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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
No. It appears to be so common that nobody's even embarassed anymore. People who think corruption is uncommon in the US either don't have memories, or don't even read the headlines.
OTOH, most of the corruption that has appeared (I'm not referring to scandal) appeared to happen before the person achieved whatever their current office is. Which is interesting. It seems to imply that becomming vulnerable to charges of corruption is one of the qualifications for office. I guess that this is so that those who pay you can control your actions. It would be blackmail if it weren't being done against politicians.
This whole mess is probably because of the cost of election campaigns. How this can be corrected when most of the legislature appears corrupted, and, by implication, most of the candidates have been corrupted before being elected (not proven, but the most probable state), is a difficult problem.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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.