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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
Plus d'info en francais et sur le site de l'association FACIL, pour l'appropriation collective de l'informatique libre.
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.
As an expat canadian I wasn't aware of any such law but I was from Ontario perhaps they have a different law in Quebec. Anyways, fair competition only seems to make sense to me. Seems rather odd for a open source software organization to fight this fight though. Unless they represent for profit service companies I don't think they'll be able to prove any loss in court so the case could get thrown out on that grounds. They probably would have been better off getting a bunch of citizens to do a class action as they are ones that have a calculatable loss.
That said even if they loss the case, if it seems plausible to the court it might put the fear of God into the government (in the incarnation of a penguin no doubt) to at least consider open source and be prepared to justify their choosing MS anyways if that is what they do.
P.S. Just a general question why does /. put a space between the second and third paragraph for me not the first and second? I'm using the same flags everywhere else, double "bracketted p". Used to work fine before the new interface came out.
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?
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
Actually, it's really just a way for them to legally cook their books. While they never provide support* on any of their consumer products, they're still allowed to have a ton of unearned revenue since they only recognize 1/12th of the purchase price each month, or however long you're supported for. Assuming it's one year and a copy of Windows is $300 (I was at Staples today, and apparently it is at least for some version of XP), that means that after a month, they've got $25 of earned revenue and $275 of unearned revenue on the books. Basically, it fucks with the numbers and makes them look richer than they really are.
Of course this isn't at all specific to Microsoft - most companies that provide some sort of support contract do the same (Best Buy extended warranties? Oh yeah). I'd suggest they abuse it a bit more than most, but what do you expect?
*you know what I mean here - I'm sure there's the odd instance of it happening, but by and large the only time you get them on the phone is for an activation problem.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Baguette.
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.
Depends on the IT guy's skills in explaining things - or, indeed, 'selling' the open-source solutions. Obviously I'm generalizing here, but most IT people aren't overly business-savvy, so they're often of little help when it comes to explaining why X solution is better than Y. Management doesn't care that CrapSoftwareY is talking to a set of cobbled-together Access tables where DecentSoftwareX functions off of a proper relational database unless the IT guy evaluating the software can explain the BUSINESS benefits of one over the other (and "users won't end up going batshit insane over file locking when trying to hit stupidfile.mdb over a samba share" won't cut it).
Open source guys can evangelize all they want, but if they really want to see adoption, they'll need to sell it. Not via cold calls, but at least throw some copy online that the IT staff can use when they're pitching it against whatever half-assed proprietary product that's backed by a sales department. And let me tell you, MS has a damn good sales department. /used to work in software sales, and outselling open-source is trivially easy for those reasons
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Time to relive the glory days of high school...
Well, you know your public school's IT is bad when a kid gets in trouble for sending a message to every school computer through netsend.
The school's solution? Forbid the kid from using computers for the rest of the year, instead of disabling the netsend service.
Ah, school administrators, how we love thee...
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.
And that's why they chose Microsoft. To match levels of competency.
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
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.
It's his new laws that took horses from the mounties, wine from the Frenchies, and sodomy from Newfoundland. Apparently that wasn't enough, he's taking open source too.
Oh well.
There's no Canada like French Canada
It's the best Canada in the land.
And the other Canada - is a bullsh*t Canada!
If you lived here for a day, you'd understand!
(for those who don't get it, click)
'a';DROP TABLE users; SELECT * FROM DATA WHERE name LIKE '%'... if you're reading this, it didn't work.
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.
There's also a press release in french, which was translated for you guys. Aren't we nice? I'm sure you can discover it for yourself as I don't want to impose any more french on you. I though someone might appreciate having the info in their first language.
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.
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?
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.
So, after all you *can* be sued for choosing microsoft :-)
I use Ubuntu on my laptop at College (BCIT) and whenever I have to print something, I just use OpenOffice Portable which I have on a USB key.
For those that don't want to use up 80MB on their USB key, there is also AbiWord Portable at 6MB for text documents.
PortableApps are invaluable if you need to use programs temporarily on windows machines.
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.
You're using a word processor for 20,000 word reports? I really suggest you learn LaTeX - there's a steep learning curve at the start, but the long-term time savings are incredible.
I wrote the interim documents for my final year undergraduate project in StarOffice, and eventually bit the bullet and learned the basics of LaTeX for my final report. Even though the final report was around four times as long, I spent a lot less time worrying about presentation issues than I had on either interim document. For my PhD thesis I used LaTeX from the start, but with a proper build system (recursive makefiles, generating graphs with GNUplot, exporting PDFs of images with little scripts, and storing each chapter in a separate file). For my book I used a slightly modified version of this same build system, with a little OmniOutline script that created the skeleton from an outline.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Simply put - Microsoft is the new IBM; you won't get fired for choosing Microsoft, even if it doesn't play out so well.
Whenever I put myself on the line for a Linux box (server, desktop or otherwise), I always know it's going to have out-perform (in whatever metric is important to the person considering it) the competing Microsoft option by a factor of two to be considered equal.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Living in a Windows free home since 2003!
I work in a government office (I bet you didn't see that one coming!) and I'm always suggesting (F)OSS alternatives to the expensive proprietary commercial crap everyone loves. The problem is that the other guys in my IT department, and in some cases any higher-ups who end up having a say in it, are terrified of it because (in their opinion):
- When something goes wrong, it's time to play the blame game, and if they can't call up a large corporation and bitch they don't feel that their ass is covered. This is always the #1 reason I get for not using (F)OSS. It seems that the "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" mentality still lingers.
- The idea of having to edit config files if things go wrong is discomforting. The idea of having to work with some code is terrifying. They're Plug Play & Forget kind of people, but they can't get past the AAHH SCARY CONFIG FILES AND COMMAND LINES stage to see the Plug Play & Forget nirvana they've been missing out on. Mind you, in my experience, the chances of something going wrong with (F)OSS tends to be equal or lower than with commercial software, but everyone feels safer in a nice walled garden where everything is designed to play nice *rolls eyes.* I cannot stress enough how much the other IT guys are deathly afraid of code (including text config files), even an ex-programmer! The very thought of having to possibly touch code makes them look at each other in sheer dread. They think I have the worst IT dept. job as a full-time codemonkey, but it's the best IMO.
- Making employees re-learn how to use software is considered unacceptable (Since everyone's been trained to use MS software from birth), even though some of these apps have GUIs that are hard to tell from their commercial equivalents. Well Vista's going to be forced on us eventually so the joke's on them!
And most annoying of all...
- Governments usually have deals with MS (I don't currently understand the business mumbo-jumbo going on there), so the software's already paid for and is basically free to government offices. This takes away the cost incentive of switching to Free / inexpensive OSS. Plus new PCs usually come with Windows and you don't have an option to get a cheaper PC with no software. Cost incentive lost again.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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
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