really. I don't know how good Windows Norweigan support is (pretty good I'd imagine) but KDE has been translated into over 40 languages iirc, and many other Linux apps also have Norweigan translations.
You would never be able to tell normally as GNU gettext hides it all from the user.... in fact I just checked, and I have almost 30 norweigan translations on my machine, and I haven't installed any special language packages or anything.
The article is translated at desktoplinux. http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS6576907451.html
A point that seems to have been missed here is cost. I work for a pseudo-government agency that runs Windows almost exclusively, and I can tell you that it constantly irks me to watch us spend thousands of dollars to upgrade licenses for what I consider to be an inferior operating system. When you're talking about taxpayer dollers, a responsible government entity will review the more cost-effective possibilites when considering an operating system. If I can deploy Linux for free and spend $75.95/copy for Star Office 6.0 as opposed to $299/copy for Windows XP and $579/copy for Office XP, the as a government entity I should save my taxpayers money and do it. Sure, it may take a bit more work, but it's the responsible thing to do IMO.
"Herbivores eat well cause their food never, ever runs."
this is the same minister who bought a million dollars' worth of airline tickets from an airline that hasn't started yet, just to make sure he had an alternative to the (partly government-owned) semi-monopoly called Scandinavian.
It'll be fun to see what happens next.
It's actually considerably worse than that. You see with Linux you can actually move to a workable thin client solution like the folks in Largo Florida. With Linux you can easily support hundreds of users with one commodity Intel-based server. For about the same price as an upgrade to your current Windows OS and office suite you could move your entire office to thin clients and never have to worry about client side problems ever again. Imagine how much easier your life would be with one machine to configure and a whole pile of thin clients that you could simply throw away if something broke.
Talk about low TCO.
Of these three, Windows (and MS-Office) supports only one - namely Bokmål. True this is used by 80% of the people or something, but that still leaves 20%. KDE in contrast supports both nynorsk and bokmål, and thereby it supports 98% or more of the people (sami is spoken by quite few)
Especially in schools this is important -- there are laws that say you have in primary school the rigth to get all teaching-material in your language, as this law is today interpreted, this means only books, so Windows is allowed. However, in my opinion it would not be unreasonable to count the programs used on the computers (and the helpfiles) as part of "teaching materials". Afterall, the students are commonly required to use many of these programs, and I don't see what relevance it has that the text is on a screen instead of in a book.