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.
However, many persons in the EU are aware of the perils of depending upon a single vendor and their propietary formats, and also how ill-served we are when pushing documents around between PCs configured for different languages.
Just wait until it flies back north, then get out the hunting rifles.
Migrating computers is easy enough - the hard part is migrating users.
Watch as the Elegant Linux penguins migrate from Finland down into central Europe for the harsh winter ahead. Linux Penguins are unusual as the only northen hemisphere penguins in the wild, this documentary shows they unusual mating dances and how they manage to move their young thousands of miles by transporting them as small ISO images.
Truely one of natures great wonders.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I think more and more business' will be considering this, faced with the soaring costs and big-brother-esque EULA clauses that go hand in hand with the likes of windows/office etc. Maybe this will cause the number of jobs in the intustry to soar, esp regarding Linux know-how. All in all this seems to be a good thing :)
Last.fm - join the social music revolution
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
Does anyone else get the impression that this will be yet another area where, yet again, Europe is going to be WAY out in front of the US. Europe and progressive social policy (or, if you live there, I guess you'd just call it "social policy" :) ) are practically synonymous and the US is once again made to look like a country run by bankers... Government is a public institution. Therefore, in my mind, it makes perfect sense for a government (a democratic one at least) to setup it's IT infrastructure based around a platform created by the people for the people rather than a platform that lines the pockets of a monlithic corporation (and, in this case, a foreign one at that).
Chris
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.
As much as I hate M$ this will eventually impact American jobs and world dominance right?
That's right. I suggest the best approach for America is to try to stifle Open Source and other such innovations. After all, stifling innovations is what made America great.
(Sarcasm!)
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?
I know most European nations are generally socialist at their core and tax their citizens quite heavily. Is a migration to Linux going to mean lower cost of government operation and lower taxes? Or is the money that they save just going to go to some other bloated government program?
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
do penguins fly?
Best Slashdot Co
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
Huh?
So how come American companies could not develop Open Source. Last I remember Redhat is one of the big Linux sellers. And another company called IBM was making big beats with Linux. And where are they located? North Carolina and New York, both of which are small states part of the European Union.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
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.
The UK government recently (relatively) spent a lot of money with microsoft to introduce a "gateway" system for several things for use by the UK population (I dont know if it is implemented, but a good example is tax returns)
I wonder if how to solve "initiatives" like that will be taken into consideration - since afaik there is no OSS solution for the existing implementation, and their gateway would have to be rethought/designed/implemented to move to OSS
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 guess this is good news. For a start, it is quite important to us European what the EU recommends. A well-funded, unbiased and "robust" study of Linux and free software should be welcomed. To start with, it will provide Linux with plenty of limelight. It will also point out things which need to be sorted out, and it will give more clout to people in European (or elsewhere) organisations that need pretty PDF documents with "this page is left blank intentionally" in order to be convinced. :-)
It would be great if this study actually comes up with reasonable comments and maybe a HOWTO. If you speak Spanish, you can see what I guess is the desired output of this project (as applied to one of Spain's ministeries) here.
Also, note that this is mainly a desktop study, not a server or file format study (the EU has already carred out a number of these in the past). So someone is taking Linux seriously!
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'm glad to see this happening.
I've been pretty turned off by some of the sales practices that I have seen by large software companies. I think that it makes much more sense for governments to pool their resources and develop free software instead of licensing commercial packages.
MS licensing fees are not unreasonable but they do add up when you are talking about so many users. At least I haven't seen them selling 2 licenses for every govt employee.
A couple of years ago, an Oracle reseller sold the state of CA more licenses than they had users to use. I've seen it happen with other software companies. I'd love to see CA move to an open source database and tell Oracle to kiss their butts. It would serve them right.
Why is the EU undemocratic? I can vote for european parties, can't I..
You know, I'm normally a fairly reasonable person as I hope my posting record will support.
Despite that however, would anyone mind if I personally came over and strung up the next person to post a "3. Profit!" mail? Anyone...?
No. Didn't think anyone would mind.
Cheers,
Ian
That sounds a lot like the Sun Ray. I can't find any info GCI from Taiwan (those who can read Chinese could look here to see if GCI==gci.com.tw. It looks like an ordinary retailer.) Does GCI sell Sun Rays, or do they have a new solution?
US $467-per-box seems surprisingly high (conversion by xe.com/ucc/) for a thin client. Thin clients (at least the ones I've seen) are usually built around stripped-down architectures -- essentially, a USB controller, a video card, a NIC, and the minimum that's needed to tie them together. Then again, if you toss in the price of an LCD monitor (space concerns) and a smart card reader, $467 may be reasonable.
Does anyone know what GCI sells? The Oracle of Google doesn't reveal anything about GCI and "smart card" or "thin client". (It does reveal a page saying that there is a "ANSWER GCI LTD", originally from Taiwan, in Telford, but supplies no details beyond the fact that they're in "computer sales.") If they're a reseller, reselling thin clients, I would be intrigued to discover which ones.
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
SOLDIER #1: Are you suggesting linux migrates?
ARTHUR: Not at all. It could be carried.
SOLDIER #1: What? A swallow carrying linux?
ARTHUR: It could grip it by the shrink wrap!
SOLDIER #1: It's not a question of where he grips it! It's a simple question of weight ratios! A five ounce bird could not carry a one pound linux distribution.
(I was only an egg, but then I cracked)
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
Really? The Euro started as $1.18. What makes you think everything revolves around the USA?
Oh absolutely! Smashing British Rail into smithereens and a bankrupt infrastructure company was a master stroke.
Where else in Europe can you still get a sense of danger and adventure when riding the train?
Ah nostalgia: The service level and efficiency of what remains from the English rail system is now comparable with the one in Bulgaria in the 50s.
Yeah, your Ms. Thatcher sure had a clue...
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Most users have so little training in using computers, the hardest thing for them to learn in migrating to linux is to only single-click the desktop icons, and to give it a second because the browser isn't 90% pre-load during boot-up. My estimate is power-users will adapt quickly, and most of the rest will hardly notice. Teach them how to copy and paste and change screen res on the fly and most people will think Linux is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
maybe in 10 years the Americans will still boast that the euro "started" at $1.18. It actually had this ridiculously overpriced rate for only a month or so. The euro spent actually two years of its existence at the ridiculously UNDERprices rate of $0.85, and the markets have put it back where it belongs : around $1, oscillating around $.98 to be precise. This is its fair price since you can buy roughly the same with 1000EUR in Europe as you can buy with $1000 in the US. So the long days of the strong dollars are over.
only 17% Not only is 17% a whole hell of a lot, but isn't even the total cost. When you take into account benefits for retired soldiers and their spouse's benefits it grows even larger. We spend more on just the Veterans Affairs office than Germany spends on it's entire military. We could afford to spend 2-3% and still feel very safe. If they cut that budget they could lower payroll taxes, pay the federal public dept, pay back the dept to Social Security, and send a paltry 30 billion to OSS a year. In 40-50 years when the baby boomers start to drop, they might even have a little left over to refinance some of the State and Local debt at inflationary rates or even shock lower taxes in for the long term. If we had any sense we'd try to reform the UN (more democratic, voting bonus for democratically elected representitive, elimination of the veto, etc.) and sell parts of our offensive military to them to police the Bosnias and Rwandas of the world.
1. Kill people for bad jokes
2. Letting them turn you psychotic
3.
4. Pro...
No, I just don't have the heart.
Moderation: +4. Modded 70% Funny and 30% Overrated. 100% Saturated.
Er.. this is just a study dude - they're not spending 250K on migrating every computer withtin the EU.
Users are much easier to move. My wife has had no problems using either Red Hat or Debian systems running Gnome, KDE and Window Maker. The only desktop that really makes itself difficult to master is Microsoft. The less they actually do the easier they are to migrate. Those that do more might complain at first as they will require the most support getting their work out and much will be lost but that should not last long. They will quickly realize the power Linux has to offer them and wonder how they ever tollerated the confines of comercial software.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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
They don't have much money but they have a huge need for computers, so Linux is their best choice.
And they are going to enter EU pretty soon.
I know this is just a bad joke. But when currencies devalutate so does the prices and the cost of work. So assuming they are doing the research in EU, they could still get the same work for for the same amount of money, even if the money was devaluated.
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.
[The] European Union, has decided to spend 250,000 Euros on studying how government computers in EU states could be migrated to Linux....
:)
Heck, why don't they just spend the quarter million on actually doing the migration. You could probably get most of it done for that....
(This was meant to be funny, not a troll.)
moto411.com
I find it funny that a page "helping" people de-install linux (the 'bashdot.org' link in your article) is shown in a format that gets garbled on browsers people are likely to be using under linux (I tried with mozilla, and it ended up writing lines of text on top of each other into a scribbly black mess. making much of it unreadable.) Now, I realize Mozilla has had html compliance before so I double-checked the site against w3.org's validator, and it generates about 100 errors - andI tried all the version of html the page had, XHTML, HTML4.01 both transitional and strict), HTML 3.2, HTML 2.0 - They all said it was messed up. (what confused mozilla is the plethora of cases where a closing tag exists for which there was no opening tag (it has a about four times, for example.)
And it's not even that complicated a page. It's just one page with some numbered lists and some paragraphs and bullet points and header size changes. All generic simple stuff that it shouldn't be getting wrong.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Now, you might have gotten the idea that I like labor unions from the above rant. I DON'T. Let me make that perfectly clear. I'm just trying to point out how the reason they are bad is IDENTICAL to the reason a monopoly company is bad, for the hard of thinking who seem to believe it's impossible for a company to do any wrong in a free market.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
People get pissed off when you refuse to help then with windows but they know that you are compitent with MS software (I've even have them get mad in the rare situation where I actually didn't know offhand what was wrong). I only recomend this route to the very strong willed.
I live in a giant bucket.
Same case here.
And don't even get me stated in the huge difference in vacation time (2 weeks in the USA, 1 month in Spain). Nor the food quality ("quality food in the US" is an oxymoron.)
The "benefits" that I get are some of the best around here, or so I've been told. But they are a P.O.S., comparing to what I was getting in Spain.
If I had been out of work in Spain, I would have had some kind of money from the unemployment insurance. In the US, when you are out of work, that's your problem.
And, if you dig in the cost of Healthcare around the world, you'll discover:
- The cost for Healthcare in the US is more expensive than in Europe. But it's not better.
- Less people gets healthcare coverage in the US than in Europe. Where's democaracy?
- In the US, people expends more % of their paychecks in Healthcare than in Europe.
- With insurance and all the stuff, visit the E.R. and end paying at least $300. Again, this is with insurance. No cost of E.R. visits in Spain.
See? There's something wrong. I'm so ready to go back!
you can buy roughly the same with 1000EUR in Europe as you can buy with $1000 in the US
Actualy, with 1000 EUR you can buy goods or services that can cost you around $1600 in the US.
Three words: cost of living.
Repeat after me "In Europe, with 22000 EUR/year you can live as with $45000/year in the US"
Been there, done that.