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Quebec Govt Sued For Ignoring Free Software
Mathieu Lutfy writes "The CBC is reporting that 'Quebec's open-source software association is suing the provincial government, saying it is giving preferential treatment to Microsoft Corp. by buying the company's products rather than using free alternatives. ... Government buyers are using an exception in provincial law that allows them to buy directly from a proprietary vendor when there are no options available, but Facil said that loophole is being abused and goes against other legal requirements to buy locally.' The group also has a press release in English."
Plus d'info en francais et sur le site de l'association FACIL, pour l'appropriation collective de l'informatique libre.
Tech support from Microsoft? Let me tell you how it goes here: Geek kids are not allowed to explore the internals of the system even to fix them, but they do it anyway after being frustrated that there are only 5 out of 20 PCs at school that actually *work*
Of course last year the schools here installed some kind of backup thingy which restores the HD to it's previous state upon restart. Sucks big time IMO, but better than PCs not working at all...
Where does microsoft support come into the picture here? exactly nowhere!
Oh and did I mention that the worst thing that could happen on a linux machine is that a user's account can get fried?
The FACIL association doesn't provide technical services. It's a group to promote free and open source software as well as open standards. FACIL believes local companies can provide the needed tech support and wants to make sure they at least get a chance in this market.
Local schools seem to be the worse offenders. They constantly bitch and moan about lack of funds, then piss away a pile of cash on a site license for Microsoft Office
I agree most secondary school IT teachers seem to think IT education == Microsoft training. But it's worse than that - in the UK, most schools actually buy all their MS stuff from a reseller such as RM Computers. Which is a giant rip because, for example with servers, they just take Windows 2003 and bolt a load of "admin tools" onto the side. They deliberately make it non-standard and harder to use so they can then charge the schools giant support contracts. It also doesn't help that most school IT techs are completely hopeless.
I speak from bitter experience, BTW.
You thought you could break the laws of physics without paying the PRICE?
If you don't want to lose any formatting, export the PDF and send that to the library printer.
Kids!
Put identity in the browser.
Unfortunately even if Canadians can comment on your question most of us can't comment on it in regards to Quebec. They have a distinct legal system from the rest of Canada.
No, I'm not kidding.
Frvivolous suites are substantially more rare in Canada than in the U.S.; Although I think there are more common in Quebec.
"In the Netherlands, the public administration, one of the most modern in the world, has decided to forbid the use of proprietary software in the public sector."
Actually, I don't think that is correct. What I know is that a motion has been passed that requires the government to consider alternatives, and give preference to open software when it is equally suitable. The government subsequently ordered a lot of software from Microsoft, without investigating alternatives. This stirred up some commotion, after which a motion was adopted that requires the government to carry out the previous motion. I don't know what has happened since then, but I don't think forbidding proprietary software actually happened.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Through the tax system every taxpaying Canadian is harmed by this directly.
Or, if they don't like OSS, they could at least get lower-cost solutions like Sun's StarOffice (USD35 per person, allowing up to five installs for that person's use at the organization or elsewhere) or IBM's Symphony. Those are some pretty big names.
Put identity in the browser.
Ok, I'm not Canadian, but this applies to everyone when their local government is pissing away money for no good reason.
It's one thing for a business to choose the more expensive option, the people making the choices must eventually answer to their stockholders. Well, as a voter, I'm a stockholder in my country. Wasting truckloads of money for no good reason means I'm going to vote your ass off the board of directors.
Most of the time, alternatives such as Openoffice.org are more than adequate for the job (and usually a better choice). Sometimes there are special needs which will allow for an exception, e.g. a large investment in Excel macros that are essential and very expensive to convert.
Local schools seem to be the worse offenders. They constantly bitch and moan about lack of funds, then piss away a pile of cash on a site license for Microsoft Office so they can teach their word processing course. Openoffice.org (and a few others) are perfect for the job. They are free and the cover everything necessary to learn word processing - which should be covering typing skills and how to lay out a well designed document - not how to use a specific product.
I love Quebec, but when it comes to politics, I hang my head. For example, you cannot even put up a poster in english. The stop signs say "arret", french for stop. In France, they say "stop".
I can only imagine what the politics would be like in a school board...
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I'm not sure why you'd consider this odd. I can think of at least two OECD countries with varying internal legal systems, besides Canada. In the USA, Louisiana is the only U.S. state partially based on French and Spanish codes and ultimately Roman law, as opposed to English common law. In the UK, Scotland has its own unique legal system - right down to three possible verdicts in a jury trial ("Not proven"). I believe, though I can't find a reference right now, that New York had a feudal-based system of property law until the late 19th century (unlike Scotland, where the feudal system gasped its last breath in 2006 or so... I got a letter from my "feudal superior" a year or so back)
This is where the serious fun begins.
RM might be bad, but MS are far worse. They (in the UK will charge schools for installing linux[1]. They, on anti-competitive grounds wont let people know how much MS in schools costs [2]
"This relates to circumstances where schools using Microsoftâ(TM)s School Agreement licensing model, are required to pay Microsoft licensing fees for computers based on Linux, or using OpenOffice.org. Finding ourselves in a position whereby a school pays (say) £169 for a device only to be faced with for example a £30 per year after year payment to Microsoft, for a system that is not running any of their software would just not be acceptable to Becta. Indeed I donâ(TM)t think many people would consider that fair. "
[1] http://www.siriusit.co.uk/myblog/microsoft-tax-on-linux-in-schools-must-end-says-becta.html
[2] http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/07/08/microsoft-gags-uk-schools
I have also seen ssh clients that allow you to run the same command simultaneously on a LIST of ssh servers. All you need is a good 4096bit SSL cert and "sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -y" and all is well.
You can put up a poster in english. However, businesses are not allowed to put-up a sign, a business sign, in english. The idea is to drive the point home to immigrants that they can't expect to live here without speaking french.
And businesses are not human, so they cannot enjoy human rights. No human has ever been prohibited from speaking any language at all.
The issue is getting great coverage and will be having a television news report today, Thursday 28th of august, on the 22h news of Radio-Canada (francophone equivalent of the CBC). It will also be aired on RDI (the 24h news channel of Radio-Canada) at 21h.
From what I've been told, there will be reactions from other board members of the association, our lawyer, university professors and last but not least, the Quebec government.
If you're in the area, don't miss out the press conference on Friday the 29th of August, 10h30, 7275, Saint-Urbain, Montreal, suite 201.
Finally, the best way to support Facil is of course by spreading the news, but also to become a member or to donate to the association (sorry if the website is not well translated, we are working on it). We are getting into a lengthly legal battle which will hopefully send a clear message to other governments. This is only the start.
Thanks for all the great comments!
Mathieu
my sister-in-law teaches, and has college students turning in papers (electronically) written on "MS Write" and comparable because they can't afford MSOffice. So she tells them to download Open Office (sometimes gives them a quick demo) and her students love it. They can't believe what OO can do.
Sounds to me like you are incompetent, Rakishi.
I've run a linux lab in a high school for years, with very, very few problems, while the constantly down, crashing MS windows machines, (by the thousands), in Toronto, are the real disaster. You need to do some research on how other countries education systems are far, far surpassing us, using linux systems.
But hell, even here in Canada, School District 73 in B.C. is easily the leader in the country.
Check out: http://www.sd73.bc.ca/district-operations.php/page/linux-in-education/
Puts all the MS junk in Canadian schools to shame, and costing us millions to boot, just to enrich Billy, courtesy of the taxpayer.
And promoting ignorance of computer technology and open source as well. No wonder the world is passing us by in terms of computer ed/technology, etc.
Want a REAL education? Visit (and spend some time reading): http://cdneducation.blogspot.com/
And yet, for years, Ximian, a company employing only a handful of people, released and supported a customised version of GNOME and a customised version of OpenOffice (which integrated with the GNOME theme). The only reason they don't anymore is that they got bought by Novell (we used to run Ximian Desktop back around 2001 without problems). Most of their patches were eventually accepted upstream, or replaced upstream with equivalent behaviour. It's generally easier (and cheaper) to get your patches accepted upstream than to maintain a fork, but there's no reason why a small company couldn't maintain a changeset on a large project and keep tracking the stable branch, removing or updating their own patches.
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Well, your efforts to command the backend of the school network are commendable. Do you recall the most hopeful part of my original post, though?
With any luck, they will also DOCUMENT their journey so it can be repeated by other governments without such huge expenses.
If you wrote a document which lays out the software and infrastructure needed to command an Open Source infrastructure, it would empower others to do what you've done. Obviously, a well-written document would help make it easier to convince others that it is a good idea and your guidelines would include invaluable "Lessons Learned".
Of course, you could start by including your experiences/configuration as a Wikibook to greatly improve your ability to get help from others.
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Two points.
1. Many schools pay high costs for MS software.
2. It is much easier to lock down and support a Network of Linux Computers.
I have friends that became so frustrated with the cost and work maintaining classes of Windows PC's that they deployed LTSP. They have never looked back!
They now can buy many things for the tech labs that they couldn't before because of the new surplus of cash and time. (setting up audio workstations for multimedia training etc.)
It's not about discounts from MS.
CECELFCE (yeah a fucking mouthful for what amounts to a bunch of dicks in an office, right?), the french catholic board of Ottawa spends money stupidly. You're going to laugh when you read this. Then cry. Then die a little on the inside.
You spend more, you get more. That's the deal. It's probably more in other places. They spend more to upgrade their computers with XP and (what the fuck?) netburst celerons at 600$ (yeah that much, and it's ~2.5GHz), and not to mention LCDs, and then next year they get more money to keep upgrading.
So why go for linux unless you go for a pricey local one? And even then can't run photoshop! That'll drop the cost!
What's really stupid though is that it never dawned on anyone that you can't game with a linux thin client. (or any thin client, and likely any linux because of permissions) So that eliminates their bitching about network sluggishness (and it is sluggy, I think they route them to the school board itself). And it's secure, and no reason for the "zenworks" bullshit, and X forwarding lets you control them remotely.
Best of all for them it can be locked down, and you can avoid a whole bunch of trouble by having them as real thin clients, or even thick clients (with systems like the asus eee desktop). Not only that, you can theme it to look like XP, or make it very simple, or better yet let the students decide. Not to mention the default settings to save at My Documents doesn't matter*; everybody has a /home/, a persistant home.
* They run deep freeze and last I was there everything got saved under U:\ as your user, with teachers using T:\ for public access.