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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."
Let's just hope the Russians don't decide to accept a deal from Microsoft for cheap software, ultimately if they do that they're just setting themselves up for future problems down the line. When funds are tight it is very useful to be able to have software where it's legal and encouraged to copy it. The amount of piracy that goes on with Microsoft products just shows how much that people consider Windows the only option, once they have other choices then more people are going to go for free and legal over free and illegal.
Back when I was a student Linux was a great way to free and easily get all the tools needed to learn Perl and C. The documentation on the internet provided most you'd need but I still bought a few O'Reilly books for reference, I learned a lot more using Linux in the 90's and using Linux gave me the skills to get a better paid job when I left university, people coming out with only Windows skills do not get the same salaries.
Some people say that teaching Linux in schools is a bad thing as the commerical world is all Microsoft on the desktop. That's total rubbish too, people should not be taught 'Word' they should be taught general word processing skills and preferably be exposed to a few alternative apps so they don't think there's only one way to do it. Versions of Microsoft applications change the UI between versions so even if they do end up working at a Microsoft shop they'll adapt better to the changing UI's between versions. Also a better all round education will open up alternatives to businesses, if the staff are better trained then switching to alternatives will be easier, it can save the economy a fortune in the future.
It would seem that Microsoft's campaign against the poor, Russian school teacher backfired miserably. Microsoft has now incurred the wrath of the Russian government and has just locked itself out of a market. That's a real smooth way to do business and has just opened the flood gates for open source software. Bill Gates' tacit denial of Gorbachev's appeal shows an utter lack of foresight and has caused an ultimate loss for Microsoft. And all of this occurred because Bill wanted to make an example of a poor, Russian school teacher whom was using Windows, not for commercial gain, but for education. If Microsoft were wise, they would have provided free, genuine copies because this teacher is educating future Microsoft consumers. Instead, they caused alienation, and, as anyone can tell you, alienation is a bad thing. So now, Red Hat has the chance to build loyal users. Go Red Hat!
Clearly MS hasn't learned its lesson yet. While I don't begrudge MS for trying to protect their copyrights against piracy, they do need to learn about subtlety. Does Ernie Ball come to mind? Ernie Ball had more copies than licenses; they didn't keep up with the licensing like they should have, and they admitted it. They were a good MS customer and would have preferred to work with MS on any licenses problems. But raiding their offices with armed federal marshalls? Now, they're a Linux shop. MS lost a good customer and got bad PR. All for 70 something licenses that Ernie Ball would have glady paid for had it had the chance.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
In Sweden one university was thinking of switching to Linux - a couple of days later it got a sweet deal from Microsoft.
According to rumours they got a 90% rebate on the normal licensing fee for software.
Just saying it like it are.