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."

Comments

Why do we let Gartner Continue?

[StCredZero]

Someone needs to pull a John Stewart/Jim Cramer on Gartner. These guys spread so much BS, yet continue to be considered an authority.

Re:Why do we let Gartner Continue?

[noundi]

Sure you can arrest the drug dealer, put him in prison for a few years and then release him without changing anything or you can go after the head of the operation and solve the problem permanently. The only party that benefits from this is Microsoft, no fucking bullshit-FUD-internet-forum-made-up word doubt about it.

Re:Why do we let Gartner Continue?

[elrous0]

Well, ARE there any "sizable deployments of Linux on the desktop" in Europe (in companies and government, I mean--not on some geek's home PC)? It seems to me that if you're going to refute a study, you should start by showing they're actually wrong.

Re:Why do we let Gartner Continue?

[Nutria]

While I dislike Gartner about as much as anyone on this list, we must remember that this report is 5 YEARS OLD. I would be surprised if there WERE any large-scale mature Linux desktop sites back then.

Still, it's a steaming pile of FUD: before companies started rolling out Windows in a big way, how many large-scale Windows sites were there?

Re:Why do we let Gartner Continue?

[guruevi]

Yes there are. They have been in the news. There have been instances in the UK and France since 2006, there are many schools and educational institutions as well as companies that have made the switch. I know in the Netherlands and Belgium government agencies have been looking into it and if I'm correct a lot of the ex-Soviet countries that are now part of the EU (Hungary, Poland, ...) and the Scandinavians have less advertised but nonetheless important conversions.

Gartner is a sock puppet for Microsoft and everybody in the industry knows that (they made the analysis that Windows XP before SP1 was safer than Linux by comparing it to Red Hat Linux 5.3 (not RHEL, the original 5.3))

Re:Why do we let Gartner Continue?

[Anonymous Coward]

let's see from the top of my head:
- all government and schools in extramadura in spain
- schools in gran canaria
- french police (still migrating)
- munich

and those are just the ones that immediately come to mind, there's undoubtfully more if you dig a bit.

Re:Why do we let Gartner Continue?

[Ed Avis]

The study was in 2005, so to show it was wrong you need to find examples of widespread Linux deployments in Europe that existed then. Not deployments that started in 2006, or governments that 'have been looking into it'.

Re:Why do we let Gartner Continue?

[Kulfaangaren!]

In goverment...
* 1000+ in French parliament : http://blogs.computerworld.com/node/4060
* 11000 at German Foreign ministry.
* 14000 in Munich.
* 13000 at The Federal Employment Office of Germany
* 80000+ in Spain 2003: http://lwn.net/Articles/41738/
* 90000 at France's national police force in 2007

In education...
* "Germany has announced that 560,000 students in 33 universities will migrate to Linux."
* "Russia announced in October 2007 that all its school computers will run on Linux."
* "9,000 computers to be converted to Linux and OpenOffice.org in school district Geneva, Switzerland by September 2008"

In business...
* "Peugeot, the European car maker, announced plans to deploy up to 20,000 copies of Novell's Linux desktop."

Read more about adoption of Linux at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_adoption

Re:Why do we let Gartner Continue?

[Kulfaangaren!]

80000+ desktops + 33 datacenters in Spain in 2003 ? Qualifies :) ?

Re:Why do we let Gartner Continue?

[Kulfaangaren!]

Please read more than the first paragraph, especially if you link to a source yourself :) Goverment migration in Extramadura started in 2006/2007 however in 2002 they migrated 70000-80000 (the figures differ from source to source) desktops for their schools and they set up 33 public computer centers.

Re:Why do we let Gartner Continue?

[sgtrock]

Extramdura. Quoting the paper's abstract:

Extremadura is the poorest region of Spain, lagging behind the rest of the country in both the economic and technological arena. Though short on financial resources, the region has set very high goals for itself in its Regional Strategy on
Information Society. This paper briefly describes the region's strategy and continues to discuss how the use of Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) aids the regional government in achieving its goals.

The fun part is the link that I provide comes from the EU's site! lol

Oh noes!

[EveryNickIsTaken]

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.

Re:Oh noes!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

And that is precisely what Ubuntu is trying to do. It is a matter of opinion as the whether they are succeeding, but I believe that they are.

Re:Oh noes!

[noundi]

Was the article not clear in any fucking way? Linux needs Microsoft to stop manipulating parliaments to reach the masses. Period.

Re:Oh noes!

[Corporate Troll]

Essentially, a 6 year old and a 96 year old need to be able to use the system.

Actually, those two demographics are the easiest to convert. While my mom isn't 96 by a long stretch, she uses Ubuntu and has no problems whatsoever. Her computer literacy is close to 0.

The problem users are those we call "power users". People that have used Windows for years and know the ins-and-outs, but do not know them deep enough. They can pretty much be found in the 20-65 demographics, also known as those of working age. My dad falls in the power-user demographic and he still uses WinXP. That said, he is very open to Linux and understands it well enough to use it.

Do note that you said "use". The system still has to be set up by someone who knows what he does.

Re:Oh noes!

[discord5]

I am not some bitter FreeBSD user hiding out in his mother's basement.

Goddamnit, for the last time, it's not a basement, it's my command centre.

Fraud and conflict of interest

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re:Fraud and conflict of interest

[MadKeithV]

15% of MBA's will get you the correct statistics though.

Re:Fraud and conflict of interest

[dkleinsc]

15% of MBA's will get you the correct statistics though.

So all I need 7 MBAs to achieve 100% accurate knowledge of everything. Great!

(Yes, I know that's flawed math, just making a point)

2005 != 2009

[firejump]

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...

"WinFS Arrives?"

[Dunkirk]

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?

gartner myths of linux on the desktop

[rs232]

* 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

Gartner helps EU redefine open standards

[bosson]

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

Re:As an European who's been using linux desktop..

[Zashi]

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.

Re:As an European who's been using linux desktop..

[lordandmaker]

This is not that Linux is not mature, this is that Linux is not what you want.