MA Dept. of Revenue consider Linux

hansroy writes "Massachusetts Department of Revenue is still using Windows 95 on the desktop. Faced with upgrade costs of $500-600 per user, they're considering Linux at about one-third the cost. This comes at a very good time, as the new governor of MA is making significant budget cuts this year."

Comments

Re:I dunno

[B3ryllium]

"Linux is only free if your time has no value", the old saying goes. In this case, though, I think it would more suitably be "Linux is only free if your co-workers aren't completely fucking retarded". Sounds about right, right?

Re:I dunno

[Rude Turnip]

They would have to be retrained no matter what. You cannot go from Windows 95 to any NT-based Windows without a learning curve. Might as well save money in that regard.

Up-front costs for interoperability will likely pay for themselves in the long run because the infrastructure will open itself up to a cross-platform environment, allowing for best-of-breed solutions regardless of the platform.

Re:I dunno

[Mnemic]

I agree training costs money but MANY goverment agencies are using very old usualy custom software, many times running on *nix Backends to do their work.

The OS is just a mouse for them to double click icons. It would not be very hard to create a new interface to run in linux, and slap an icon on their desktop to run that interface, which looks very familiar to Windows, and still allows them to work comfertably in the custom software they have been using for some time.

It really all depends on what apps they have been using to determine if they need to retrain MANY things or not.

Familiarity, ha!

[Sloppy]

Rebecca LaBrunerie, product manager for Microsoft's worldwide licensing, said the software giant is working with DOR and other state agencies to convince them of the benefits of Microsoft. Those benefits, she said, include familiarity, ease, application and productivity.

Heh, familiarity. My boss talked to a user this morning who "upgraded" to XP. User needed to add a printer. Anyone here seen XP? It's about as "familiar" to a Win95/98/ME/NT4/2k user as CP/M is. There's a "classic mode" but to make it act like MS' old products, but it's still pretty bizarre.

That isn't to say UI can't ever be changed (I'm not arguing against progress, nor making any comments on whether XP's approach is progress), but the "familiarity" argument for staying with MS is total bullshit.

The "ease" argument is bullshit too. You have to turn off the firewall that comes with XP to use Win98's SMB printer. Yeah, that's really intuitive and easy. Today, somebody paid a couple hundred dollars for that "ease."

Applications: this one is true; you might be locked into MS. Tell your vendor you want the next wave of custom apps to be platform independent. It is inexcusable for most business software to not be super-portable these days: PYTHON ROCKS and there's almost nothing it can't do (well, not counting realtime stuff, like monitoring the neutron rods in your reactor ;-). And I'm sure the Java and perl guys have something to say as well. If your vendors are still creating unportable apps, either find other vendors, or at least tell them that their decisions are costing YOU money.

BTW, I mean that about portability. Don't trust Linux either. Just be able to use anything and then whatever platform comes out on top .. will come out on top. I don't see Tux's flippers shaking with fear over that prospect.

Re:Win95 no longer working?

[BWJones]

I don't understand this "we must upgrade" mindset.

The problem is that Microsoft is no longer supporting older releases thus "forcing" many users to upgrade regardless of their satisfaction with the current OS. This is what happens when your business model relys on folks constantly upgrading and is a problem with the PC market. Apple appears to buck the trend in many ways in that while they do not officially support really old versions of their MacOS Classic OS, you can still download it from Apple's servers for computers that cannot support more modern versions of the OS. This is one of the many reasons why I purchase Macs. They simply are functional machines for a lot longer than Wintel stuff, they hold their value longer, and they run lots of commonly used software making my return on investment much higher with Macintosh than with Wintel.

This will benefit them greatly

[Zapdos]

I really like the "if it is not broke dont fix it" group here.

We are talking about windows 95.. Guess what? It is broke. It has a MTBF of about 180 hours,

The product is no longer supported by the manufacturer. This means no more security updates. Windows 95 was never a very secure networked computer OS. I am sure that the Massachusetts Department of Revenue, could use some security.

Re:I dunno

[Politburo]

Windows XP is radically different from Windows 95.

"Radically" is going a little far. From a system administration point of view, XP could be called radically different. To the end user, XP is very much the same. When changing from 98SE and Word 97 to XP and Office XP, my mom had no problems doing the exact same tasks in Word. Same with Freecell. Sure, she doesn't know the new way to change the IP of the computer, but she didn't need to know in the first place.

Recently at work, we moved from NT5 to XP. Almost all people had no issues whatsoever with the new OS. Some little things behaved differently, but the general feel of the system was the same.

My point is, for everyday tasks, and to a "normal" computer user, Windows* is the same as Windows*.