Microsoft's Bulk Deal With New Zealand Collapses

vik writes "The latest 3-year, pan-government deal that Microsoft has been establishing with the New Zealand government since 2000 has collapsed, opening the doors to the wider use of open source software in government. The NZ State Services Commission (already a prize-winning user of open source) says in a statement that it '...became apparent during discussions that a formal agreement with Microsoft is no longer appropriate.' Having lost their discount, individual government departments will now have to put their IT requirements out to tender individually."

Comments

Re:A small win, but MS has lobbyists

[morgan_greywolf]

1) MS is a powerful marketing organisation with a single control center. It has millions to spend on lobbying. Instead of one central purchasing order they will go after each state/county and government organisation parallely and independently

I agree to a point: I personally don't think that Microsoft has the domain knowledge to after individual provinces or localities in New Zealand, but then I may be underestimating Microsoft's presence in NZ.

2) To take advantage of this situation the FOSS/Open Source has NO marketing budget or marketing plan except for some backdoor geeks.

Red Hat, Novell, Canonical, Mandriva, Sun, IBM, etc. all have marketing budgets. With the sole exception of IBM, none have as large a marketing budget as Microsoft, at least not by themselves.

3) Lobbyists that MS hires far outmatch the abilities of what FOSS can bring up....

There is no "open source lobbying" organization. ("FOSS" and "FLOSS" are ugly terms, IMHO). But certainly there are individual groups that, together, are extremely power, each from different angles. From the "online freedom" aspect, you have the EFF. From the "Linux is good" dept., we have The Linux Foundation. There are several organizations pushing open standards. IBM pushes open standards and open source. And there are tons of other examples. Together, these organizations outweigh Microsoft's lobbying efforts.

And there is no "we": Open source represents a bunch of diverse elements with diverse agendas. That's why open source is winning (yes, I said it: we are winning!). Many individuals and organizations with many agendas easily outweigh the one agenda and one organization, no matter how big or how much money said agenda and organization are.

Re:Open Formats

[Narpak]

I agree that should be the number one short-term goal for governments of the world. The only problem is, what do you do about issues like OOXML, which is a standard, and which MS supports in name, but which isn't actually supported by anyone? Gaming the standards system has become too easy and corrupting standards has no penalty.

I know I have posted something similar like this before. However I believe it bears repeating.

The Norwegian Government, in a moment of clarity, decided to embrace open standards. From January 1 2009 all departments, institutions, schools and public sites; should deliver and accept all documents that are ODF, PDF or HTML (which ever is appropriate for the information in question). This doesn't bare those sites and institutions from putting up, or accepting, Microsoft document formats; but at everything have to be there in Open Standards first and foremost.

Re:A small win, but MS has lobbyists

[Seriousity]

Microsoft is quite present here in New Zealand. On a few occasions I have mentioned that I run linux on my desktop PC to IT tutors / teachers; the responses have varied from "what's that?" to "isn't linux just for servers?"(that one was today)

In fact, barely anybody else that I know is familiar with linux; everybody assumes it's Microsoft as far as the eye can see - how can there be possibly something better out there if everybody still uses MS?

There was one person I tried to introduce to linux, and to my distress the result wasn't exactly glamorous - after spending half a day figuratively breaking through brick walls with my forehead to configure PulseAudio with his 5.1 surround system, grr, I find out that ATI had decided to dump support for his relatively new card, grrrr.

So X is pulverized completely and he has a filesystem he can't access on a brand new hard drive that's good to kill small bugs with or stop paper from blowing away. I tried to explain to him that this was ATI's doing, not the fault of Linux.... Seems he'll never give FOSS another chance after that.

All in all there's many walls to break through to get linux out there, and many of them come back to Microsoft doing what it does best, which to be blunt is using it's inflated wealth and influence to overstay its welcome.

At any rate, we need to tighten a lot of loose screws before we can really get Linux out there. I hope and pray that Ubuntu considers changing the fixed release cycles so there isn't something major broken with every new release, as the OS has the potential to go far. But I digress...

At the end of the day, the less I see of Microsoft in my blessed country the better. My uncle works in government in New Zealand, and the laptop that Microsoft pilfered down through the grime channels to him has made his job a bit harder - in his words, "Computers are supposed to get smaller and faster, this thing is huge, heavy and slow". So yes, Microsoft is indeed hampering productivity here; this news gets a begrudging thumbs-up from me to a government I like as much as the smell of a long-dead seal.