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Munich Spurns Steve Ballmer's Software Rebates
Kurt Pfeifle writes "Steve Ballmer's recent trip to Munich to offer up to
90% rebates for the Microsoft Software Assurance and
Licenses was in vain. The ruling party of Germans biggest city and self-proclaimed 'technology capital' now decided
to migrate 14.000 workstations to Linux and an OSS
office suite. A study comparing the alternatives had
assigned 6218 (out of 10.000) points to Linux/OSS,
while the MS Windows platform only scored 5293. Babelfish translation of the latest newsticker story."
Helloooo. This is just a "Buy Deutschland" kind of thing. So they buy SUSE and SUSE support and use an OSS office product. Call me skeptical but if it doesn't work out:
... well where it is now but with even less hope of being mainstream.
... is there an election due soon?
a) MS won't cut them any slack when they want to return to the fold so they'll be worse off than before; AND
b) the anti-OSS publicity will relegate future OSS to
Gotta love this forum though. All this pro-OSS sentiment and happiness about this decision could be heart-warming. But whenever there's a post about how OSS doesn't live up to commercial standards, the poster gets flamed with comments about how OSS is written as expression _not_ to satisfy the "public". So a municipality contemplating a similar decision will have to go with a smaller commercial product (which may not necessarily be around in the long term) or it will have to put up with a hodge-podge of substandard OSS apps worked on, in some cases, by people who don't care about the non-geek user.
Really, OSS is fine in academia but for the administrative needs of a governing body !?
A ballsy move by Munich's politicos
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
At least they have a P/E ratio, as opposed to SUNW or RHAT. :)
I'll start off by saying I use Linux (Debian) as my primary OS, and usually only run Windows in VMware.
However, Windows still feels better than anything on Linux (KDE 3.1, GNOME 2, or whatever). Windows is more consistant (all the widgets look the same), cut/copy/paste works better, and the UI just feels snappy and nice (file manager, desktop, start menu). Contrast that with Linux. The UI is all over the place, KDE is extremely slow to start up and just generally feels somewhat funky, the file managers are all slow and tend to crash a lot or just not work, there are not many good GUI administration tools. I could go on. Please note that I am way past the initial "neato" Linux phases. I've been using Linux since the pre-1.0 days. A lot of people who say Linux is so much better, faster, or whatever are actually just excited about using something different. Linux is getting better, but there is quite a ways to go before it's better than Windows.
Really, the Linux and *BSD communities should take note of Mac OS X. That is UNIX with a nice (although slow) user experience. Now, Apple has it easy because the hardware configurations is extremely limited, but the friendlyness could be copied. I'm not talking about copying OS X in the strict sense, I'm just saying that OS X is an example of something complicated and text based (UNIX) that was made friendly.
The ratio of people to cake is too big