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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."
De kommer krypende tilbake..
Translation: They'll come crawling back.
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.
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 nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. - ast
It seems to me that most governments would do more for furthering the independence from proprietary software by increasing dependence on open standards. For instance, if I were President for a day (mwahaha!), the first thing I woudl do is issue an executive order stating that no agency, department or NGO may use .doc formatted texts. Where documents are purely text, they must be sent in plain ASCII or rtf formats. Suddenly the "need" for Word is lessened considerably. Need spreadsheets? Send tab-delimited files everywhere. I don't have all the details worked out but it seems to me the reason why governments and the like are so dependent on MSFT is because they are dependent on what the software produces not how the software performs.
The article is translated at desktoplinux. http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS6576907451.html
Localization and language support are going to be an issue here.
I don't know -- most Norwegians speak English better than we do.
Having said that, KDE at least is pretty well internationalized.
Steve
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.
Interesting how here on /., when discussing an alternative to MS, the first (and usually only) alternative to be discussed is Linux. As far as a desktop OS is concerned, Apple's Mac OS X may be far better suited to the task. Since the subsystem is very closely based on Open/FreeBSD and hence supports all the "information wants to be free" technologies that Linux does, the real comparison is the user interface.
:)).
... this isn't a flame or a troll, just a commentary.
Now, I have a whole lot of respect for the GNOME and KDE efforts (I have Ximian on my laptop and KDE on one of my desktops), but they've got a ways to go to reach OS X's level of ease-of-use. I believe OS X is also localized in Norwegian, but I could be wrong on this count (if I am wrong, then that's a good reason to discount OS X
Apple's no longer *just* for creatives, designers, writers, etc. It is (at its core) a highly productive and functional operating system built on a highly stable and powerful subsystem. With OS X, you can *get things done*. For the novice computer user, OS X can be a good deal more intuitive than either Windows OR any of the Linux UIs.
*sigh*
Cheers.
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 $579/copy for Office XP, the as a government entity I should save my taxpayers money and do it. Sure, it may take a bit more work, but it's the responsible thing to do IMO.
"Herbivores eat well cause their food never, ever runs."
However, I think M$ 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.
I remember using Mac's in school for the majority of my time (from grade school on up through High School). If this chain were true, why am I not a Mac user?
Because of the OS/Windows Environment advances.
Ok, either you went to school in a time when the first and most intensive exposure to PCs (or Macs in your case) was in school, or you are wrong, because today nearly everybody at least knows someone being a "peecee"-guru, therefore school isn't as important as it once was in said "chain".
If you went to school in those old days, when MS Win (>= 95) came out, it was really advantage, at least Win 95 vs. MacOS 7 (8?) - software wise, because of the price and (maybe most importantly?) because of warezing.
So this advantage would break the chain also.
But today, it's really hard to get a strong enough advantage to "break the chain". Even MS has trouble to raise the bar, in order to get people to desire - and therefore buy - newer versions of their software.
So, Open Source (or whatever possible MS competitor, I just doubt there's someone else out there) finally has a good chance to level the field, to catch up. We can discuss all day if KDE/Gnome + Linux/BSD are "as good as" or "better than" as Windows XP, the truth is that people have decided, and - seemingly - they (still) prefer the latter.
But people believe, and I'm also inclined to, that this is it, today, where the "chain" comes into action. And I also belive that in many places familiarity with an user interface just wouldn't matter much, and therefore not lead to high (re-)training costs, and that at these places "alternatives" could be used and one could rapidly see the benefits.
So, perhaps Norway has some of those places, schools, public authorities, whatever. All I want is a small fracture in this wall of "just MS", so that people who would otherwise would never have gotten the chance to even *see* an alternative will now have a real choice.
Really, give it some time, and *nix distibutions will be easier to install, much more liberal in usage conditions and much more trustable concerning privacy - btw. most of this is true now, but people will then have realized that.
Fortunately, MS does what it can to strengthen these advanteges for open source.
I don't think the plan is to replace the hardware...also, compared to OS X, even Windows XP wouldn't be ready for the desktop. I think "ready for the desktop" has become the most meaningless sentence ever. I use Linux on my desktop, therefore it is ready for the desktop. Just because OS X has a nicer GUI (that's debatable) doesn't mean Linux cannot be used in a productivity environment.
;-)
Back in the 80's, end users were stuck with DOS, Lotus 1-2-3 and Wordperfect - and yet they were productive. They knew how to use their computers. Perhaps the learning curve was a bit steeper, but somehow they managed. Have we suddenly all become so stupid that if we don't get enough eye candy we can no longer use a computer? I had a crash course in Maya at my job: that program has so many menus and options and whatnot, it's the opposite of user-friendly - and yet it's still the market leader...I find the trend to "dumb down" computers as much as possible quite disturbing, to tell you the truth. At some point we have to accept that computers must have a minimum degree of complexity if we are to have a good control of how they behave. So the hypothetical grandma can't use it? Well, that's to bad: she can't program her VCR either. But a 12-year old can learn UNIX - for him it's just a game...so why do we care so much about "usability" when the next generation is adapting itself to technology faster than we ever did? To hear the UI fanatics, you'd think that it's impossible for an average user to use Linux (which is totally false, I have had the occasion of testing it more than once). It's as if we were trying to encourage the user to be as lazy as possible...
Oh well, I still think KDE3.02 with Crystal icons and Kermakik style looks nicer and is more usable than Aqua on OS X. Not that I care...
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