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Embarrassing Governments Into Adopting Open Source
caitsith01 writes "An effort is currently underway to embarrass the Australian Federal Government into adopting open source software. As this story explains, the Australian Democrats have put questions on notice in Parliament that will require all government ministers to disclose how much money their departments spend on Microsoft products each year. The idea is to force open source issues to the fore by showing just how much money Microsoft receives from the government. It could be a smart approach - the average taxpayer knows little or nothing about OSS, but will rapidly form and express vocal opinions about the government wasting money. The article also mentions that a bill may be introduced to Federal Parliament to mandate the consideration of open source solutions (you may remember this story about an Australian state trying to introduce similar legislation). Some quotes from the article: "What the country doesn't need is to be tied into a profit-maximising licensing system, and the way to combat that is to get government to break out of the paradigm." On the other hand, the (right wing) Liberal Party criticises suggestions that use of open source should be compulsory as "hi-tech affirmative action.""
The democrats are usually a non-event, being third party in a two party state, like the liberal party in the UK.
However their founding motto is "keep the bastards honest", and I hope their new policy will include looking for Microsoft payback (election campaign contributions anybody?) as I am sure this will be fruitful.
Humorous signatures are over-rated.
As much as I love Open Source (I'm typing this via Moz on FreeBSD!), I don't think I could recommend it to Sally Secretary quite yet. Its still got a bit more polishing to do. In Gnome, for example, I occasionally get a dialog box that says " occurred. For more information, click on the help button." Naturally there is no help button.
Hopefully, though, a widespread adoption of it as a server OS will encourage those working on its workstation aspects to really get a move on so we can rid the world of MS products.
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
Australian Democrats have put questions on notice in Parliament that will require all government ministers to disclose how much money their departments spend on Microsoft products each year.
The question to ask is:
How much money does Microsoft spend on each minister. That would be truly embarassing, specially in the US.
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If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
I sincerely hope they find a good bunch of sysadmins to run that stuff
They don't need any more sysadmins. Just sysadmins who know Linux. To Windows sysadmins, sure, Linux looks difficult to use. If you already know it, it's a fairly logical system. Plus, it's easier to maintain more Linux systems per sysadmin than Windows systems because you aren't forced to use a GUI for everything.
But will they still save money in the end--even after they have spent $$$ to re-train their employees on Linux?
I know people who are not extremely computer literate who use Linux for their every day tasks with no problem. Web browsing and typing up documents is easy. I don't know too many people who know most of MS Word's features - they end up having to look up the advanced ones. Same will go for on Linux.
Two sites to check out are egovos.org and this one at netaction.org. There's also the other side.
I no it is a futile point to stress, but spending money on software is not necessarily a waste of money. Software developers, IT staff, network technicians, Linux gurus all look to the layman like a big fat waste of money.
The problem isn't that the Australian government is spending money on computers and software, but that the world's richest and one of the most politically powerful man on the earth has the government in a vice with its OS and other monopolies.
There is a good argument that it would be better for Australia to go the OSS route. It would help encourage the local development of software, etc.. The problem is not that people working on or developing software get paid.
There is a second extremely powerful implied argument in the article in that people don't really know how much MS gets from the government. If the government tallied up their bill, they would be shocked. As it stands, MS is able to hide its take in the cost of hardware, or other parts of the ledger.
the desire for independence from the US is going to be an increasingly important factor in driving Linux/OSS adoption throughout the world.
You nailed it! Just think at the resentment to H1Bs and the French in the US. Imagine Microsoft and Sun were French companies. Would the US think long and hard, and ponder over Gartner reports before jumping to Linux?
Jacques Chirac donating a few billions to unemployed Americans 'cos they lost their jobs to French giant Microsoft! Yeah.. now I can see resentment from both sides.
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If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
I think that rich societies, the U.S. in particular, squawk a lot about how horrible it is to have a lying, cheating, or boozing president. I also think that they will only whine until it starts hitting the cash supply. Even if the TCO of the Microsoft solution is somewhat better than the open source alternative, it may not be better macro-economically. If you are going to spend serious money, you might as well spend it at home. If the above guesses are true, and unless our Australian friends enjoy making us Northwest U.S. people rich, then yes, it is possible to embarrass them into using a particular OS. This is assumes a rational legislature and discounts the recreational value of having Balmer fly down just to kiss your ass every three years.
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
gee i dunno my univeristy and most others (in the US) consists of whites and asians. Im not going to assume anything abuot whites, but i do know that most asians, inclusind myself, do not come from wealthy families. It is possible to work your way the top without handouts if you are competent and you know it. America in particular rewards hard work, dont tell me its not possible, i used to live in a village in the hills of Nepal and i know many many other with similar stories
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
It's much more difficult to argue against a law along the lines of "all Government information must be stored in an ISO approved format."
Are you kidding? The Liberals are _exactly_ like the Republicans. In fact, they maintain active ties with the Republicans, and attend common policy forums, think tanks etc.
They are very, very right wing.
Read Pynchon.
Wrong. Most probably they would not just use some existing distribution. Neither they will create their own distribution. Most probably they will sign a contract with a company like RedHat to get "ongoing support etc etc etc."
Last time I checked RedHat it was $90/year for the subscribtion with minimal support contract. Most probably they will want better support, and end up paying much more - maybe even more than they are paying to Microsoft.
They could save lots by avoiding this contract, but it never happens - goverments usually like to have a support contract just as companies do (e.g. because goverment bureacrates want to cover their asses). So I doubt government would really save any money.
MSDOS: 20+ years without remote hole in the default install
As long as the amounts spent are not put into a context (by for instance showing how much can be saved if OSS is used) the amounts spent are meaningless. Some of the public may have heard about OSS, and they may know that it's 'free', but hey, Munich spend around 35 million Euros on OSS (IIRC) and that was even more expensive than going for the MS solution. Therefore this is only useful if the public is also informed about the costs and profits and drawbacks of alternatives to MS software. And why focus only on MS? That is also not fair. I can't believe the government only spends money on MS software. Conclusion: this proposal sucks.
-- Cheers!
I used to help administer a hospital-informationsystem.
This was a unix-alike system (although the OS was *proprietary*). Users used terminals/terminal-emulators.
It had a appliction for writing letters about the patients. This application was only used by secretaries. The firm that made it also had a plugin for MSword. Using this plugin users didn't need to use the terminal-based application, but they could write their letters in Word, fill in some database form-fields and send it over to the system.
So the users could choose between:
- terminal-based word-processor
and
- MS-Word-with-plugin.
Our experiences were:
- New end/or temporary staff liked to use Word, since everyone knows word so training-time is shorter (and thus you get more productive hours from those people that only stay for a week).
- Experienced staff *liked* and *chose* to use the terminal-based version. Reasons: it was more responsive, less error-prone, no need to use the mouse (switching left hand keys->mouse->keys->mouse->....), more productivity (it took less time to initiate a new letter, to save it).
Secretaries and non-IT-skilled staff have for long been able to use all kinds of IT-systems (with proper training). I was surprised to see that they sometimes actually chose to use a unix-alike when there was also Word. So here you have it: what counts in the long run is functionality. Does the application do what you want from it, does it do it effectively, efficiently and reliably? GIU is a plus, but no more than that.
MrPrince.
This unique sig is intended to make this user more recognisable.
I think the "It's cheaper" aspect gets prominence because it is something everyone understands.
Start saying "proprietary vendor lock-in for legacy data" and watch your listeners eyes glaze over...
So politicians emphasis the point "it's cheaper" and the media rehashes the point because its something they and their audience can follow.
MS will give Australia higher license fees when they decide that OSS should be adopted someplaces. MS can do that, since they know that the government won't be able to switch to OSS just like that.
This happened in Norway some time ago, when the government figured out that the MS license they hade made on behalf of all the schools in Norway, actually prohibited all use of software that had MS equivalents, which excludes a lot of software, Linux included.
When the government terminated the license, MS then proceeded to charge more for each school that wanted to use MS software, a number which probably didn't change much, and MS got paid more money for the same number of licenses.
"This whole mentality of using a "desktop environment" is one of the worst crutches the computing industry has been hobbled with."
I agreed with most of your post, but I'm, going to have to complain about this bit.
I think OS's should have even more time spent on making better GUI's, with as much written language removed from it as possible. Humans have fantastic abilities to process pure images (i.e. pure graphical UI's); it's when humans have to deal with written language (i.e. Text only UI) that you get hobbled.
I for one, would not be in the Job I am in, if it had not been for desktop GUI's. I'm Dyslexic, and as a result I had horrible troubles learning and using command line only interfaces. You see, my reading was not very good back then, I had to learn how to speed-read because my brain processes language in a completely different way to the average person. As for spelling, ha, try using a command line if you can't spell. Not only that, I can't even see most of my mistakes, even after going over a statement several times.
I was not really into computers till I got my hands on Apples and later Macs in school. Once I learned the concepts of basic computing from using desktop GUI's (which relied on my image processing skills, instead of my non-existent language skills) I was able to carry those skills over to command line interfaces. I'd prolly be Anti-Computer still if I had not been able to learn on a Desktop GUI.
It's not just people with "learning disabilities". I can sit down at a PC running Windows, or a Mac running OS X in a Spanish/French/Greek/Japanese Internet café, without being able to speak or read a word of any of those languages, and I can still surf the net.
I think a pure GUI, void of any written language is the Holy Grail of computing as far as I'm concerned. It would not matter what your native language was, you would be able sot sit down, and use the computer.
(For the record, I'm not "stuck with GUI's, I was able to become very proficient with command line interfaces in the end. I used BBS before the Internet was even available, and the first time I logged into the Internet was on a Commodore 64. And yes, I had to spell check this post)
Munich changed from a US vendor with a German support organization (Microsoft Corp. and Microsoft GmbH) to a German vendor with a German support organization (SuSE and IBM Deutschland GmbH). Since support and education is a very important piece of the Munich cake, this piece of business was in local German hands already. The importance of technical independence is not seen as important as some /. readers would like to see it. I have been involved in Linux studies for the German government and that doesn't play a large role.
Concerning support, I've worked both with Microsoft and with IBM service at the enterprise level. You won't see much US influence / connection there. Not as much as you see at Sun or at Oracle. OTOH, in the case of problems, access to MS developers is hard to get, even within strategical alliances. Whereas access to developers of IBM or Sun is better. For Munich, access to SuSE engineers will be the easiest -- SuSE headquarters are just a few kilometers away. That may have been a factor in the decision.
Joachim
People don't write Manifestos any more -- what's going on in this world? [Frank Zappa]