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Dutch Gov't Doubles Back On Open-Source Goals
An anonymous reader writes "Despite a 2002 unanimous vote by the Dutch parliament to prefer open standards and open source, exclusive negotiations with Microsoft were started. MPs have started asking questions already, but will add some more now that a Dutch journalist discovered that the deal will cripple the open source ambitions. The deal not only covers desktop software, but lets Microsoft deliver server software and support as well. MPs are outraged, and the EU may investigate why no mandatory public bid was started. In an open letter to the government, public organizations and open source companies like Novell raise hell. How can you ever fight bureaucrats?"
Don't know about there, but here the bureaucrats (did I get the spelling right?) have an upper hand over politicians. Politicians are there in the office just for few years - bureaucrats are there for decades. And bureaucrats have more technical knowledge than politicians (at least here).
I never understood this.
Does "Dutch" refer to Holland-related stuff, Netherlands-related stuff, or both?
well, in the irish case, it was probably easy - Microsoft: "Support software patents or we'll leave Ireland, costing hundreds to thousands of high-paid of jobs". Politicians treat "employment" as an important issue - they don't much care _what_ people are working at, so long as they're working and not causing trouble. Tell them "I don't care how many jobs Microsoft brought to Ireland, I for one would never work for such an unethical company" and they'll laugh in your face and call you a hippy idealist (I know from personal experience) - yet I also know at least a hundred Irish highly-qualified computer people who would never work for microsoft for exactly that reason.
True, But prime minister Kok ( not known for his expertize on IT ) made the first monster contract deal with Microsoft some years ago.
Gates even dropped by and Kok acted like Gates was the saviour of the human race or something.
This is the true "Poldermodel".
But this is NOT where I want my taxmoney to go.
-- forget
I've worked at the Netherlands Ministry of Housing, Spatial planning and the Environment (VROM in Dutch) about 4 or 5 years ago as an IT specialist. It's not only about the sysadmins. When I started working there, they were cutting the number of applications. As far as I remember, they were trying to cut from about 1500 different applications to about 600 to 700. Most of them were Windows applications. My grilfriend worked at a Dutch city hall. She had to support between 45 to 60 different Windows applications. Switching from MS software to something else could mean that most of these applications have also to be converted / substituted. That's not something that can be done easily. I can understand the short-time choice for MS software. But the negotiations with MS seem to conflict with government policy.
So any time anyone chooses a MS product over an opern source product, it must be because of bribery and not because of some legit reason (like lack of training)?
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
Try me, I'm very shocked by something like this happening in europe. Here in african countries, everything is just about politcs. I'm on a little island called mauritius. Believe me this is so much opensource can do here, but for some reason..our government chooses to equip our schools with microsoft softwares, recently i've observed that they are willing to let people pirate their softwares for a while, which afterwards the turn this habit into locking devices, cutting crazy deals with small and big enterprises here...I hope someday this will really stop... I wonder why our National Computer Board is organizing all these open forums, yet No one is trying to promote OpenSource / Linux in this country....
What Sig
Have been tried many times, it creates chaos. Take Iraq. You remove the Baath party and everything collapses.
Not to be cynical, but it seems what civilisation is all about is.. Bureaucracy. It is not like evolution or liberalism etc. has removed it. We have as much as the Romans did and even more.
[Our current government] Is the most corrupt one in many many years...
I hope that both the related ministers and MS executives get a big bucked of shit over themselfs.
Why hope? Let's go and do something about it.
In my oppinion, the Dutch public was about to empeach our current ministers, too many people were/are upset over the issues of early retirement, healthcare etc. We are represented by a government for which we did not vote (the majority voted for a CDA/PVDA coalition, we got a CDA/VVD/D66 coalition in which the agenda of the VVD rules), they take measure of which the public does not approve, so the public is in it's democratic right to demand changes, either by the current government or by one we'll elect because the current one does not do what the people want and demand.
Why were there no mobs of people in The Hague, demanding a change of government and/or it's policy? Because some lunatic shoots a filmmaker at just the right time (just like with the rise of Pim Fortuyn), one which just happens to have a very critical opinion towards this government and his opinion tends to influence those of others. Now we start to get a US-like situation, were the public is manipulated by FUD about threats of terrorism and fear of all that is Islamic. But the public opinion is once again in favor of the current government. I accuse them of creating momentum by assinating a critic and a politician who demanded change in the current political system, and using this momentum to assure their continuity and increasing their power and control.
Almost an exact copy of what happend in the US after 9/11. I guess now I know what our Minister President talked about with GWB, tactics on how to spin public opinion in your benefit and how to ensure the profitability of our own Oil (Royal Dutch Shell) and War (Stork, Urenco) industry.
You know what? I'm still fed up with it! I demand change, but it seams that only in Eastern Europe the public can still demand changes. The West has lost their will to fight or question authority. *sigh*
The U.S. has many thousands of unemployed or underemployed Linux admins who I'm sure would love to go to Europe for a few months to help ease the transition to open source. Where do I sign up?
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
No, of course not!
When "mid" and "long" term finally arrive the Dutch government will find their data 'safely' tucked away in WinFS with no means of export. Having had their data locked down by Microsoft they will then discover that the 'price cuts' they thought they were so clever in negotiating will evaporate 10X over when Bill sends them the next bill.
They will also find that their 'negotiations' didn't reduce the crashes, data loss through corruption, data theft by black hats, loss of time rebooting, rebuilding or reinstalling, and the plague of viruses that cause even more COSTLY grief. Being a small country they will watch in helpless horror as they see a significant portion of their GNP go to feed the ambitions of the world's richest man.
Welcome to our world! Now you are truly like the USA!
Vendors have "relationships" with buyers in companies. They wine 'em, dine 'em, hassle 'em, etc. That's what they do. It's ALL they do. They try to do this in secret. Why let the competition know?
I remember when I was VP Engineering for a company, and I showed up one morning and there were all these drones from Compaq installing those idiotic "non-expandable crapola PC inside a 14" monitor" boxes that they used to sell. They were putting them EVERYWHERE.
Yup, you guessed it, the Controller just decided on his own to go buy about 50 of these useless things. Never asked anyone for advice, even though he had about 40 engineers including me he could have consulted, any one of which would have told him that his decision was nuts.
I got the Compaq sales guy alone in my office. I told him never to set foot in the building again. I told him Compaq would never, ever, sell us anything again as long as I was there. And they didn't. It didn't stop them from calling me. At the end, they were offering to rip every single PC out and put in some other hunk of crap. for like $200/station.
But then we sold the whole company, so that was that.
It became entirely apparent to me just over a year ago that *real* F/L/OSS advocacy was needed in the Government arena - to help stop sh*t like this happening.
And if you think the proprietary vendors are going to stop Microsoft - you're living in a dream-world!
This is one of the reasons why we formed the Open Source Consortium in the UK, a coalition of almost 70 F/L/OSS pure-play companies to provide a vendor neutral voice representing the views of the community to government. The other main reson being to give them a deployment force which is not controlled by any of the proprietary vendors.
Of course, we were slated on slashdot just over a week ago. Interesting how you guys can whine about this kind of stuff happening, and then whine about your own kind coming together to try and stop it!
Anyway, if there are any of you out there interested in actually *doing* something about this, rather than inneffective whingeing on slashdot, you may like to consider joining us!
Oh, and you might like to consider funding FSF Europe as well - Georg and the guys are amongst the few front-line organisations we've got actually having an impact over here right now.
Or you can just get back to compaining how unfair it all is...
Open Source Consortium
www.opensourceconsortium.org
It's nice to see that cross-national EU procedures seem to be in place to monitor these kinds of worrying development. It shows that the EU is not (just) about bureaucracy and 'being ruled from Brussels' as my British friends like to put it, but actually an effective means to watch what all its member governments are doing.
--
Coolbeans! The Nuggets , SMS search engine -- text your questions, get your answers from the Web, now all across the UK.
What makes me raise my eyebrows on occasion is the way that the Netherlands seems to be on a particularly anti-european or pro-american (depending on your viewpoint) bent in recent years. The Dutch military choosing the American Apache helicopter instead of the Eurocopter Tiger. The Dutch military choosing the american M-16 rifle for some reason that no one can quite fathom. The Dutch choosing to participate in the F-35 JSF fighter consortium which hasn't really brought them any benefits. The Dutch signing on to the Iraq war fiasco, which wasn't even very popular in Holland at the time. And now the great Microsoft deal of the century when just about every other country in the world, let alone Europe, is at least looking at Open Source alternatives.
There are probably some good business and political reasons behind this but more often than not, the Dutch decisions seem to me to some kind of attempt to deliberately put the Germans and the French at a distance. I can understand that in a way as Holland is smaller than those two and could fear being overruled by them, but it mostly comes across as the epitomy of the old saying "Cutting off one's nose to spite one's face", i.e. doing something on principle even though it has no benefit to one.
Sadly, a lot of stuff in the EU seems to happen like this where national self interest can torpedo some very good projects (and bad as well, to be fair).
The government (anybody's government) is a huge bureaucratic organization that is comprised of people who primarily want stability. They want nothing to threaten their position, pension, and job security.
Given a choice of spending other people's money (your's, the taxpayer) or going with a group that has no formal organization that can take legal responsibility when systems break down, the bureaucrats will always chose buying the service from another large organization. That way they are protected. The fact that Linux Open Source is a better situation for the taxpayers and government information systems is secondary.
There are three ways to deal with this situation:
Pass laws requiring the use of open-source. This won't work because bureaucrats will always twist the law to fit their needs, which in this case is to 'cover their ass' when (not if) the information system breaks down.
Make Microsoft unaffordable Stop paying taxes in a big way so that the government doesn't have the money available to afford the Microsoft solution. This won't work because the government can use any amount violence to take your money from you, and because Microsoft can lower the initial offering price to almost nothing to secure the contract. This will work in developing countries, eventually, but not in the EU or USA.
Have open source so widely used that Microsoft can't link into the established framework This won't work because Microsoft will always allow free limited distribution of its product (by technically permitting unpaid copies to be made of Windows and Office) enough to keep itself being the defacto standard in use.
The only way that the open source community can win against Microsoft in government procurement contracts is to be so transparently better that the government buyers will be willing to overlook its stark disadvantages (to the bureaucrats) in order to have a greatly superior product.
This can't happen because great software is mostly the result of great individual programmers.
Microsoft has the funds to buy their work, talents, and focus for its exclusive use in Windows. The only way that Microsoft can fail here is if they refuse to pay their most highly productive 'superstar' programmers enough, or refuse to make the necessary effort to recruit them in the first place. Given that MS is run by super programmers (even if he is retired from actual coding) like Bill Gates, this too is unlikely.
The only way to beat Microsoft is convince them to hire mediocre executive leadership. This is the only way to beat any large powerful organization.
... by 'De automatiseringsgids', a Dutch weekly newsletter for IT professionals, put the people in favor and opposing this deal to a 51-49 percentile stand off. What is clear from this questionairre, however, is that people opposing it know much much better why they opposed it ; funding their opinions appropriately. People in favor of the deal played mostly stupid when they were asked the same thing.
I understand politicians are in the latter category, but it worries me that so many "IT professionals" are sticking their heads in the sand as well !
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I don't care about the ones with moustaches.
But I do care about the multitude of tall leggy blondes that walk/ bike the streets of the Friesian cities, especially Sneek (Snits in Friesian) has a reputation for classy Blondie's.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Hate to say it, but there has not been much outrage over the DMCA or so-called PATRIOT Act.
It's certainly understandable that you might think there has been if you spend much time reading Slashdot and similar-minded sites. Why? Because you're constantly seeing people discussing these things, so, since you constantly read this, and since the things said are overwhelmingly negative, your mind is tricked into believing that what you see is representative of society at large. There's even a theory in Communication research about this. It's called cultivation theory, and it basically says that people tend to form their beliefs of what's real based on what they see in the media. So, someone who watches lots of crime dramas tends to believe that there is a greater chance they'll be a crime victim than do those who don't watch them. Basically, the media, whether TV or the Internet, gives you a distorted view of society. You may think that the masses are outraged by the DMCA and PATRIOT Act, but many people simply don't care. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that most people don't even know what the DMCA is or what it does.
But on the upside, massive outrage can indeed change things, but it has to be backed up by action. How many countries have had their political establishments shaken to their foundations by public action in the last 20 years? Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, the USSR, the Philippines, Indonesia, Yugoslavia, and now Ukraine, to name a few. People can indeed change things, but they have to know what's happening, and they have to get off their couches and do something.
Well, then, if you want to see more dirty tricks by M$, then investigate something called "CTMI" in the Toronto District School Board. M$ is demanding that linux labs be shutdown in schools, (or not allowed at all), forcing schools to buy Dell computers ONLY, with a "special" image of M$ junk, at horrendous costs to taxpayers, regardless of what teachers and students want. Corruption at the highest levels, due to M$ influence. Millions of taxpayers dollars squandered and sent to M$...
"Go ahead, tax me, I'm Canadian."