Slashdot Mirror
EU Studies Linux Migration
LeftOfCentre writes "The Register reports that the European Commision, the executive arm of the 380 million population European Union, has decided to spend 250,000 Euros on studying how government computers in EU states could be migrated to Linux and open source."
I bet 100 that Microsoft or similar companies will put a lot more than 250'000 into a study _against_ a Linux Migration as we've seen quite a lot in the past.
Migrating computers is easy enough - the hard part is migrating users.
The EU has no love are large US Companies, they are after all the competition. There is less lobbying in the EU (though loads of corruption) and at the end of the day do you think that the French, Germans, Italians, Spanish etc etc would prefer to see a US Monopoly or something else ?
Or put it another way. If MS had been French, the DoJ would have remedied them out of existence by now.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
We all know that opensource comes into two forms of free: free as in beer and free as in speech.
Migrating to Linux doesn't mean that Companies can not make money on the products sold. Looked at it from a better perspective it increases the market place, since the opensourced scripts (free as in speech) can be maintained by any company, thus allowing the one that provides the best solution to the current problem to sell it.
Look at companies like Red Hat and Suse already doing this. They get money from the government to make opensourced software.
So yes, it will take jobs in the US if Suse does a better job than Red Hat. And as far as I'm concerned M$ can make a Linux distro and Linux solutions as well.
The site where: "I'm right, as long as you ignore the things that prove me wrong", became a valid method of debate.
in a world of american companies trying to force the world to use their software america created the FSF.
France is helping to create a Europe that doesn't require MS's permission to go to the washroom.
The commission is forcing no one. It gives recommendations that the states of the new Europe take or reject based on wether or not it gives them advantages.
Grow up.
Depends how many jobs in America would be picked up by the commercial Linux sector.
Although aren't most of them european anyway?
did anyone take MS paid studies seriously?
Spending money to find out how to stop spending money...
Granted, you won't find a professional anything in the world who will invest money without research, but it still seems funny to make a big annoucement about spending to reduce spending.
-- El Sacarino tiene gusto de la chocha
As a European I would gladly have the saved money reallocated to further improve the public health care and transportation instead of returned to me.
is 250,000 Euro really needed to educate and research on migration from Windows to Linux? Personally, but I know this will not happen, I would take advantage of resources on the Internet (i heart google :-)) based on migration for the systems and the users. Of course, later on, the money can be used to train users how to use linux, but with KDE 3.0 and so many more easier window managers and distributions popping (LibraNet a personal favorite for me).. it really won't be too difficult to install it and use it. There would be no reason for them to even use the console.
"The ones who dont do anything are always the ones who try to pull you down" -- Henry Rollins
Not Nessarly. Microsoft is a global company most of the jobs for the products sold in europe are the europieans. Sales Reps, Support People, Custom Application Developers, most of them will be Europians. Most of the american Jobs will be programmers who will still be working to sell to americans customers (You may loose a fiew jobs due to smaller profit margens) But they still need a programer base to create there "Software". The higher upps may feel the burn more then the ordanry jobs but they are not really that much help on the echonomy because they find ways to bypass most of their taxes.
You can consider it an other way. The money the EU saves will allow them to buy more products some of them american. Good echonomy is not how much money a county has but how much of it is moving from hand to hand.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
When governments and large corporations use Free Software, the chances of Palladium and other "Digital Restrictions Management" software being able to work against Free Software are very low, meaning that we as individuals maintain more of our software freedom. Hardware manufacturers cannot afford to lose the whole EU as clientele even if Microsoft can.
I think you have a lot to learn about government and taxes, my friend. Where, pray tell, do you think these 'state governments' get money from?
they resigned because of corruption charges against 3 commission members. The *entire* council resigned, and was replaced by new people. How's that for accountability?
Seen any U.S. politicians resign lately?
That they've only budgeted 250,000 euros for a study really shows that they are complacent with a Microsoft dominated IT scheme. That rather insignificant amount of money could easily be blown on six months of a consultant's time and stock research reports from Jupiter, Ovum, and Gartner.
I have to agree with you. When I was a child, we looked to the US as a model of freedom and liberty, you could do SO much more in the US than in the UK and Europe.
Now, to my mind, I would rather live in Europe because I have more freedom of speech, more liberty and more protection from world dominating corporates.
The trials of OJ Simpson and Bill Clinton have demonstrated that even the law can be bought in the US, in the UK we have imprisoned two Lords just for lying in court (perjury).
We have a social policy that is steadily improving, our system is not perfect in many, many ways but it is moving in the right direction.
I am, however, an optimist and I fully expect the USA to finally grasp the importance of good Environmental Policy (something that will take many decades to happen with current social attitude), good attitude towards liberty (by empowering the people again and taking the whip from the corporates hands) and moving towards the founding principles of the nation...
"By the people. For the people." For as long as Disney keeps copyright on Mickey Mouse(tm)(R)(c) the people will be impovrished.
Good luck to you all!
Interesting how "someplace else" is always better. In the USA, new products and unusual ideas refer to a European origin. In Brasil, the origin is the USA.
In France, where do they say a new herbal cure comes from? In Japan, what origin do radical clothing or ideas claim? How about Australia...other than from the other side of the country?
Actually OSS has been subject to several studies from one or the other eu comission. There are some strong promotors for OSS like Germany and several special interest groups which include some distros and smaller OSS companies.
;-)
Further more, the recent cooling down of relations between the US and Germany inflicted fear upon several EU parliament members who suggest that it would be wise to look into OSS software to make sure the EU is not too depending on software of American origin.
I can understand their sentiment given the alleged fact that information aquired through echelon was abused to give American companies an advantage. So they are afraid that using "American" software could give them the same problems. Aside from the fact that the EU too does not like vendor lock-in there is also a growing resentment of how Microsoft is going about it's bussiness without even the slightest hesitation because of it's legal battles and the ongoing investigation of it's practices by the EU.
Besides.. they'd rather spend all that money they could save on licensing costs on farming subsidies anyway
but what they will have to contend the most is the migration of users to a new way do doing things in the linux os and any and all the applications that will run on it.
I work for a large City (municipal) government and let me tell you just changing from windows 95 to windows 2000 caused chaos and havoc in my department. There are ppl here that worked for the city for more than 30 years and are so bloody entrenched in doing things their own way it is unbelievable.
Now the EU has a good chance of migrating since (and this an assumption) the workers didn't have much time to get set in MS way of doing things
Belive me, as a Swedish national, the rest of Europe is not jealous of the UK. If employment means what it means in the US and UK, namely working multiple jobs and still not being able to sustain yourself and your family, and the unemployed here being better off than the employed there, then I'll stay clear from that blessing which leads to US/UK employment rates, thank you!
Whenever someone has done a poor choice and implemented part or all business logic somewhere proprietary, migrating becomes hell. One example would be databases where you rely heavily on the procedural language that comes with your particular RDBMS. Another example would be use of macros in MS Office products.
Sure, if you have all your systems implemented in a Java-based GUI or as a webapp, then you're in luck. Otherwise, tough luck.
Stop the brainwash
Ok, let's put down the Linux fanboy suit, and look more deeply at this.
EU is (slowly) getting out of the shadow of the former superpower. Euro, 9/11, New Economy burst, US & Japan economic crisis, all "helped" the Union to find back their unity, identity, pride and strength.
I won't debate the good or bad of these events, I'm not up to it.
But, I'd like to point out that in such "self awareness" phenomenon, the last thing you'd want to concede to your competitors is to have one of their major companies practically rule the information and communication infrastructure of your own national system(s).
Would any american citizen rather have all of their phone lines be run by a German monopolistic private company? Or all of their power plants run by a French monopolistic private company? Or all of their run by monopolistic private company?
So why so many arms thrown up when we Europeans start looking around for other suppliers of (most of) our government and in the end strategic IT infrastructure?
I believe if we in the EU had a powerhouse software firm similar in size to M$, we'd be already switched over it. Proprietary or not, it'd not matter (much) from a strategic point of view.
Cost is a factor, but not as much as putting your own computer-related balls in the hands of a private company of an allied-but-competing country.