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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...
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'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.
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