Portugal's Vortalgate — No Microsoft, No Bidding

An anonymous reader writes "Companies using software other than Microsoft's are unable to bid at many Portuguese public tenders. This is due to the use of Silverlight 2.0 technology by the company, Vortal, contracted to build the e-procurement portal. This situation has triggered a complaint to the European Commission by the Portuguese Open Source Business Association; the case is unofficially known in Portugal as 'Vortalgate.'"

Comments

Open Source vs. Closed Source

[malevolentjelly]

Are we all forgetting about Moonlight? Silverlight actually has a supported fully open-source alternative. Flash does not-- the open source flash solutions are basically reverse engineered while Mooonlight has support and documentation from Microsoft-- while retaining no licensing snafus.

Basically, you're all letting your fanboy rage over Microsoft blind your sense to the point that you're pushing a fully proprietary non-oss solution (flash) over a fully open source solution. If this site simply keeps in mind that Moonlight support is the base level of silverlight support to shoot for, then they've got a completely open-source friendly solution that has decent development tools (silverlight has a beautiful C# .NET base that is far easier to work with than flash-- not to mention can be developed with free tools).

As far as I can tell, it doesn't matter how much better the development is made by tools, docs, and language, or how open source the project is... all that matters is Microsoft affiliation.

So slashdot isn't necessarily pro-linux, pro-oss, or pro-free software. It's just anti-microsoft. I mean, that's the major crux of slashdot- that is its entire focus. Isn't that a little... you know... sad?

Here's the final word: if Microsoft is beating the Adobe toolchain in a cost-benefit-analysis, then more people should volunteer on Moonlight-- the project is progressing well and should remain at a competitve level with mainline silverlight. It has way more of a chance than gnash or anything, that's for damn sure. If Adobe wants their customers back, they can open source flash. That's that. I could use less binary blobs in my system.

Re:Open Source vs. Closed Source

[malevolentjelly]

Then once it is nice and entrenched MS will kill silverlight for OSX, just like IE for OSX.

Of course, that's not only a paranoid assumption, but a retarded business practice. I mean, they'll just get eaten by flash. I hate to break this to you... but I think the purpose of silverlight is to market development tools, not the windows platform.

Aside from that, I think silverlight 3.0+ will eventually prove to be a far better online game development platform, which pleases me.

If Microsoft ever did that to Mac, Moonlight would just start supporting mac anyway- which would be helpful for that grey period where flash would just completely destroy them, making their entire investment a waste.

I think Moonlight/Mono provides a far likelier chance of there being open source dynamic web content creation tools than flash would ever allow- and that's also a positive.

I think what happened with IE is simply that Safari totally surpassed it, rendering the product moot. It became a waste of time to push it, so it was easier to simply support a mac-specific browser than keep maintaining their web platform on mac. It's not really that evil... just pragmatic.

Only silverlight 1.0, that site users 2.0. When moonlight gets to that silverlight will probably be 3.0.

Whenever the fabled "Year of the linux desktop comes", that will slow adoption of future silverlight versions, maintaining the deployments with Moonlight's versioning instead.

Re:Open Source vs. Closed Source

[malevolentjelly]

Don't want to get sued.

Silverlight is basically an organized reimplementation of flash/javascript/HTML. If they tried to sue over it, they'd probably lose. One thing is for certain: you live in a far more frightening world than I do... and for that, I pity you.

Re:Open Source vs. Closed Source

[malevolentjelly]

Sigh. You can't win on technical merits if a monopoly is leveraged against you. That's the whole point. You create a better solution using cool new HTML 5. It is open and standard and innovative and cutting edge. MS refuses to implement the technology in IE, making the only way to get it to work on IE Silverlight. Because MS can force feed IE to the entire Windows using populace and you have no ability to do the same with another browser, your solution loses... despite being technically better.

Who supports HTML 5? It's not even a complete standard. So it's hardly specified much less implemented. Are you honestly suggesting a non-existent solution vs. an existent and supported one?

What are you talking about? MS is the only one likely to end up in court over this issue, not Vortal or Adobe (unless Vortal broke their contract or local laws in the process of using Silverlight)

RTFA. The Portugal Free Software Wingbat club is challenging it to a governing body.

Yeah, just make a better technological solution just like we did to overcome IBM's monopoly influence... except antitrust regulators had to step in and restrict IBM's practices, if you know your computing history. You know, the same laws that make what MS is doing illegal and prevents better solutions from winning. You don't seem to understand antitrust issues very well.

This is a rather unique situation- you see, the open source platform kind of sucks. It pushes absolutely godawful technology from the 70's and 80's and gets by based on its ability to run a web browser. Apple is a great example of the fact that there's more to this than monopoly- they are gaining market share by making a better product, not by forcing their product to be bundled in a court of law. Firefox gained market share by actually beating IE 6, and then IE 7 to a lesser extent, and even IE 8, to an even lesser extent. Still: no monopoly could stop technical excellence, because the competition is hardly held down.

Free market capitalism is free market, monopoly control is technically socialism- not that I don't support it. For instance, the solution I am backing here is open source and developed by Novell, not Microsoft. Sometimes you need a large technology firm to push innovation.

Web standards have been artificially held back by one particular monopolist. Previous to MS's gaining control of the browser market, they were advancing quite rapidly.

Actually, there's really no official reason that the w3c is in charge of the web- it's just a group of businesses. It's only recently been a web of standards- for the most part, those standards are pushed by various other companies who pull strings in the coalition. The web standards are a tremendous and unreadable mess, hardly a productized development platform. So, while IE was basically 95% of browsers, MSDN was more of an example of web standards documentation than the w3c. But I suppose if I just keep calling myself the pope, it's only a matter of time before I become the pope.

You must be right. There can be no other answer. Might I suggest you try another forum, like Digg?

Hurray, so I can deal with Apple zealots instead of open source zealots.

I'm so sorry your brilliance is persecuted by all those jealous moderators. Obviously they are biased.

The moderators are just other people like you, who think like you. It's user moderated, and the users on this site are mostly idiots- not engineers, designers, or developers; just sysadmins and web trash. They're pro linux because it's what they know and anti-microsoft because it's what they hate. For the most part, like the rest of the GNU/FSF/Linux/UNIX pile, it's just an anti-technology, anti-innovation cult full of people with outdated skills who want to keep their jobs maintaining their poorly engineered systems. I mean, this is a site where people maintain tha

Re:Open Source vs. Closed Source

[malevolentjelly]

I'm sorry, I just keep seeing all these snide remarks about monopoly abuse and I am just not seeing it. I think that's the real story of the 90's, but it's hardly relevant today. The state of things now is that the market is basically a dry well. Windows is okay but brutally uncool, Apple is doing great, and Linux is getting to the point where it isn't so ridiculously bad that no one will even run it for free-- but they're so far behind their competition they're clearly not innovating.

What amazing open source innovation is currently being held down by the evil Microsoft conspiracy? Somebody please enlighten me. I think Linux is doing a splendid job filling the gap of bottom end desktop experience and creating a reason for commercial operating systems to improve quality and cut costs, but beyond that, it's really a pretty poor example of innovation.

This isn't like people not being allowed to make phones like with Bell, so don't get me wrong- I simply don't think of Microsoft like that. Anyone can make computer hardware and software and yet here we are using like 3 different systems, all of them shoddy, running processors that hardware emulate this old x86 architecture. The desktop world is just not that creative or advanced. Anyone can make an operating system and somehow they don't-- it's like Microsoft is Bell selling phones, and it's legal for everyone else to make phones... but only Apple is making them and everyone else is just trying to push pinecones with strings attached. Why won't anyone use these pinecones? They convey audio from point A to point B and they're free.

Yeah they only have a vastly superior product and have for many years and it has netted them what 20%? Yeah, sounds like the market is working great.

Firefox is awful. I mean, seriously terrible. They're really driven by the fact that IE is worse. I think it is a fantastic example that people were so fed up, that they left IE and made their own crappy browser. We'll see if the greater market can create some interesting and new before Microsoft wakes up and starts throwing research and resources at it.

I see Microsoft widely praised here when they take actions like improving Web standards or creating really innovative technologies. I see them widely decried when they illegally undermine markets, or stifle innovation, or make really poor design decisions, or file frivolous lawsuits.

You must be reading a different website. I only see the latter, even in situations like this where they're just creating a fairly open flash clone.

Last it was discussed, the consensus seemed to be hybrid kernels merging micro and macro elements were pretty much everywhere.

Are you kidding me? People here think the linux kernel is an example of modern operating system design.

That's quite an overstatement but more people here have been personally affected by MS's broken junk, so emotions can run high. Objectively, their abuse has done more to hold back numerous computer fields than any other, single company. We'd likely be a decade ahead of where we are now with Web technologies (for example) if MS had been split to move IE to a different company.

... you really think the Unix world would have forged forward with lots of new innovations? Without competitive bodies like Microsoft and Apple around, people do jack. They implement worse is better solutions and enjoy making systems so unuable that they get to be computer gods. This issue was discussed in the 70's at great length... making a hostile computing world where only people with insane attention spans can succeed. Companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Amiga were different because they thought compuers should be usable... people still hate them for that.

I'm not suggesting anyone implement anything in any particular technology. I'm mentioning that MS's actions in promoting Silverlight are probably illegal and this is evid