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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
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
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.
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.
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
did you *read* the article, perhaps?
no?
*sigh*
They're after a system where you have a smart card that you swipe and then the system logs you on the your personal desktop from anywhere in the network. Don't you think that'll take a little bit of moola to do feasibility studies, rather than a 5 minute google search?
``Is a migration to Linux going to mean lower cost of government operation and lower taxes?''
Hehe. I don't think switching to open source solutions will have that great an impact on government expenses. Software costs will drop, but the hardware costs will remain, as will the costs for maintenance. And with all the subsidies and financial aid still in place...
Besides, AFAIK, the expenses of the European governements aren't paid for by the citizens, but rather by the state governments. The decision to alter taxes would, then depend on those, and I don't think they will be inclined to lower taxes. They can better use the money by stimulating the not-so-shiny economy...or save up for the upcoming expansion of the EU with several poorer countries.
---
The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it.
-- Abbie Hoffman
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I know most European nations are generally socialist at their core and tax their citizens quite heavily.
I pay about the same amount of tax here as I did when I lived in the US. The difference is that in the EU, the money goes to social policies; while in the US it goes on the military.
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.
If I were a European taxpayer, I sure would feel better to have my money safely tucked into Microsoft's gleaming $40B cash stockpile than to have it wasted on some local pork-barrel program. That beautiful pile of money gives the entire world something to aspire too, and I would feel proud to do my part to make sure it's kept big, strong and safe from shareholders, Europeans and other freeloaders.
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?
Since when do penguins fly?
Penguins can fly when being thrown, when on a plane or when you shoot them from a canon. I don't know exactly how migration would work. That's why I think this study is really great.
If there is hope, it lies in the trolls.
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.
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
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
They travel by wire. Occasionally by post. And the government frowns at people who shoot at the post, even during hunting season.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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.