Slashdot Mirror
Some European Moves Towards Linux
Readers VE3OGG and FFFFHALTFFFF write in with three pieces of a global picture that is emerging of governments and corporations moving away from Microsoft and towards open source. First, France: the French automaker Peugot Citroen has announced that over the next several years they will be integrating up to 20,000 Novell SUSE desktops as well as 2,500 SUSE servers into their facilities. (Let's hope that, in Novell, Peugeot Citroen hasn't bought a lemon.) Next, Sweden: the Swedish Armed Forces has made a decision to migrate its Windows NT servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Finally, Russia. VE3OGG writes: "It would seem that after the recent Russian piracy debacle that could see a school headmaster jailed in a Siberian work camp for purchasing pirated copies of Windows for his school, the Ministry of Education in Russia has decided that the school boards will no longer be purchasing any commercial software."
"European" is an adjective. Try reading the headline now.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
All of these groups didn't stick with MS: http://www.linux.org/info/linux_govt.html
I thought that Linux was always bigger than MS in Europe already, was I wrong?
Yes your are (still) wrong. but it depends of the market we are talking about. If you mean the web server market, clearly Linux won. If you mean the desktop PC market, Linux is almost non-existant.
Concerning corporate/administration networks, each migration from Windows to Linux makes headlines (Munich city, French Police/Gendarmerie with Open Office, Swedish army, etc.). So I guess it is still considered as "extraordinary" events. Most are still running Windows. But it may change with the official support for Open standard/format that I've seen in recent call of tenders. Microsoft will clearly lose a big advantage.
The situation in Europe isn't that different from the US, except maybe that the Microsoft lobby is less powerful.
Drink with them, make friendship, du not fully trust them, too many crooks, but many also are nice, make business with them, but never every try to be arrogant against them or bully them. They are very proud people, and the usual american arrogance is not really accepted. (I am not russian and live in central europe btw.)
The russian mentality in many ways is somewhat different to the usual western mentality, you really have to be open to keep friendships with them or generally deal with them and you have to learn their ways to some degree.
Yes, you were wrong. It's pretty much completely unheard of at home or at work. MS utterly dominates. At work we've got one Linux server now (as in: within the last year), cos I helped push towards use of an OSS CMS (plone as it happens), but apart from that, it's all MS. If I went around the office I doubt more than a couple of people would have even heard of Linux. MS having an uphill battle to get in?!? Absolutely not. (Disclaimer: I don't really know anything about the super big Enterprisey systems. I doubt it's much different to the US tbh - there's Linux adoption but the Linux installs are probably replacing Unix more than anything else.)
How about "Some moves towards linux by Europe" or "Europe makes some moves towards linux." These capture the essence of the original without being confusing. However, they are still kind of dumb. The concept is that more people or agencies in europe have been using Linux. "Moves towards" isn't the best way of poutting this. "More Agencies in Europe Adopt Linux" or "Linux Usage Rising in Europe" would have been much better.
"Some Lazy Editor Moves Towards Cheetos." Why do I suspect that these guys really just want to sit on their asses all day playing video games while the money pours in and they do as little as possible? I know the submitter probably wrote the headline, but that's what editors are for: editing.
I feel like the editors resent everything they actually have to do, like they are some kind of royalty and we are the peasants whose duty it is to support them. Hmm, I wonder if slashdot editors get Primae Noctis rights?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
You talk like Europe is an another planet. Wake up, there are whole other continents than North America.
Granted, the media there doesn't necessary tell that 'Europe is still under the domination of MS' or anything other from here, but the world or life outside US is not very different than yours.
Torvalds does indeed live in this country, but I don't think that makes Linux any more popular. If a company has international connections, everyone has to use the same system, right? MS still rules the world.