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Secret EU Open Source Migration Study Leaked
Elektroschock writes "For 4 years MEP Marco Cappato tried to get access to the EU Council's 2005 open source migration study because he is a member of a responsible IT oversight committee in the European Parliament. His repeated requests for access were denied. Now they have finally been answered because the Council's study has escaped into the wild (PDF in French and English). Here is a quick look. It is embarrassing! Gartner, when asked if there were any mature public Linux installations in Europe, claimed that there were none. Michael Silver said, 'I have not spoken to any sizable deployments of Linux on the desktop and only one or two StarOffice deployments.' Gartner spread patent and TCO FUD. Also, the European Patent Office participated in the project, although it is not an EU institution."
Someone needs to pull a John Stewart/Jim Cramer on Gartner. These guys spread so much BS, yet continue to be considered an authority.
Mod me down if you want, but Linux needs to go "full retard" in order to reach the masses. Essentially, a 6 year old and a 96 year old need to be able to use the system. If they can't, start over.
No mature public Linux installations in Europe? Either Gartner has chosen to mislead, or they have used some definition of the words public and mature that I don't understand. And people still take notice of what these guys say?
Exceptions are like STDs. You really don't want to catch the ones you can't recover from.
Isn't there an EU action for fraud, if Gartner was a contracted and paid consultant to the EU for this study? I'd love to see an American company get financially shitcanned by the EU. Not just fined but wiped out.
Sue Silver for fraud; also he has a conflict of interest because he is a self-declared Windows tool and Linux is the main competition (sorry, Mac users.) Finally, never ask an all-business BA+MBA for technical information. You will only get statistics.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm in no way trying to defend Gartner and his study, but I believe there is a huge difference between Linux adoption in 2005 and now. Some slides from the pdf linked in the article suggest that major portions of the study were made even earlier, in 2003. Of course basing any technology-related decisions on such a outdated study is another matter...
I love it! Here's our infamous "Gartner" group in prime form. FTFPDF, we see that they are predicting the arrival of WinFS anywhere from late 2008 to early 2010.
Now, anyone who's been around as long as Gartner knows that Microsoft has been promising this "feature" since Windows codename "Cairo," which was announced in 1991, and publically demo'ed in '93. There was a lot of hope that it would be delivered in NT 4.0. That's roughly 16 years folks. WAY more time than they had to develop Duke Nukem Forever, and it's just a _file system_.
If you want to talk about basing your corporate purchasing decisions on "features" like WinFS, then all this slagging off on Linux as not being "there yet" is directly hyporcritical, now, isn't it?
Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."
I'm pretty sure that Google and Yahoo have some data centers in the EU... and likely many other companies do too. Gartner is being deliberately obtuse, IMHO.
C|N>K
* Linux will be less expensive than Windows because StarOffice/OpenOffice.org can be used instead of Microsoft Office.
* Linux is free.
* There are no forced upgrades.
* Linux will require significantly less labor to manage.
* Linux will have a lower TCO than Windows because of available management tools.
* Applications will be inexpensive or free.
* Hardware can be kept longer if Linux is used, or older hardware can be used.
* Skills are transferable. - Gartner
davecb5620@gmail.com
Well racist troll or not I feel compelled to point you don't know what you're talking about. I'm native of the UK, currently living in Spain, and I can tell you your cab driver doesn't know shit.
Since it joined the EU Spain has received massive investment from the EU, which it has used to modernise in all sorts of ways and has gone from a stagnant low GDP economy to being one of the leading economies in Europe.
The UK on the other hand has benefited greatly from having to take on a modicum of human rights law from the EU which its leaders (and popular press) have hated but IMHO have been a huge boon to human rights in the country. Of course the UK government is doing its best to trample all over those rights still but are repeatedly slapped down when they over-step the mark.
Gartner also made the case that EU governments should not abandon open standards, but rather redefine open standards by removing royalty free use. Thats basically tossing the success story of the Internet out the window and still using it as branding name for the new EIFv2 "European Interoperability Framework" See EU-commission pages at: http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/7728 and a post about it here: http://bosson.blogspot.com/2009/05/stealing-free-from-open-standards.html
They are already doing that, with some success. Of course windows being bundled with new computers and incapability of running win32 apps (and i am not talking about office) are other pieces of the puzzle for which, i believe, we have to wait a little longer.
We learn from history that we learn nothing from history - Tom Veneziano
'As an example illustrating this fact, the Commission officially uses "Linux RedHat Enterprise Version" in its "x86" (also called Intel-compatible architecture) based servers. The fees for "RedHat Enterprise Version" are actually more expensive than those of other proprietary alternatives'
davecb5620@gmail.com
Indeed, you should never try to fuck linux, nor any other OS residing in your PC. This is what happens when schools stop their sex ed programs people.
I am the lawn!
There's a difference. Linux actually supports openGL via wine, whereas W7 (and no other windows virtualization equivalent other than wine) does not.
for over a year now, I must say I agree. Sadly, linux is not mature.
In the times pre windows nt/2000, yes, linux was more stable and had far better up time. But after windows 2000 came out, stability was greatly improved and is simply a non-issue these days.
When that happened, linux lost its strong point and the direction where it's going. A few weeks ago, Mark Shuttleworthd said "Linux must not be just better Windows" or something like that. That of course, is wrong. No matter what you want linux to be or not be, it's just a freaking OS. It deals with scheduling processor time and resources, and IO (and sadly, there's a IO bug in kernels after 2.6.18 that still hasn't been fixed IIRC). Anything more than that is not linux any more. It's either gnome or kde or whatever.
What I really care about as the user is that the os can run my software of choice. For example, MS office is my software of choice. I prefer MSO to any other solution I've seen. Specifically: i also like the look and feel of office 2007 (and since MacOS is forcing me into something else, Mac is off my OS list). Now, should linux run my app or should linux provide "an alternative" to any single pice of software there is? Dear god, speak about reinventing the wheel).
I currently use linux (or should I say Gnome, since linux really doesn't matter that much) because Vista has a really really REALLY stupid memory management (I don't understand what's the point of prefatching software you MIGHT use and then swapping programs you actually do use. I mean, how brain dead is that??). I like having multiple desktops (hello MS it can't be THAT hard), love powerful shell and SSH integration into nautilus.
But the more I use linux (Ubuntu in case you are interested), the more unhappy I am. It's the little things, like, keyboard not processing input on dual screen when there's no window open on that desktop. And configuring / changing (external) display configuration is simply broken. And high IO really brings system on the knees (even surfing is not possible while writing to a CD). Firefox is sloooooowwww. No exchange client. No out of the box AD integration. And so on and on and on.
It's really strange. Currently, there's no desktop OS i'd like to use. I don't get why people are sooooo amoused over mac os. I've tried it but didn't really liked it (yes, i'd prefer windows). On the other hand, MS doesn't know wher to go with Vista/7, but they don't implement a simple virtual desktops and tabs in windows explorer (yes, I'd buy 7 for these simple features).
Based on my experience I agree with gartner, windows is the better choice for EU's cuncil IT environment.
Sorry to be a grammar/spelling Nazi, but you misspelled Vista.
Probably. But they DO cover more services. Bare MS licensing gives you not much more than the OS. Now add IIS support, Exchange, Office in every machine, etc. RHEL gives you an OS plus e-mail server, web server, directory server, virtualization, and all the free goodies packaged in RHEL. ALL WITHIN SCOPE OF THE SUPPORT CONTRACT.
Correction:
Linux supports OpenGL full stop.
Wine just uses the libraries if available and maps the windows DX calls to their OpenGL equivalent.
Windows 7 does _not_ support OpenGL (if not not at all, then at the very least to any usable degree). But of course does support DirectX natively.
Posting obviously for anonymous reasons.
Ubuntu? Really? Try clicking the "system" option, then "Synaptic Package Manager". As you would've found had you paid any attention, you click the pretty box for the software you want, and your system installs the precompiled binaries along with any dependencies. No files (not even the equivalent of a .exe or .msi) required.
Your description of installing software on Linux is one way to do it, but it has not been the only way and certainly not the easiest way for a very long time.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
Feel free to chime in guys:
"It's from Gartner, so it is wrong"
Yes, this is a repetition of what I'll always say when talking about a Gartner report. But obviously it hasn't been chanted enough.
As far as the MS Office issue, Linux can run your app via Wine or Crossover Office. There are also alternatives with varying degrees of quality.
It seems like a lot of your difficulties (No exchange client, no AD integration) have more to do with expecting Linux do things like Windows does when sometimes it doesn't. And sometimes there are ways of doing what you want to do that you just haven't learned about yet.
I am officially gone from
Well, at least the city of Munich: http://news.cnet.com/Munich-fires-up-Linux-at-last/2100-7344_3-6119153.html
I am sure, though, that there are others.
I forgot: The Linux desktops were not in place in 2004 and the report seems to refer to that year.
yeah, I should have typed that a bit more distinctly, but I agree.
What I meant was that you can essentially run XP software with better support via linux/wine than you can via windows 7's built in shoddy virtualization and/or piss poor "xp mode". I can only pity those trying to run an XP version of games/anything graphically dependant under the virtualization in W7 for example, whereas most windows software and even gaming is basically a non-issue for linux.
What did they expect?
You're unhappy with Linux because you're making the fatal mistake of trying to live a Microsoft life with a Linux based OS. It's like deciding you like nautical life so you buy an airplane. I had the same problem when I switched from windows 98 to Linux. I used XP along side Linux for a while, but eventually Linux (more acurately, POSIX) felt oh so more right and sensible than windows. Now, if it isn't POSIX compatible, it's a weird niche system to me. If you can let go of all your windows-isms and microsoft-isms you can be much happier with your computer. You can't constantly compare the two OSes, either. You'll never be satisfied like that, especially if you're really used to the first OS. It's like watching a really great movie many times and then years later watching a remake. Even if the remake is fantastic and new and has all the elements of the old that you like, it'll still be different. It will still feel like a shameless copy that doesn't quite work the way you want it to. You'll expect a line from your favorite character only to hear something different. Does the fact it was different from what you expected make it a bad line? Probably not, but it still leaves you a bit disappointed. I guess my point is to leave behind all your preconceptions about what an OS is and how it should behave, if you truly wish to switch to Linux--or any other OS for that matter--and be happy with it.
Okay, enough bad analogies.
Skiffy is Spiffy, but Ort is tort.
Outrageous! Single or limited function desktops (for example, data entry) Err, we are talking of modern day distributions of Linux, not some random software made by a random person for Linux!
The only thing that can be found out (about how this "information" was discovered) is the amount of money M$ paid to get this to be said!
If it's unelected then how come I will be choosing who my Member of the European Parliament will be from a list of candidates on June 4th? Do you even have a clue or do you base your entire knowledge of a union of 27 countries on the ill-informed complaints of one fucking taxi driver?
This is not that Linux is not mature, this is that Linux is not what you want.
Ok you people! Now anyone may call me troll, racist, animal hater or anything worser. But I'm really fed up with people like this one. It is the very same song since the old 90's. And it is one of the reasons why I haven't been here for years.
Now, I have to confess, this is a never ending story - brawling all over what 6 year, 30 year, 90 year oldies may or may not able to use Linux. No one is going to give up.
But I think there is a way... The TEST!
Let a chimp try to use both systems. Really, Sincerly it would be interesting to see what will come out of such thing. Whatever it will be, it will be funny and damnly embarassing, I believe.
To be honest, if it's not in the add/remove app then you can only expect a certain percentage of users to be able to find it. With that said, google has introduced people to the concept of trying multiple searches with different keywords to find what you're looking for (amazing!) so more and more people are probably able to use the search field in Synaptic all the time :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And the beauty is that you just described the complex way of doing it. If I'm no power user, I can just select "applications", "add/remove" and pick what I want.
Try doing that add/remove trick using what I believe in Windows is called the "control panel", and if I remember correctly it doesn't even give you a list of programs to install; you have to scrape around for something called an "exe". Will Windows ever be ready for the desktop?
PS. We seem to see a lot of these comments about the insurmountable difficulty of installing apps in Ubuntu. A subtle troll doing the rounds, surely.
At least have the decency to insult Europeans in English rather than American.
I know the truth and I know what you're thinking
A. ) there are no "free goodies", you paid for them as part of the support contract.
B. ) what real reason is there to pay for a support contract through RedHat? What am I gaining (and I am being 100% serious) over installing the software without support?
What's up with the endless Linux is better chatter, specificaly Ubuntu? it's simply not so. I can't use dial-up without hand rolling a configure script and that is only after getting the package from Debian (for Ubuntu) of Wvdial on s second computer with internet access, this problem has existed for years in Ubuntu, lets see, sound is broken, and my graphics card is only partly supported. Gee, and is it really free? I pay for the disk cause I don't have broadband and then I pay for the upgrade, which usually fails anyway. What business owner, 96 year old, or 6 year old will use this. Answer, none, unless they are geeks.
So basically, you are saying that because Microsoft doesn't support Linux, Linux is not mature.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
why would ANY study a parliament bases from to make decisions be secret to begin with?
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
Google "flash install" from the Linux PC. It's the first result, Adobe's page will detect your browser and OS type and present you with multiple installation options and step-by-step instructions. On Ubuntu, use the .tar.gz file.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
well obviously we need to still work on things and developers need to make sure multiplatform programs work equally well on all platforms. I said differences should be ignored only if you want to go with one OS or another. if slow firefox is a deal breaker for you, go with windows. I don't see what the problem is.
Skiffy is Spiffy, but Ort is tort.
But the more I use linux (Ubuntu in case you are interested), the more unhappy I am. It's the little things, like, keyboard not processing input on dual screen when there's no window open on that desktop. And configuring / changing (external) display configuration is simply broken. And high IO really brings system on the knees (even surfing is not possible while writing to a CD). Firefox is sloooooowwww. No exchange client. No out of the box AD integration. And so on and on and on.
Many of the complaints you list here I think are valid, because I'm using Ubuntu Linux as well and I have found myself thinking the exact same thing. Specifically, all of the trouble with X.org and dual-head, the high IO, and the slow firefox all resonate with me. None of these are enough to make me go back to Windows though; overall, Ubuntu offers a much better experience for me than Windows.
Mac OS, on the other hand, is very intriguing. Unix-based (FreeBSD, specifically), and yet has 110% hardware support. A thriving ecosystem of free software available (much [most?] of it ported from GNU/Linux). Overall, it seems like a pretty attractive target. There are just two things that really really prevent me from using it: the UI, and the culture. The UI I find to be bloated and ineffecient, and the culture feels quite closed. Until Apple opens up their OS and allows me to install it on non-Apple hardware, and stops bricking jailbroken iPhones, I just don't see Apple products as something I want to use. Better to target Ubuntu, which is technically very close, and properly philosophically aligned.
Oh, and as far as getting MS Office working on Ubuntu, apparently you can get it to work under Wine:
http://www.programmerfish.com/roffice-2007-in-linux/
I haven't tried it myself, though, so your mileage may vary.
I have to agree that there are still maturity-problems. I have been using Ubuntu since "edgy", and each version since then has contained at least one annoying bug - a bug that would not be fixed until the next version.
For example, with "jaunty" I have at least three bugs related to pulseaudio that shows up on a daily basis. And a new notification-system that is so far from being ready that I would not even consider it as beta. These things were working fine in "intrepid"
With "intrepid", Evolution was more or less unusable due to some cache-bug (deleting the cache-folder resolved it for about a week at a time). Not a problem in "hardy" and fixed in "jaunty". This version also made Java-applications with a GTK interface so slow they became unusable (I used a few on a regular basis). This is still not fixed.
Before that, i experienced regressions with windows that would move on restart, windows that would refuse to open om my second screen, crashing media players, crackling sound and a few other annoyances - everything stuff that were working in the previous version.
And not to forget, this frequently requested feature has not been fixed in over six years!
But in my opinion, the sum of the pains are about the same with Windows and Ubuntu - so I'm sticking with Ubuntu and buy some beer to relax with for the money I save.
Very insightful.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
As you can imagine, I am in no position to say which one, but a well known bank is running an internal call centre in Linux exclusively.
Those are several hundreds of workstations (I think around 500). Not servers, desktops.
The same and other banks's Engineering teams are constantly evaluating the feasibility of long Linux deployments in desktops (the server battle is over, people stopped laughing at Linux in the datacentre long time ago).
It is a matter of time before companies begin to openly talk about Linux desktop deployments as they do about Windows ones.
that's only people with the slightest clue. Business execs are mostly just computer stupid, ignorant, or call it naive. Microsoft did a great job at eliminating the corporate Systems Engineer position and now management is deciding that they know computer technology enough to make the choice of what gets purchased. Visual Basic and MS Access turned management into full blown computer programmers and database developers and gave them the balls to become the IT decider. Funny how it always comes down to education of some sort IMO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Having migrated only 1,200 out of 14,000 computers to linux by 2008 doesn't seem like a great example.
Dual Opteron < $600
But she is no technologist neither.
At 70 she is happily using Ubuntu, her first computer ever.
Anecdotal I know, but I think that test is frankly done and dusted.
Linux has now to convince the slightly more sophisticated user, the one that may want to find an application for specific purposes beyond the traditional office oriented ones.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Windows Media Player does not play MP3 files by default and I believe you don;t have a CD/DVD burner out of the box.
Lets start from the point where the systems are configured equally for the most common tasks and see how systems fare from there.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Support. I have had network performance problems running RHEL on DL360G4s which RedHat solved after a week. The new patch was then tested, commited and served through RHN - complete with driver patches delivered upstream. I have seen communities work just as commited (postfix is one), but RedHat gives you this on all the software it ships. This is a guarantee that you can present to your customer.
Even more seriously, RedHat backports security patches onto a given stable set of software. This is tedious work which I am more than willing to compensate someone for.
Lastly - it is actually important to inject money into the OpenSource model. This in turn lays the fundament of solidity which is crucial for letting us play with OpenSource in a business environment.
And yet linux fanboys mod me troll.
Like, you know, GIMP USER INTERFACE STILL SUCKS. But developers surely know waaaayyy better what's good for the user.
What's funny here is that you're either a subtle troll, uninformed, or willfully ignorant. Not everyone agrees that the GIMP user interface sucks - and that's not just a developer viewpoint. Every time GIMP is mentioned, you get entire subthreads on this. Are you trying to generate another such thread or are you truely unaware of this?
i'm not completely sure how true your comment is (as in, whether you work for gartner ;> ), but i'd like to comment on something.
(and sadly, there's a IO bug in kernels after 2.6.18 that still hasn't been fixed IIRC)
would you mind linking to a kernel bugzilla report on it ? as a linux user i would be quite interested in a progress on such a seriously sounding bug, if only to upgrade once it's fixed.
No exchange client. No out of the box AD integration.
right. because microsoft provides native groupware and lotus notes clients and integration in novell edirectory.
Rich
> WTF and HTF do you reason with these kinds of people?
You don't. No one likes evangelists, even if they are right. (You can make an exception in case there is some kind of bodily danger involved, but using Windows, at least in the home, typically doesn't fit that.)
Do you also constantly remind your acquaintances who are smokers about the dangers of smoking? I used to make that mistake but understood eventually and now limit myself to doing it about once a year, per smoker.
Just take a deep breath and think about that saying which talks about changing the things you can fix and accepting the things you can't.
> it just doesn't occur to them that installing software could possibly
> be as simple as just a few clicks
I wonder if this is partially because of the "free" == "copyright infringement" == "criminal/infection danger" propaganda the content industries have been pushing everywhere?
Becoming childishly hysteric when realizing that there are multiple powers on this planet - yes, that smells American.
Want to hear the voice of GOD? cat
On the other hand, it's not so hard to see how the sentence "your averge diaper-headed cafe bomber that you find driving around a cab in NYC." could be construed as racist. I, for one, doubt that the poster is referring to white anglo-saxon protestants, and I can also see how the terms 'diaper-headed' and 'cafe bomber' can be construed as negative.
The document reveals in one part that the EU uses Linux for tactical reasons.
And if you don't have access to the repositories (behind a restrictive firewall that requires NTLM auth) you can download the .deb packages via HTTP and double click on them. Synaptic will open and install the package as if it downloaded it. I should imagine that this will work with most .deb packages but I've never tested it. Linux has several graphical systems to automate installations, Synaptic is just one of them.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
I know nationalism isn't racism (although actually they are very often strongly intertwined).
But "your averge diaper-headed cafe bomber that you find driving around a cab in NYC." clearly is.
The problem with that is not all software is, or will ever be, present in your specific particular repository. Until Linux adopts actual standards for packages that will be made compatible with the existing package managers, until Linux users and developers are free to easily install software they want from any source, and Linux takes a huge step towards freedom and away from proprietary business tactics when it's the developer projects themselves that should be getting the attention instead, will users and developers finally truly be enabled to use Linux how they see fit. I want to easily run any program and any version of any program that I want to, not be forced to compile it or hope that someone else does it for my locked-in distro. 9 and 95 year olds can't compile, and every distro and developer can't and shouldn't have to compile every version of every program for every version of their distro. Until the community realizes that, and in turn the companies crap themselves and realize they can't get away with that kind of lock-in in order to drum up attention for themselves, Linux will remain fragmented and it's adoption slowed.
Just think, once actual important Linux standards become adopted, like packaging standards, you'll have hundreds of additional mirrors that you can add if you'd like to, AND be able to easily download and install packages from websites! (You know, actual installation packages, that integrate with your OS, as opposed to having to deal with regular compressed binaries that involve more fiddling.)
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.