Slashdot Mirror
All of Vietnam's Government Computers To Use Linux, By Fiat
christian.einfeldt writes "The Vietnamese Ministry of Information and Communications has issued an administrative ruling increasing the use of Free Open Source Software products at state agencies, increasing the software's use both in the back office and on the desktop. According to the new rule, 100% of government servers must run Linux by June 30, 2009, and 70% of agencies must use OpenOffice.org, Mozilla Firefox, and Mozilla Thunderbird by the end of 2009. The regulation also sets benchmarks for training and proficiency in the software. Vietnam has a population of 86 million, 4 million larger than that of Germany, and is one of the world's fastest-growing economies."
Man, I don't know.. they make some pretty crappy cars, I'm not sure I'd trust them to make a decent operating system distribution.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
It's time to take the FREEdom out of FREE software!
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer take a S.E. Asian vacation...
Microsoft offers a new deal to Vietnam. Vietnam goes with Windows for 5 more years.
I may be skeptical. Using the Linux card is a great way to get a better deal from Microsoft. The bigger you yell the better the deal.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
All of Vietnam's Government Computers To Use Linux
According to the new rule, 100% of government servers must run Linux by June 30, 2009, and 70% of agencies must use OpenOffice.org, Mozilla Firefox, and Mozilla Thunderbird by the end of 2009.
FTA:
by June 30, 2009, 100% of servers of IT divisions of government agencies must be installed with open source software;
I really doubt all of the Vietnam government's computers are servers. Also, Open Source does not neccisarily mean Linux. (not that BSD is a bad alternative)
Penguins?!? in Vietnam? It's a cold day in hell boys!!!
Also, this bodes well for Open Source everywhere. Eventually all other countries will follow suit and the people will have government systems that work best for their diverse cultures, tailor made UIs and logic, that can also extend inventive solutions.
Also knowing what is in the source code helps identify potential threats to national security.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Yikes, I hope no one was using SQL Server. 6 months to move every system to a new operating system? Moving one single system is a huge effort that most companies wouldn't even think about doing in such a short time.
Whale
A giant customized Starbucks in Cupertino California where lattes and no soy skim macchiatos are given out free to all employees. The background music involves a playlist of Nora Jones, David Matthews, John Mayer, and Bono on loop from an Ipod docked somewhere in the Apple/Starbucks facility. Hours are long but morale is surprising high as developers, hardware and software, are given 30 minute breaks to masturbate to the new itunes interface.
All developers sit at cafe type tables with a Mac Book Pro while their lord and master Steve Jobs stands deskless in his predictable attire of a turtleneck and jeans. In fact, this is the preferred (mandatory) dress code at Apple. Jobs walks around to each and every department, separated by latte and vegan preferences, and checks on the performance and efficiency of his developers. At any given point in the day one may see Mr Jobs yelling at a programmer for not implementing a button in the perfect shade of corn flower blue (#6495ED) and immediately sends him to the apple punitive chamber, consisting of a HP Compaq running Vista Basic.
There are 2 software development departments and 2 hardware development sections in Apple. For software there is the Apple core team, Apple Open Source team. In hardware there is the Apple systems and management team and the iDevice team. Since the OSX kernel consists of a BSD darwin kernel there is no real need for low level programmers and as such the entirety of the Apple core team consists of UI designers and photoshop junkies. All software churned out from the core team is designed in a program strikingly similar to Visual Studio's form designer but with Cocoa Objective C generated instead. The 16 hour day (Jobs demands 16 hour days since he himself never sleeps) of a core dev involves lining up the right shade of chrome with the latest photoshopped graphite button and maintaining the correct color scheme, not an easy job at all.
The Apple open source team involves a little bit more coding, which is mandated to be done in TextEdit or the option of a $80 third party mac text editor. The Apple open source team doesn't actually create much code but searches the internet for interesting BSD licensed software and modifies it as it's own through obfuscation and conversion to objective C. Many of the items a mac user sees comes from the open source world stamped by apple such as the ability to play music taken from 67 different originally linux based players, CD burning, and the overall ability to click a mouse. Apple's legal department has no qualms about this practice and has assured many that since most of the code is BSD and if any is GPLed many Linux hippies should be grateful that Apple fostered WebKit by using KHTML and adding some Gecko bloat. Perhaps one of the most important items that the open source team has done to date is use parts of the FreeBSD to keep the kernel up to date.
There's not much to say about the Apple systems and management team. I suppose they can be classified in to desktop and laptop systems. Because hardware work is beneath Apple in general and thought of being only worthy of Windows Users and as such can be found working on these beauties in the starbucks bathroom. Desktops are currently made by buying dell machines and putting them in Lian Li cases, where the majority of the costs goes to buying titanium Apple emblems to paste on the sides. Laptops consists of the rebranding of only the most silver and black Sony Viaos but talk has been going around about rebranding Asus EeePCs for a new Apple netbook but you didn't hear that from me, for fear of my life.
The iDevice team's job is to develop for the ipod, iphone, itouch, and many other portable electronics apple may release in the future. Their jobs are very interconnected with the open source team as well as the core dev team. Using firmware from random samsung devices and giving it an OSX skin the ipod stands as a shining example that infringement only applies to greasy file sharers and that the music player remains the best in market
IMO, this is not necessarily good. Forcing free software on someone is not going to generate all good comments. In fact, forcing someone to use something, especially if they aren't used to it, usually generates more complaints - not because the new thing is actually worse, but simply because they are being FORCED to use it.
I dunno. I like using Linux and I think it's a good alternative to Windows, but forcing people to switch doesn't really show Linux to be a "good alternative," doesn't make people want to use it on its own merits, etc... it makes it look more like a financial move, not a "This is better software" move.
EDGI is a customer-focused program that is for circumstances (like the one you reference) where an education and/or government customer is going to purchase naked PC'S or PC'S w/Linux ..
.. "
under NO circumstances lose against Linux
davecb5620@gmail.com
The Communications Ministry of Vietnam is running ASP.net on Windows Server 2003! oh the ironing!
THL phish sticks
I think open standards are much more important than open source software. The ability to use your favorite program to get a certain task accomplished without having to worry about compatibility problems is worth much more than wether you use open source or not. I would much rather use Pages instead of OpenOffice if it only would support ODF, for instance.
-- Cheers!
You cannot scare Vietnam with office furniture.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I don't know about the submitter's sources, but the article referenced in the summary doesn't mention Linux, at all.
Is that some sort of laundry joke?!?
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
If you go to any asian country, you find stacks and stacks of CDs and DVDs filled with mislabelled stuff from Microsoft to Universal studios. So, the thought of Vietnam actually paying for a bunch of Windows licenses just seems rather remote to me.
I would be willing to bet that Microsoft has been quietly watching Windows get rolled out all across Vietnam, knowing that, they don't have but a dozen licenses for the entire country, and a million copies of Windows, and just let Vietnam build all of their infrastructure on top of it.
Then, once they see the Vietnamese are hooked, they sent in a salesteam to ask them to pay for it, or they will shut the country down. Vietnam of course issues its edict, but both they know and Microsoft know, that Vietnam now belongs to Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates.
Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon both roll over in their graves, and somewhere, on a dark night, the leaders of Microsoft enjoy a drink to celebrate the triumph with Henry Kissinger, Dick Cheney and the Bushes. "Hey, we might have f--- up in Iraq, but we finally won Vietnam."
This is my sig.
"Using the Linux card is a great way to get a better deal from Microsoft"
...
Among the reasons cited were:
to reduce commercial software license fees,
freedom from foreign-owned technology,
greater security,
curbing the number of infections from Windows-based viruses and
to gain technological leadership on platforms relatively free of dominance by large multinational corporations
davecb5620@gmail.com
The instruction also requests that computer traders not sell PCs installed with cracked software, but open source ones.
Nobody buys software in Vietnam. Seems they got some heat from software vendors for not going after "piracy", and now they're trying to enforce the only alternative to cracked software, i.e. free software.
According to the new rule, 100% of government servers must run Linux by June 30, 2009, and 70% of agencies must use OpenOffice.org,
I guess it's time for Steve Ballmer to catch the next flight to Hanoi with cash and incentives in his briefcase. If this approach worked in the past why shouldn't it work one more time?
Go Ballmer go!
"I think open standards are much more important than open source software"
Straight out of the MS FUD manual. Like, let then use 'free' software as long as they us our Intellectual Property and Patent dues. When does your shift on slashdot finish ?
davecb5620@gmail.com
Agreed. This is why Peter Quinn's sovereignty argument for OpenDocument in MA was so apt. It's not about Linux, but communicating lofty ideals like Free Software to government types is difficult. When you start talking about the ancient political documents like a constitution though, and government responsibility to preserve them in a neutral format, things become a lot clearer. Add in the Peruvian arguments for an openly competitive economy based around open standards in software, and it's clear that government's absolute responsibility is to choose free software and standards. So no, Linux should not be forced, but yes, free software should. Our taxes should not prop up individual corporations -- especially when that monopolizes their power and cripples other parts of the economy.
Good thing software will be free. My mom only lets me spend $5.
You never expect irony, do you?
Want to be a professional wrestler? Visit www.iyfwrestling.com
@iyfwrestling
I wonder when 'Le Doan Hop' the Minister of Information and Communications, is going to be relieved of his job and trashed in the press.
"I'm sure you'd like to hear from Peter Quinn, formerly CIO of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts"
davecb5620@gmail.com
it always prints the entire document in a 1.5"x1" space...
Set Print Area? An accidentally filled cell somewhere down or to the right?
Why?
Charlie don't surf!
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
Fiat Lux.
I write this as chairs are being thrown in another part of the world: Kudos to Vietnam! I hope that more governments and businesses around the world will realize the savings that can be had because when costs are cut at these types of organizations, it means higher efficiency and lower prices. Software is a great area to cut costs, and the free software packages that Vietnam will adopt are mature, stable codebases.
I know no one reads TFA but it doesn't actually mention anything about requiring Linux. That was your wonderful submitter that seems to have gotten that part wrong. TFA isn't even very clear if the requirement is even to change the server OS or just what apps are installed on it.
They've been talking about this for years. I worked in Vietnam for a year three years ago and still visit a couple times a year and they were talking about it even then.
But so far I have never seen a computer running Linux there that I or a Linux user friend of mine didn't set up myself. And I am completely unable so far to find the actual text of the proclamation that says that they will use Linux. Nor have I been able to contact anyone who knows anything about it. They are probably just looking for leverage against Microsoft.
Why is it that nobody ever links to the actual text of the legislation or proclamation?
I really do hope they mean it.
They tested OpenBSD first but Vietnamese people and flames do not mix well.
It didn't help that they were using the "Napalm" release.
This is my sig.
Dumbasses tagging this 'communism' - it's nothing to do with communism - more like COMMON-SENSE-ISM.
you had me at #!
IIS7 is remarkably performant, even compared to Apache2, and I haven't seen a significant security update come down the pipe for it or ASP.NET in quite some time.
The initial cost outlay of a Windows machine is higher, of course, but did you consider the other costs? Maintaining an application written in .NET is a lot easier than doing the same in, say, Perl or PHP (unless your staff is universally comprised of language virtuosos, which strikes me as unlikely). Their development teams may already be proficient at .NET. I know that the common wisdom around here is that a good programmer should be able to pick whatever the hell they need to use and be able to get up to speed, but a lot of programmers aren't good but are nominally productive with what they already know. And the support Microsoft offers to big companies is really, really good. (Red Hat and Novell offer good support too, but neither are the same kind of behemoths that Microsoft is.)
There are good reasons to pick something that isn't what you personally like, whether it's proprietary or not.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
I've been observing the growth of Vietnamese-language software for the past decade, and I have to say that open-source growth have been outpacing proprietary growth. In a country where the piracy rate tops 90%, major software companies don't see much incentive to support the Vietnamese language. With more than 80 million speakers, the Vietnamese language has about 8 times as many users as Swedish, a commonly supported language. The repertoire of open-source software supporting Vietnamese grew from virtually nothing in 2003 to support in most major Linux applications in 2009. This includes some of the most common Vietnamese-language keyboard drivers such as Unikey and even expanded to the fast-growing Vietnamese-language Wikipedia. At the same time, Vietnamese-language support among proprietary software barely grew; IE still doesn't have a Vietnamese-language version, and Word does not have a Vietnamese spellchecker. The only notable exception to this is Yahoo!, who has a dominant presence in the online market.
Linux cannot be a monopoly, by definition. A monopoly is when a single entity has overwhelming power in a market. But Linux isn't an entity, it's a bit of software. (For the same reason, it doesn't make sense to talk about a Windows monopoly, only a Microsoft monopoly.)
Next, the reason monopolies are bad is that they guarantee income to certain people without any need to deliver good value, and prevent other people from competing in that market segment. But mandating Linux wouldn't do that. Anyone who wants to sell Linux can do so. Even Microsoft would be free to compete in a Linux-only market.
Lets remember that as part of becoming integrated into the economy - Vietnam will be told taht they have to crack down on piracy.
Do they crack down on piracy and push up the cost of doing business in Vietnam by having all departments use Windows + Office, and thus all those who interact with the government having to have said software - or is it smarted to start off using opensource software now given that they are pretty much starting from a clean slate? They've made a good move - and I'll put money on it people will be looking in and asking their own government why Microsoft is given multi-billion dollar contracts when Vietnam's public service is just as productive (if not more) using Linux/OpenOffice.org as they would using Windows.