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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."
It would be cool to see a multinational "Knowledge Base" to be used by smaller countries wanting to go this route.
Not as an anti-Microsoft movement, but as a pro-alternative movement.
Don't read this!
...Of course, that's the best way...you know, you don't want all of the PR flacks from MS having a chance to spin this in the wrong direction.....or give them a bunch of time to start blackmailing you over license violations....
Remember all the fuss about the German government?....How about Peru? Making such a decision without letting the sales force get involved is prob. a good thing. I imagine that they (MS) would dig up every thing they could find in order to keep everyone in "lock-step" with their goals.....
I hope that this does get played up....now that the decision is made, let the chips fall where they may. I expect that there will be a lot of "surprise" defections and I imagine that they will happen pretty fast.
> ...with software that most of its workers use
> at home seems like a large expense.
I agree with this, but someone has got to break the chain. When you think "government" you usually associate that with office buildings and bureaucracy. However, government means schools as well. The reason people use Windows at home is because they use Windows at work, because they used Windows in college, because they used Windows in high school. If the government went with Linux in grade school/high schools then more colleges would be Linux-based. More colleges means more businesses (that's what the grads know). The chain can finally be used to Linux's (and everyone's) advantage.
Matthew
/. finds me to be 20% Troll, 80% Funny
I think the proper translation from Norwegian for this announcement is:
pretty simply.The open source, liberty, GPL, anti-MS folks can get into a lather all we like, but it's really about money.
If you've seen Service Agreement 6 terms, then you'd make an announcement like this, too. It's win-win: zealots off my back and MS might give us a price break on our crackware.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Thats eexactly what the EU are planning to do...
Hopefully they'll set up a 3rd world and common wealth inititive with there sharing.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
You don't like KDE and Gnome? They both look nicer than Windows and both behave very similar to Windows, of course each has their own little quirks. After using Mozilla at home on Mandrake 8.2 I haven't found a site that won't work. Of course manually installing a flash plugin isn't for the average windows user, it's not a big deal to do. The only thing I noticed that didn't work were the DHTML menus certain sites implemented. Not a bid deal either, usually just means 2 clicks instead of one.
Thought you all might like this little gem I found in my apache logs:
/signs/porktheone.jpg HTTP/1.0" 200 16076 "http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLin k=233989" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020530"
tide117.microsoft.com - - [11/Jul/2002:20:21:15 -0500] "GET
Look at the last part identifying the browser.
Pretty standard really.
Microsoft however probably doesn't want to loose their monopoly (even if we're just four million people). Norwegian translations of Windows have been ...questionable... at times, especially for "New Norwegian", an officially recogniced dialect counted as a second language (though I've been out of the windows league for a while, haven't checked recent conditions). Therefore, I think Microsoft will boost support for Norwegian software out of fear of loosing a nation (which would be a bad example for the rest of their world), and businesses/departments will keep using Windows out of fear of retraining their workforce.
I will, off course, continue my subtle penguin missionaries... Maybe some day
However, I think M$ has done one thing that is really starting to backfire in the corporate world ... intrusive software. XP, with it's online licensing was barely tolerable for most, and completely intolerable for some (you try connecting to the internet when in the Arctic doing geological work ... it involves sitting down and taking ~15 - 20 minutes to hook up the sattelite link, assuming you lugged the gear into the field. Heard similar horror stories from others who work in truly remote locations (Amazon, and huge parts of Africa). But now their software is coming with 'call into microsoft' features, which violate virtually every corporate security standard. In the security world, this is called a BACK DOOR and is something to be dreaded and/or blocked by anti-virus software. And now Microsoft is putting it in their products and claiming it as a feature?!?!
At one place, we ran a little test using IP hijacking, with a server outside the corporate firewall. Win XP, Office XP, and the standard suite of apps ... and managed to hack the network in less than 20 minutes. Couldn't have done it without the PC automagically dialling out for 'updates'. Which, when you consider this company (which shall remain nameless) has assets over half a trillion, and the toughest security setup possible (under M$ products), is damn scary.
We won't even get into the hassles people are running into when their software tells them it's expired, and to contact their nearest M$ rep ... especially when it hasn't.
Sure, Word et. at are slick, but the cost of running them - in terms of money, security, and hassles - are pushing people to other OS.
Good idea, bad implementation. RTF and TSV are not the best formats. What happens to the formulas, graphs, drawings, and formatting (yes formatting matters) in an Excel document when you save it as .TSV? They disappear.
There need to be open, documented formats for this stuff, that open source apps use [mostly] correctly, for such a switch to work. Otherwise you're left with proprietary = productivity vs. open = time waster. Guess which one makes more business sense in the short term (which is all that bean counters ever look at anyway)?
Norway is a small country (4 million people), and not very much is translated into Norwegian. For instance, you will rarely find dubbed movies here (just subtitled).
As a result, most norwegians understand english fairly well (even if they dont speak/write it very often).
The characterset used to be a problem (like 7-8 years ago), but isnt any problem today (For the special interested, norwegian have three special characters: æøå).
Most people I know like to use english versions of programs (instead of risking new bugs/misunderstanding resulting from low budged translations).
Internationalization is always important, but it is actually of less importance in Norway, than in most other european countries.
Sure there is. Any decent format should be both reverse & forward compatable. If you take a version 4 file and load it into the version 3 program, then any new features should be ignored (probably with a warning). This allows people who haven't yet upgraded to handle files which have been saved by those who have. Going the other way should be totally transparent, except perhaps if you try to save the new version - Have you tried to open a Word 2.0 document in the latest version of Word?
I'd also say that a good file format for text heavy data (word processors, spreadsheets, presentations etc) should be text based. This makes convertors easy to write. I wrote a program to convert Wordstar documents to HTML. A very easy program to write, because the wordstar format was basically plain text with extra formatting information. It would be impossible to write a similar program for Word in reasonable time.
Hey, I'd love to give OS-X a try. And if it were $200-300 to try it out and write some exploratory apps for it, I'd snap it up in a heartbeat.
But trying it out doesn't cost two or three hundred dollars. It costs two or three thousand. Yeah, I know, the eMac is inexpensive hovering around $800, but it's far too slow, comes with a monitor that's too small, a keyboard that I can't seem to make friends with, and a mouse with one-third the number of buttons it should have. Apple also seems to provide only set bundles: This machine comes with these accessories, period. I'd like to make the cost/performance tradeoff decisions myself and pick my own combination of components.
In short, there doesn't seem to be a way to give OS-X a fair shake without spending a farkload of money.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
You don't win a war with whining and being afraid.
XBox will end the myth of Microsoft being invincible and will end the whatever-vaporware-they-put-out-it-will-be-the-sta ndard talk.
Bill Gates and all other high execs are selling as much shares as possible, Microsoft owes their own employees tens of billions in outstanding stock options and Microsoft will make losses as soon as they will have to pay taxes (either because their stock-option house of cards break down or the government closes this loophole, whatever happens first).
I don't know why everybody is so pessimistic these days.
The big days of Microsft are over, they will be the next Novell.
- Norway has opted not to prolong an exclusive contract with microsoft. No statement regarding of what that may mean for what they buy in the future.
- Germany has made a deal to buy Linux systems in a major way and on an important location - for the IT structure of their parliament.
Methinks Germany is far ahead of Norway.