Slashdot Mirror
UK Councils May Dump Windows For Linux
An anonymous reader writes "Local authorities in Newham and Nottingham are expected to migrate more than 10,000 desktop computers from Windows to GNU/Linux.
ZDNet has the story. "If this is seen to work in Newham, it has the potential to be a significant project, changing the perceptions of other councils," said Tim Dawes, director of local government technology consultants Nineveh."
It should say, "The sheriff of Nottingham is stealing from the rich and giving to the poor."
While it has very good Word im-/export, it's not yet faultless (and won't be any time soon, because of inherent limitations of OpenOffice). And you NEED that import, because otherwise you can't exchange documents outside of your department.
They could also use the excellent CodeWeavers' CrossOver Office but then they'll probably pay more $$$ for the MS Office licenses than when they make a OS+Office deal with the MS sales reps.
Either way, they'll have to solve a problem, now or in the future. Then again, Windows brings its own host of problems.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Eddie Bleasedale, of Netproject has been one of the UKs most prolific advocates of the Open Source movement. Hes been running seminars, Discussions and meetings with a large variety of "movers and shaker" within the UK for several Years now. This is the not the first large scale project in the UK but it is certainly the most important. The Architecture employed to move everyone to the Linux Desktop , which I have seen , is certainly the most influential and consistent to date. We at 3aIT wish Eddie and his team all the best in this project and the future.
Though I am wondering when the UK Magazines are going to start including Eddies Name for Linux Advocacy nominations.
And if youve ever tried getting your boss to understand the benefits of Open Source in business then look out for Netprojects Day Conferences ( next on is 10th June 2003, London ) where Netprojects put together a excellent series of dicsussions and topics detailing issues and concerns over the Linux Answer.
And thats why Firecrackers and kittens don't mix.
I disagree. I have used Linux as my desktop since 1994 and when I set up my company I put it on everyone's destops too. I recently offered to switch to Macs but was resoundingly told that we should stick with Linux as they liked it. We have no trouble working with other companies, OpenOffice is fine for all our documents which are the vast majority of what we need an office suite for. We can share those with others as PDF as generally they should not be changing the content of our docs, and if we need to work with others OpenOffice is free so I give them a copy. And if totally unavoidable, we have Office2K under crossover on one machine but it is rarely used. Even if we were using Office2K primarily, docs sent out should be in PDF unless there is a specific reason. Word itself has trouble rendering docs correctly when done on another copy so PDF preserves the formatting better and should be used instead.
I was reading about the switch in Munich yesterday in a German publication (no link, it was paper) based in the City.
It was a political decision and as such, it carries the implicit rider: 'if this is feasable'. The IT department has started on the detailed planning for the switchover. If they decide that in is not possible or cannot be completed within budget - and this involves retraining costs - then large parts of the administration there will continue using M$ products.
Reading between the lines of that article, some participants were willing to go for it and some looked to be trying to torpedo the decision.
The City of Munich has more than one HW/SW platform at the moment, it looks very much as though this situation will continue, with linux and windows both being present.
The article also considered the figure of â30 Million to be ludicrous - the M$ final offer was less than 25% of that (that was self-defeating, it demonstrated their profit-margins) and SuSE's offer (allegedly â34 Million) was also much lower.
The city is also currently migrating to SAP (no idea what from) which is taking up a lot of time/money, they were considering hiring students from the local University to help with the work.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
First, yes the story says they are considering the switch, second, the header dosen't contain the word "may".
I wonder about pressure that local governments can apply externally on businesses. People resist moving from Windows and MS Office saying it will be too hard to convert to something else because file formats are a problem. Yet San Francisco can mandate that any company that deals with the city must have gay friendly policies in place across the entire corporation at the local, state and country levels.
Why can't this same pressure be used to ensure that documents sent to local governments must be readable by freely available packages like Openoffice.org or the companies can not continue doing government business? Make it a requirement and watch the barriers to free and opensource software drop. Then if a local government is having a financial crunch, let them convert older systems to linux/freebsd/whatever without worrying that common document formats can't be read. This way governments could cut computing costs and hire another teacher or policeman, heck maybe even fund youth baseball for a season ( not cheap).
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
The story doesn't say that the final decisions have been made. A feasibility study is being mounted to replace Windows systems by the end of the year. Microsoft will be pulling out all the stops against this. A May 14th Slashdot discussion on the topic quotes Orlando Ayala, head of sales at Microsoft, as saying: "Under NO circumstances lose against Linux." They're going to practically give Windows away to avoid these setbacks. Even if they do prevail, though, the die is cast against Redmond.
I think that Microsoft has "jumped the shark."
Longhorn is two years away. Palladium-Next Generation Computing is alarming large segments of the IT community. Microsoft's latest licensing scheme antagonized its business customers. It is a convicted monopolist; its options against future challenges aren't what they were before that conviction and they face antitrust action in Europe and elsewhere. Viruses and worms spread by and through Windows IIS, Hotmail, Outlook, Outlook Express and Internet Explorer create weekly embarrassments in the face of Bill Gates's call for improved security. The strategy to impose a Microsoft-powered Digital Rights Management regime on users has been hurt badly by Apple's iTunes Music store. Economic conditions have slowed the adoption of Windows XP because new machines aren't being bought at rates anticipated before the technology industry nosedive. Millions of Windows 98, ME, and 2000 customers see no need (and have little incentive) to upgrade.
And now, the growth of Open Source has crippled Microsoft's ability to "embrace and extend" critical standards. The first big mistake in that battle is their recent announcement that there will be no more standalone versions of Internet Explorer. Open Source alternatives will be able to develop and implement improvements in browser technology at a much more nimble rate than will Microsoft while maintaining compatibility with current standards. New versions of IE that cripple functionality will drive customers toward alternatives rather than toward IE (and the requisite release of Windows that delivers it).
Microsoft's stated goal of "Windows on every desktop" is no longer practical. Steve Ballmer's recent memo to the troops admits as much. I've been in the computer industry for over twenty years now and I assure you that that is a HUGE victory, but the advantage has to be pressed now or Microsoft will catch up like it has caught up so many times before. Open Source has to continue its emphasis on better, faster, cheaper, safer, and more reliable.
But for now? Bravo!
Cities switching to Linux happens so often that it is going to be available as an option in Sim City 5.
Slashdot Sig. version 0.1alpha. Use at your own risk.
As a long term unix developer who tried a job where windows was mandated:
.NET, yes, cloning Java is a good idea if you can't bring yourself to actually use something not invented here. But people still have to deal with the utterly brain dead attitude of windows, and Windows.Forms is still the absolute worst GUI toolkit in use... You still end up having to use COM, and anyway, why the hell wouldn't you just use Java unless you are a complete MS donkey?
It is an absolute nightmare to do anything on Windows that isn't explicitly allowed by Microsoft.
Have you ever tried to debug some random piece of crap VB dll or vbscript ( two of the four current VB dialects... vb.net, vb6, vbs, vba )? Its a fuckload harder than a horrible shell or perl script. Python scripts are pretty hard to make truly horrible, so those are usually even easier to debug.
COM is really just a horrible hack to make people think there is a C++ abi on Windows. It is an absolute disgrace to actually use. This is the reason so much is done in VB on Windows. Microsoft have made C and C++ into a completely useless platform for doing anything quick. There are over 30 different types of string used in the MS apis... what does that tell you?
Every api seems to have from 9 to 35 arguments. Nobody knows what they are for... its a cut and paste job from MSDN, yet again... and then we get on to business processes.
People start off with a spreadsheet or a word document. They add macros to it. They expand it. They go fucking insane. The next thing you know you are expected to work out what a fucking idiot has created in the worst language known to man, VBA. There are so many random limitations in this crud that even the bog standard excel user hits them on his first macro, and starts making up crazy work arounds, each different than the other. Fuck you, Joel Spoelsky..... . I can't believe that guy is proud of his "Excel macro strategy".
And before you say
On unix, the first thing is that I have choice... I don't have to go with Apache, or Tux, or publicfile, or roxen, or zope, or roll my own with twisted , my current favorite trick. On windows, if you don't use IIS, you are likely to get screwed over at any point.
Now, be honest. You tried to use unix but you got scared. "Mummy, theres no drive letters! I'm lost!!!!! Waaaaaah!!!!". You didn't want to know what was going on. Windows protects you from knowing what the hell you are doing by restricting you to do only what their focus groups tell them. Have you ever actually worked out what was happening when something broke on Windows? Or did you just give up and abandon that functionality, and blame it on Microsoft? Microsoft, in their incompetence, provide a great scapegoat for Windows developers. If they had to use an Open Source system, this excuse would become fairly hollow...
Anyway, when you have a problem on Unix you don't ever reach some inscrutable, impenetrable barrier. You can look at what every component does, and if required, dive into the source and fix it. There are no artificial limits. The fact that anyone can look at the source means that people are less inclined to publish crappy code... And this effect increases with time.
To your "advantages":
DFS - please. This is a dodgy hack of SMB - it is not "distributed" in any real sense. OpenAFS is about as good as gets there, maybe Coda when it gets stable...
User administration: Huh? Can your helpdesk staff not learn a web front end to do this? Its not very hard to find one.... eg webmin, linuxconf. And this kind of thing is easy to customise - ie force your staff to put the required info..
and frankly it will always be easier
As soon as someone uses the word "frankly", it means "I'm going to say something completely unsupported and expect you to believe it."
Comparing windows to unix is like comparing a swiss pen knife to a fully equipped machine shop, with almost every tool available to you to use. Except you can fit it in your pocket....