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Microsoft Alternative in Extremadura, Spain
grylnsmn writes "The Washington Post today has a front page article talking about how the Extremadura region in Spain is converting all government offices, businesses, and home from Windows to Linux. The article talks of their problems last spring and how the community banded together to solve them. "But the glitches are more an annoyance, [Ana Acevedo, who heads one of the government's document-processing units] said, than a hassle. 'It's mostly very tiny things,' she said." Overall, this is an important testbed for localities all over the world who are looking at making the switch. Overall, a very good and balanced article." Update: 11/03 20:37 GMT by T : Headline misspelled "Extremadura" as "Extramadura" -- fixed now.
"Microsoft regards such talk as too dramatic and distracting. It is software, after all, not war, company officials said. It is far more productive in their view to talk about the technical aspects of Windows vs. Linux."
but consider a microsoft philippines job ad
one of the responsibilities of the job microsoft is offering is...
"Demolish competition by knowing everything they do and thwarting their every move in the relevant spaces"
that's a microsoft developer evangelist for you...
Who is "stealing" market share? That editorial blurb seemed wrong to me from the gitgo.
IMHO, if anyone chooses to use an alternative OS or hardware, they have the right to do so. There is no theft involved, just freedom of choice.
db
Cig:
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When I was in grade 10, I took a manditory computer studies class that taught us to use Microsoft Powerpoint, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access, and nothing else.
In grade 11 we studied Visual Basic, and in my grade 12 Cisco networking class we learned to configure TCP/IP and SMB on Windows XP - so much for router configuration.
I tried to join the club that maintained the school's website, but they wouldn't accept hand-coded HTML - you had to use FrontPage, or you couldn't join.
Extremadura is distributing free CDs, which seems relatively harmless when compared to what happens here in Toronto.
The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience
I think that is the point of intiatives like this.
By dropping the machines into schools they are educated their children. This means their children are going to be using open systems and will have experience with it. This means that if they need to move out of an Microsoft framework they can and if they need to move into a Microsoft framework. Well I guess that learning curve is only slightly less easy than moving to the MacOS.
If Microsoft would give its software away to schools and not worry about future liscensing within the educational system it would be a difficult fight for linux. But as the Nambia article pointed out Microsoft is worried about revenue from education so it is openning up doors for Linux in education. When the end users are use to an os it will end up in business and government. Windows entered the office from people talking about the ease of use of their home machines and cemented itself in the office with students learning nothing but Office. If Microsoft gives up this market. In 12 years it will be seeing waves of students entering the job forcing learning Open Office as an Office ap and unfamiliar with the undocumented features (read bugs) of Windows, they will begin a push for the OS they are comfortable with in the business world. For in business efficiency is measured with getting work done. Windows is efficient because it is easier to deploy without having to worry about the computer literacy of your employees above a cetain level. But that is my rant. I would prefer to see Sun, Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Linux, FreeBSD and all companies tripping over each other to give free software to schools. The more exposure the youth have to a variety of Operating Systems the better future generations will be able to innovate. But my rant stops. Spelling is out the door and so is sanity but wait that is normal hence I am at slashdot.
I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said: "I drank what?" - Chris Knight (Val Kilmer)- Real Genius
I'm sick of morons who don't get it. (Microsoft broke an agreement goddamnit. They agreed not to bundle IE with Windows and they did bundle IE with Windows at the next possiblitly.)
I'm sick of monopoly-whiners constantly complaining. We don't need whiners, we need a positive, optimistic attitude in the Linux community.
Let's face it: The US-government is both incompetent and corrupt.
There is no hope that the US-government will ever reintroduce a free, open and capitalistic market in the OS space (yes, you read that right. The market is not open. The force-bundelings of Windows are more close to communism than Linux can ever become), we will have to do that ourselves.
Let's forget that courtcase and move on.
And it can be done. All the mainstream software is right available. - Just show the software to users. All users I showed Mozilla to loved it (either because of tabbed browsing or because of ad-blocking). It's harder to convert the whole platform, but I've done that for a couple of users, too. After initial glitches and minor problems, it's much better and problem-free than any Windows installation.
I think it's not about economics. Couldn't it be about national "security"?
See things this way:
US govt --(controls or is in bed with)-->Microsoft
Microsoft --(controls)--->Every desktop in the world.
So you could say that US govt somehow controls every desktop system in the world.
(ok, call me paranoid)
Especially with TCPA and Palladium!
I am pretty sure this thought as occured to the Chinese,Indians, European Union and a lot of other people. Why do you think that the Chinese are so keen on developing their own processors and OSes?
(ok, call me paranoid)
Yes and no. It is very unlikely to be an organised consipracy, but as the end result will be to make the US more powerful, I suspect other countries will regard it as irrelevant whether is planned or not.
"Microsoft regards such talk as too dramatic and distracting. It is software, after all, not war, company officials said. It is far more productive in their view to talk about the technical aspects of Windows vs. Linux."
You want productive and dramatic? Here's the breakdown:
Windows = $150+ (depending on where you get it)
Linux = Free, Nominal fee if you buy a packaged distro
Wow. Rocket Science. Those are the numbers that Joe and Jane Public understand. And once they find out that Linux does alot of what they want to do with computers, Linux is gonna look a whole lot better when they get to Wal-Mart.
Now, let's look at it from a government perspective:
Windows = Closed Source, any software is going to be both proprietary and costly.
Linux = GNU GPL allows for total customization of the OS and applications without having to spend a fortune.
Unless MS is in bed with a government (like it is with ours here in the US), that Government is going to like the idea that, instead of spending millions on licenses and proprietary software, they can spend under a million on a few programmers who can tailor everything to their exact specifications. And the big issue, Security, can be resolved during the process of customization. Any Geek worth his salt can recognize a potential security flaw in the code. With Windows, you're sitting on your laurels waiting for an announcement and patch (MS has been known to wait quite a while to release them), and also those ever sneaky EULA changes.
It's a no-brainer, really. Linux and its OS brothers and sisters (and bastard children) are the most logical choice. Cost effective and customizable, something both Governments and Joe/Jane (in this case, Jose/Juanita) Puiblic can both understand.
Looks like Gates' travel itinerary has grown again. First India, now Spain. If he has to keep giving out "free software" to convince people that his is the right path to take, MS will go broke.
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
The one feature I like about Windows (& Mac OS) that I haven't seen in any Linux distribution yet is no cost, easy to install security patches. Windows Update, Critical Update Notification, and the like. Non-geeks aren't going to cope too well with, "download this patch, apply it, recompile, and restart the affected service (or reboot)."
You haven't heard of Debian have you?
I returned from Spain one and a half months ago. I lived there for one year and I read about this a lot. The reason they are doing this is because the region is VERY poor. They are laggin behind in all aspects of technology. It isn't because the government is choosing the platform, it's because the government has no choice. They want computers, but they don't want to pay for Windows. It's as simple as that. If it works there, it will move to the basque region, to galicia, etc, etc
When I read this, I thought about it for a few minutes and I realized that there's a number of interesting issues that make it worthwhile for governments in other countries to really carefully consider migrating to free software:
:-P)
:)
1) Licensing: Software licensing is expensive and restrictive (particularly from everyone's favorite punching bag, Microsoft), and outside governments can likely save $200-$700 per machine on budgeting if they choose open-source alternatives. (Since their user base hasn't yet grown to be dependent on M$ products, they have far fewer usability issues when migrating their infrastructure-- just interoperability ones).
2) Security: Linux/BSD Unix/etc. are open-source and since developers all over the world are reviewing them 24 hours a day (while you sleep, there's someone on the other side of the world looking at the code for the kernel, which is always kinda cool) security issues are found, publicized and fixed much sooner than from closed-source software vendors. Foreign governments in particular should find this attractive, I'd imagine.
3) Maintainability: If a user needs a feature (say, the ability to use the new Euro currency symbol, or the inverted date-parsing of 23/01/2002) then, rather than having to wait for a proprietary company to develop a localized version of your software (several months to perhaps years of lead time if it's a big application that has a long product cycle) you can just go and change the source code as necessary to incorporate whatever you need.
4) Economic independence: I have to believe that one of the reasons so many outside countries are considering switching to free software is in order to avoid having their information infrastructures become dependent upon systems from large American software vendors. After all, suppose economic sanctions or US trade policy towards a hostile nation shut off someone's software licenses. (Particularly for big, expensive applications that authenticate with a central server at the developer's control, this is a valid concern!) It seems like investing in owning your own IT structure (not licensing it) is a good choice to preserve national independence.
5) Political Integrity: In an open-source system (particularly a voting system, which is the easiest example to choose) the user (voter or government) has a clear view of the inner workings and how everything goes. If I conduct an election, I want to make sure there are no bugs in the system, so I will inspect the source code and run a few tests to make sure everything works properly. If the program is closed-source, I cannot do that; I must rely on the manufacturer's assurances that everything works properly. And I don't have any way of auditing an election to make sure the votes were tabulated properly; the machine simply spits out a result, and I am bound to accept it. (This, of course, is one of the things that infuriates me about the new voting equipment in Florida!
I just thought that, really, the confluence of all the above issues makes very compelling case for these governments to consider migrating to open-source software. I'm not surprised by the growing trend....
-d
Linux becomes recognized as a superior international standard... ...and like the metric system is never heard of again.