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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."
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.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Don't you have to be somehow affected by defendant's actions to sue them? Is the Quebec's open-source software association harmed by this directly? Or do they have a plan to sell tech support contracts once the free software is installed?
"There is no real right or wrong, just what the majority accepts at the time."
Most large organisations including government provide 90% of their own tech support. Microsoft, in practice, provides none. At least it's like that where I am. The only "support" they provide is helping to ensure all of the machines are licensed properly.
So if a local government can't figure out that they can take save the $25 million they have spent on licenses by training their IT staff or supporting local business, they really aren't intelligent enough to be working for the government.
That whole support argument is bullshit, as is the TCO argument that gets bandied about.
I don't therefore I'm not.
Bull. Paid tech support for custom/specialized apps is one thing (the company I just left made a very significant percent of their revenue from support and maintenance), but that's just not the case for MS Office. And having paid for MS software in the past, I'll let you know that the only "support" I ever got was from someone named "John" in $randomOutsourcedCountry when I needed to re-activate the damn thing because apparently a system upgrade is a novel thing that nobody had tried before.
Ironically, those 'support' issues went away when I stopped paying for MS software, and obviously also haven't been an issue since I stopped using their stuff entirely.
Don't get me wrong - support is a legitimate concern for some software, even some from MS. But when it comes to Office software, that support is coming from the IT guy, not Microsoft.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Typically very little tech support from MS is included with the license. That's the "beauty" (for MS) of their pricing schemes; it's basically a money pit. First you get hooked on the software, then the support, then the proprietary formats help keep you locked in. It's like quicksand.
Again, incorrect. There are a several good open source vendors who offer excellent support. But quite often OSS shops find they need very little outside support. I would expect most schools to fall in that category, though I have no personal experience working in that sector.
Caveat Utilitor
That's true. But the people who call the shots think differently. To them, business solutions are more reliable than open-source ones. What is better doesn't matter -- it's what management thinks is best.
If they went to FOSS, they could take the 25 million they spent on M$ licenses (in 08 alone!) and pay local Quebecois to provide support. In fact, that's their whole grounds for bringing the case to court.
From TFA: "Quebec's public administration refuses to even consider and evaluate these options...the regulation implies that public markets have to enhance the local economic development as well as the Quebec technologies....From February to June 2008...sales of proprietary software for more than 25 million dollars"
Sounds like good case to me. My parents actually worked in the kind of local government that would be using this software, and I'm here to tell you, the transition would go fine. The fact is, most of them barely bumble their way through no matter WHAT software they use (on their outdated machines). All they use is a word processor, email, and maybe a spreadsheet and simple database. Just the basics.
This from TFA actually kinda scared me...scared because I'm worried about how far the US is falling behind other countries when it comes to tech: "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."
Thank you Dave Raggett
Exactly. Which is why Red Hat fills a niche: they have a corporation behind their software.
Seriously, though, it's government. You're not going to have competent people running things.
I don't really know. I do know public education contains some of the most laughable IT staffs in existence, though.
I would take a guess that it's all about the feeling of security. Managers (or whatever government equivalent) are going to feel safer with business solutions rather than open-source alternatives because of support for bugs or other problems. If MS Word screws up, you call Microsoft. If Open Office (using it as an example) screws up, what then? There's no business guarantee that OO will respond in a timely manner to the problem.
I've worked in a school so I've got a bit of experience here.
Laughable IT staff or not (and there is a glimmer of truth in that), managers (or whoever has the role of managing IT - often a teacher) does indeed get the warm fuzzies from buying as much as possible from big companies like Microsoft.
Furthermore, there's another angle. It's fairly common to find that the companies that supply schools (and here I'm talking about primary/secondary level education in the UK) don't tend to supply many businesses and vice versa. The companies that do supply schools will tell you that this is because they specialise in education and can offer better support more appropriate for schools. Many of these companies have been supplying schools for many years and are more-or-less 100% Microsoft shops. Guess what they put in?
Anyone who's any good at IT and has worked in a school will know that this is complete bullshit and that there are dozens of small consulting companies would love to have a few school contracts and could do a perfectly good job for a lot less. However, in the valley of the blind and all that.... there are plenty of schools that believe they're getting a good deal because they don't have anyone on staff who knows enough to tell them otherwise.
I think as taxpayers they can sue for damages in the form of increased taxes.
Competitive bidding should be the norm, and exceptions to this rule should be rare. Once a spec is given and bids are in, there'll be an obvious choice.
When time or special circumstance doesn't allow bids, there certainly needs to be a detailed report on the reasons one vendor was chosen over another. Someone needs to put his ass on the line and say "Symphony, StarOffice, Openoffice.org, and Gnome Office don't meet our needs" for reasons a, b, and c. When an accountant comes back to audit the department, he'll back those up or pay the price.
And I just use double-<br>s instead of paragraph tags.
Put identity in the browser.
Agreed. And I would imagine many managers don't have highly refined IT skills, either, which is why IIS is still used instead of Apache. Or why Windows is still used for servers in the first place.
Example? I can't count the number of times I had to eventually save my OpenOffice file as a Microsoft Word Document and opened it in Word only to find that I had to do a whole bunch of reformatting before sending it to the library printer!
On the other hand, I can't count the number of times I have saved my Microsoft Word file in Microsoft Word format and open it in Microsoft Word only to find that I had to do a whole bunch of reformatting before sending it to the printer (changing of the restarting of numbered lists is one particular thing that isn't always persistent through a save-and-load cycle, and with Office 2007 paragraph indentation isn't always persistent either).
I have to use MS Office for work, but I keep a copy of OO.o on my computer because it's far better than MS Office's recovery mode at recovering corrupted MS Office files. Sure, I usually have to sort out some formatting in that case too, but I'd sooner reformat a 20,000 word report than scour through trying to remember all the critical changes since the last backup.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
It so happens that a lot of qubecoise are better at french than english. Linking them a french-speaking relevant page seems like a nice gesture, much like you'd link the relevant original-language story beside the english one if the news originated in e.g. sweden.
Microsoft clearly fits the definition of a monopoly.
Don't think so?
Do a little research on Standard Oil, which was broken up in the United States under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. Standard Oil was not the only oil company in the United States at that time, nor were they the only one that operated gasoline stations. However, their market dominance was such that they were within the definition of a monopoly.
There are other OS, mail server, and office suite vendors out there, to be sure. However, Exchange has a 65% market share (probably more in the global 2000), Windows has 90% of the desktop, and probably more than that in business desktops. Microsoft Office has about a 90% market share, too. It has been so successful, in fact, that "Excel" and "Word" have become generic words in the lexicon of many people. I regularly encounter users who think "Excel" is what you call a spreadsheet program. I have NeoOffice on my wife's Mac and and she calls its spreadsheet Excel all the time. This has become very common.
Yes, Microsoft has a monopoly. You don't need 100% market share to have a monopoly. You just need so much market share that the market is no longer anything like a level playing field for others. The fact that some competitors have been able to survive or even make headway anyway is not testimony against Microsoft being a monopoly or even for a level playing field, but rather testimony to the quality and tenacity of those competitors.
Granted, Microsoft has jumped the shark, but it's still a powerful monopoly.
I have seen this in action. It is amazing what it can do even with one pathetic P4 and a couple gig of ram.
It really gets rolling with a quad core server and 8 gig. (I can build one of these for mere hundreds of $$)
You can even have the whole class doing 3D modeling with blender. Imagine the cost of doing this with proprietary software and without thin clients?
Also, upgrading is so cheap. The cost of upgrading everyone is just the cost of the server. (and that is under a grand)
I have found that just the LABOR cost of procuring 30 new desktops, imaging, configuring and deploying them is more than the cost of a new LTSP server. YMMV