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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.
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 Of course basing any technology-related decisions on such a outdated study is another matter...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."
* 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is not that Linux is not mature, this is that Linux is not what you want.
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.