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Open Source Cities Followup — Munich Yea, Vienna Nay
We're catching up on two stories of municipal engagement with open source software: Munich (which decided to go OS in 2003) and Vienna (2005). E5Rebel brings us news that Munich has stayed the course. But bkingaut informs that Vienna has decided to migrate back to Windows (Google translation) — to Vista no less. The migration of 720 computers used in kindergartens will cost the city about €8M. The given reason for all this is a language test application for the kids that only works with MS IE and won't be made compatible (by the producer) with Firefox until 2009.
IE4Linux? Not exactly legal, but hey...
Who in their right mind makes something work on a browser that doesn't work well, but neglects to do it for a browser that is easier to develop for?
So much for the web based application cross platform utopia.
These vendors really should target Mozilla, and distribute a client (branded Firefox install) for those fearful of the open source.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Seems to me it would be easier and cheaper to find test software that did not require IE.
OR even better, they could write some and help other schools going open source.
I guess the actual problem lies in the fact that IE uses ActiveSEX technology and that site makes use of it.
RTFA, they are also willing to pay 8M euros to someone writing the language test application instead.
Seems like a good price...
Sorry, reading the onion too much...
I suggest hiring 1000 monkeys for a year, bananas should cost less than $8000 a year.
- These characters were randomly selected.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The wonderful world of educational software. It is usually written by the most clueless and incompetent lowlife out there. It runs only on Windows, only on a specific version and is mandated and approved by the relevant government as mandatory.
It is the _REAL_ reason on why Microsoft is so prevalent.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Can't IE6 run on Wine?
"That's a major setback to the conversion to linux of the city.", Marie Ringler, a member of the district council and representative of the Vienna Green party, said to ORF.at. On Wednesday the Vienna district council will decide that the most important linux installation (720 computers) of the city council be migrated to Windows Vista. The corresponding proposal was made available to ORF.net
-----8,000,000 Euros for Microsoft-----
The MA 14, the body that is responsible for the city's IT-systems, has thus made available a budget of 8,000,000 Euros for the purchase of software licenses. These costs will be reimbursed to the MA 14 by MA 10 (kindergartens) and MA 56 (school administration).
The migration of the public authorities' computers from Windows 2000 and Office 2000 to Vista and Office 2007 will cost 7,600,000 Euros, and the purchase of 2,600 licenses for Windows, Office, and Server-software in Vienna's [Bildungsnetz] education network will cost 324,000 Euros. The changeover of the 720 kindergarten computers from the city-branded linux distribution "Wienux"* to Vista will cost around 105,000 Euros.
-----Language skill tests for children-----
The migration of the kindergarten computers is because of a piece of software that tests kindergarten children's language abilities is only available on the Internet Explorer platform. The makers will have a Firefox version of their product only by 2009, according to Ringler.
"The city could have gotten the company to get their version that runs on Firefox out the door faster with only a fraction of the money that the changeover to Windows will cost, Ringler said, who also accuses the city of not following the Open Source concept and not producing any incentive to migrate from Windows to Wienux. The city also missed the opportunity to subsidize the 1,000 companies that make open source software in the Vienna region.
In Fall 2008, the STOSS2 studies, which was initiated by Vienna and is concerned with the analysis of costs and benefits of using open source software in the city council, will be published.
-----The MA 14 continues to polish Wienux-----
Klaus Rohr, spokesman of the MA 14, confirmed the roll-back on Tuesday afternoon, which is to be completed in 2008. The most important reason for the migration from Linux to Windows is the availability of the aforementioned software only for Windows via Internet Explorer. But there have also been problems with hardware detection in linux, according to him.
But the re-migration to Windows doesn't imply that Wienux will die. The distribution is to be continued to be developed and distributed, according to Rohr.
-----SPÖ: "Wienux is not dead"-----
SPÖ-district councilor Siegfried Lindenmayr doesn't view Wienux as dead either. "Wienux isn't dead. The city of Vienna has used open source software since 20 years and will also continue to do so," he said to ORF.at. "The use of software isn't a question of ideology to us, however. The best educational software runs on Windows, and therefore we will use Windows in our kindergartens."
The city's general open source strategy hasn't changed. The MA 14 will continue to offer linux and install it wherever departments want it. * Wien is the German word for Vienna
Yahoo has an English story about the Switch to Vista in Vienna: http://messages.finance.yahoo.com/Stocks_(A_to_Z)/Stocks_M/threadview?m=tm&bn=12004&tid=1393970&mid=1393970&tof=3&frt=2
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The only way to solve this kind of problem is to make the decision makers accountable to the people who employ them (the public). If this made headline news (and possibly some rent-a-celebrities got onboard) this kind of thing wouldn't happen.
-1 not first post
How can you possibly say IE is easier to develop for then Firefox?
Either way it's HTML and CSS, it's just that one of them has a renderer that actually works, and the other is broken in a multitude of ways.
And that's not even getting started on things like Firebug, which makes it far easier to develop on Firefox then with IE's "something broke, I'm not going to tell you where" model of error reporting for Javascript.
What? When was the last time you heard of Microsoft providing support for IE?
Lets take the classic example of transparent PNGs, which took years to get fixed. And that's something that thousands of developers have been screaming for - I dread to think what would result if you called up Microsoft and said "I have a really specific problem, can you fix it?"
If you want support for Firefox there are forums, IRC channels, and a publicly viewable bug tracker. I'd imagine that if you waved enough money at them the Mozilla Foundation would be quite happy to get a problem you have fixed pretty damn quick as well.
As a professional software developer and college system administrator, I disagree.
To be fair: The migration of 720 computers used in kindergartens will cost the city about 105,000 euros not 8M.
First I thought this may have been a bug in TFTtranslation but It's even correct in TFTofTFA.
Just not in the teaser.
The migration of the 720 computers will only cost 105,000 euros. Sorry about that. Couldn't edit it anymore
1000 work stations migrated to LiMux
6000 work stations using OpenOffice.org
90% work stations using Firefox and Thunderbird That means that during the five odd years that have elapsed since the decision was taken a grand 7% of the computers have been switched over to linux. And this on what the article states is the budget for the transition was 30 million euros.
the budget for migrating all vienna offices to vista is 8million, the 740 kindergarten machines "just" cost 105k. I am not saying that this is a good thing, since the software that is the reason for the switch is unnecessary no matter on which OS it runs... But still the numbers are wrong.
I can't believe that this made headlines - just do the math 8M divided by 740 - that's 10810 Euro per machine, you could buy server grade hardware with 32 cores and 64gb ram (running linux of course) for every kindergarten, or a single license of vista according to the editors...MS knows what sells windows - IE only Kindergarten Language applications and the like.
While GNU Linux is making great progress to get better software on their systems many people need specific software such as that language program.
On the other hand a LOT of these applications were written years ago (sometimes more then a decade) and if they were to be updated they would probably have to be re-written as the original developers have since moved on to other things. Which means XP is kept alive, and developers who do re-write may be considering more cross-platform oriented applications with the increase of the Mac/Linux use in business and schools.
I think though that those tides are turning a lot with FOSS, as a lot of talented people can build/adapt on the works of others and make better educational and other vertical market applications. MS knows its a matter of time, and they are trying to PR/license it to their advantage while they can.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
User-Agent-Switcher anyone? Just a thought.
Actually transparent PNGs aren't really properly fixed in IE7 - try applying an Alpha filter to a transparent PNG and suddenly the transparency does not work anymore.
This is the nature of Microsoft's software and APIs - if you use it in uncommon ways, it breaks. I can give you such examples all day - JavaScript memory leaks in IE6 and IE7? How window.openPopup() requires weird hacks to work with domain relaxation? Flickering images at page load in IE6? The first BR tag in a block tag does not appear when the block tag has a background image? document.selection returns gives you a selection object from a different document object than the one you specified?
Add these to the fact that IE does not have free developer tools like Firebug, Safari Inspector and Drosera, and Opera Dragonfly available (notice how every significant competitor to IE has one)... I'd take the opinion of anyone who says "IE is easy to develop for" with huge pinch of salt. And please... trying to bully people with "I'm an experienced developer" in the technology world isn't a very smart thing to do.
I use both firebug and IE development toolbar. I'm not sure which came first but one has clearly ripped the other off. ;)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=e59c3964-672d-4511-bb3e-2d5e1db91038&displaylang=en
If it takes 100 monkeys some finite amount of time to write the complete works of Shakespeare, then it can easily be said that 1000 monkeys can rewrite a language test application, clearly a simpler task, within a year.
third party paid support
plus, it's a freaking web browser. you point, you click, it works. really, what problems do you need real support for with kindergarten aged children?
Firebug came first - I remember when the IE development toolbar was released, I took a brief look, and went back to using tools that work.
The only time I start IE is when I'm testing a site works in it, and even that has dropped off since I started working for a company that requires (your choice of) working web browser to access web applications.
for corruption.
I am a name troll of Westlake. Visit my homepage to learn why.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/02/0033211&from=rss
Not for long.
OMG! u r prolly like 13, aren't u?
Oh, that's right, you're a Developer of Browser-Based Educational Software, not a real coder.
On the Munich site they are going to move 14000 computers from Windows to Linux and they currently have:
1000 work stations migrated to LiMux
6000 work stations using OpenOffice.org
90% work stations using Firefox and Thunderbird
And in addition of using open source software, they have also written some (OOo plugin) of their own and released it as open source.
For a fan of open source the switch of vienna to vista is a sad story.
:-) .
--- begin complain mode
Given that the 8M euros are 'just' the money of taxpayers and the city of vienna is dominated by one party for at least 90 years (minus the years during WW2) there is no reason to wonder about. Democratic power changes form one party to another do not happen in vienna. A lot of the voters in vienna just vote automatically for the same party all the time, independent of what this party does. Therefore the government of the city of vienna has no motivation to save the taxpayers money. I do not want to start a political discussion. I just think that power changes between partys are essential for democracy.
--- end complain mode
If you want to support an open source project in vienna, support Seed7 (I am living in vienna / austria (no kangaroos here))
Greetings Thomas Mertes
Seed7 Homepage: http://seed7.sourceforge.net/
Seed7 - The extensible programming language: User defined statements
and operators, abstract data types, templates without special
syntax, OO with interfaces and multiple dispatch, statically typed,
interpreted or compiled, portable, runs under linux/unix/windows.
I am dumbfounded that they are spending 8M Euro to make a switch primarily for ONE application. If you have that money to spend, tell the bloody web app vendor to fix their broken app or you will move to a competitor. Heck, I bet for substantially less than 8M you could sponsor an open-source project to CREATE A NEW APP FROM SCRATCH.
Yes Firefox is easier to develop for than IE but.
With IE market share you MUST develop for IE.
For any website I feel that IE and Firefox are mandatory. Safari is getting to be mandatory but thankful it is well behaved from what I have seen.
When developing for browser apps that run on an Intranet Firefox is less important. You will not loose many sales saying it only works on IE. You will loose a lot more more if you say it doesn't work on IE.
So in that case getting your application to work on Firefox is extra work. It really doesn't matter now easy that extra work is.
Of course if you want to develop for that market you now have a key feature you can use to get sales.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
But I do know about it in the UK.
Generally, educational software falls into one of two categories:
1. Written by IT professionals. The user interface is consistent with everything else on the platform, there's a nice easy way to roll it out to everything, it doesn't stamp crap all over the system, it doesn't do something silly like want admin rights to run.
It's the IT admins dream, with only one minor disadvantage: It tends to be very bad at actually getting information across.
2. Written by teachers and other educational folks. This tends to be hacked together, with a user interface which defies belief in every way. Think the worst nightmare software you've ever used and multiply by 5. It's shipped with instructions saying "Go to every PC in turn and double-click on the setup icon" - and it is not uncommon to find the setup procedure is actively hostile to any attempts to automate it. Despite being generally relatively simple, it only works on a few specific versions of Windows and tends to break very easily. It makes assumptions like "The application will always have its CD available and it will be on a disk in a CD-ROM drive at D:" (even if you've explicitly paid for a version to run over a network) or "We can write wherever we like in C:". It's licensed on a per-machine basis and the idea that you might want to license or indeed work with more than about 5 copies honestly never occurred to the developer.
It's the kind of thing that most admins thought died (or at least had the worst stupidities ironed out) a long time ago. But once you get it working, it's generally very good at getting information across.
Guess which one teachers prefer?
Multiply that by every single subject taught at every single level for which a suitable piece of software exists and you have a rough idea of how much fun educational IT is.
Regarding the actual issue of the kindergarten app which is IE-only - thinking about it, this doesn't surprise me. I've worked in a school and I found that the idea of any software which isn't entirely available off the shelf was absolutely terrifying to the Powers that Be - even though in this case paying for the relevant migration would almost certainly have been a lot cheaper.
There is a story on the WKO (The Austrian Federal Economic Chamber) http://portal.wko.at/wk/format_detail.wk?AngID=1&StID=366673&DstID=0 , which is closely tied to MS, about the context where this software is used. The initiative which uses this software is sponsored by the WKO with MS as a partner. I suspect that the big advantage the Microsoft technology stack has, compared to other inferior offerings, is the reason that the product is working only with IE and not with any other browser
The reason given by the Viennese sounds a lot like the kind of perfidious methods M$ would employ to secure market share.
It's ridiculous. For the cost of changing back to Windoze, 8 m EUR, you could probably hire *ten* companies to port that silly language test application to Linux in a couple of weeks. Who are they kidding?
I wonder if there is a decision maker in the city of Vienna who maybe got a birthday present or two from Bill.
So Wien is changing their computers all over to Windows... again. How long is this expected to take? And when in 2009 (presuming that for once some sort of software will be completed & delivered on-time) is their program supposed to be compatible with the Gecko engine? I'd be surprised if the reverting to Windows part would be completed more than a couple months before the program is compatible.
This has got to be the dumbest IT blunder of all time, if Vienna's IT pros knew a little about computers, they'd try it with Wine. Or heck, it'd be cheaper to develop their own kids language test application & contribute it to the open source community. To top it off, using a heavy weight resource hog Vista to run a browser based web application is ridiculous!
"The given reason for all this is a language test application for the kids that only works with MS IE and won't be made compatible (by the producer) with Firefox until 2009"
Isn't that a reason in and of itself to push for open source solutions?
As an example, The Swedish goverment once bought an unlimited licens for http://www.agresso.com/ accounting and management system, this was then forced onto all parts of of the goverment, departments, agencies .e.t.c.
Now comes the fun part, the system only works with IE, and itÂs very dependent on Excel.
There are tons of software out there for accounting and records keeping and similar that are MS only and canÂt be replaced because of legal issues and certifications.
All parts of public sector has software that are more or less monopolies because of legislation.
The thing that I've found in the past is that it's far easier to develop for Firefox first, and then make the changes required for Internet Explorer.
Going that way, it takes about a day to get things working right in IE once things are working. Going the other way you could easily drop a week, bouncing back and forth between the two browsers.
Not a good idea. Bananas are dying. Netcraft confirms it.
It would be appreciated if you post a reply to this thread, as well as being decent enough to apologize to George Ou for insulting him.
Thank you.
I just re-started developing web pages (last time I did it is when
After developing 3 full blown websites (MVC from DB to CSS, 2 of them using CodeIgniter) I have come to understand all those rants (from web designers) I read in these 5 or 6 years I stopped "web-developing".
Every darn IE version is broken, and the worst thing is that the developers even know it and they "enable" patches (conditional comments).
Making a web design compatible with IE (even IE7) is a pain in the ass. Even when your page is 100% XHTML validated.
Sorry for this rant. I just had to spit it out somewhere and this story and place is the most appropiate (given the level of anti-Microsoft sentiment in slashdot
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
You are _incredible_ ignorant (with all due respect!), please, give us your name and the company you work for( _if_ you are brave enough, and willing to defend your opinions), so we'll know who not to call, neither hire or buy products and services.
Damn! I just can't believe what I've just read. Everybody can have an opinion, I must respect that, but.. GOOSH! some opinions are just PLAIN wrong.
Well, after the blight wipes out all banana crops, bananas might be the most expensive food on earth!
Hey Ballmer, thrown many chairs lately?
Think about it, all that money just for licensing and they are going to Vista? And it is because 7,000 computers need to run one Windows app for a kindergarten language class? I'm sure that has got to be one highly sophisticated application and one so important that hundreds of thousands of other computers will have to run Windows also just because of its sophistication. WTF?
My guess is that Balmer or Gates recently visited Vienna and talked them into making sure they were ready for the next great OS from Microsoft, Windows Vienna/Windows 7. And they probably promised it will do dishes and wipe kindergartner's asses at that same time.
Or just maybe Microsoft didn't like the fact that a large well known city with the same name as their "new" OS was switching to Linux. And really, a browser based app for children was the best reason they could come up with? They're not even good at excuses so it would be no wonder that they took bribes from Microsoft to be a Windows shop and a Windows-only shop at that. IMO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
How come nobody is asking the obvious question:
Why the hell does this software need a browser?
If fetching the content through the internets is a big deal,
then code a standalone program to do so. It isn't *that* complicated.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
C'mon, if you have the choice between a Bock and a Vienna Lager or Oktoberfest, what are you going to drink? Vienna is semi-obsolete anyway; even with those lighter styles, I bet you can get a tastier beer by blending pilsner and Munich malt anyway, than using Vienna.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
18th Century, something like that. It was in my copy of The Guiness Book Of Answers, 1980.
IE does TOO come with a free developer tool! Notepad fires up when I do view-source.
Wow... did you guys look at the breakdown on that article?
Their "success" was, since 2002, they spent $35 MILLION, and converted about 1000 computers. So that's about what, $350,000 per workstation?
Yes, the OP had it correct... Munich did "Stay the Course" with Linux. Any rational person would have stopped a LONG time ago.
... do I sign up to perform the installation of Vista on these machines at 11,111 EUR per pop ? Do these Government Organisations just play "pick a number and double it", when it comes to assigning a cost to these "upgrades" ???
$8 a year for bananas? You must be opening a development house in rural Africa...
Unfortunately your 1 simple rule isn't so simple because people are so used to using apostrophes in contractions and possessives. The way I finally remembered how to keep them straight after 28 years was to remember that possessive can be expressed without an apostrophe. As in the word "whose". So, I use this short dialog to demonstrate to others.
"It's whose?"
"It's its."
The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the
You could simply write a web app for the web and by choosing carefully how you code, it would run in ANY browser. Just a few examples would be: GMail Yahoo Mail Reuters News ......
Coding explicitly for IE doesn't do anyone any good, just like coding explicitly for firefox doesn't help either.
The web is built on standards that when used, really do work.
Yea, if we all wrote the the standards, the browsers would begin to actually support them.
For 8 million euros, you'd think they could find someone to develop a new language testing app...