Free Software For All Russian Schools In Jeopardy

Glyn Moody writes "Last year, we discussed here a Russian plan to install free software in all its schools. Seems things aren't going so well. Funds for the project have been cut back, some of the free software discs already sent out were faulty, and — inevitably — Microsoft has agreed to a 'special price' for Windows XP used in Russian schools."

Comments

In Soviet Russia

[symbolset]

Free software costs too much? Really?

Somebody needs to explain some things to these folks. It's not that hard: you install LTSP on a server, all the clients boot to the network. Install all the software you want on the server. If instead of (or in addition to) thin client/shared desktop you want an image on the desktop you configure the PXE server to dish an installer image.

Re:In Soviet Russia

[Darkness404]

It depends though. If you look at a lot of (American) schools technology is crap. About 2 years ago I was in an elementary school computer lab with computers still running Windows 98(!) on hardware made for Windows 95. And legacy software wasn't the issue the school just didn't have the funds or the motivation to switch. After all a kid can learn just as well on a Pentium II that takes 4 minutes to respond to mouse input as a Core 2 duo that responds instantly right? Even the small expense of some noiseless thin clients and a powerful server might be too much because until the HDDs are dead, the memory is bad, the CD drives are stuck and the monitor has exploded, they have no desire to upgrade.

Retraining is also hard. Schools (at least in America) generally have a large amount of dead weight. Teachers long past their prime who teach boring classes who are apathetic towards students but who have been tenured and can't be fired without having to fight through the unions. These teachers have no desire to get a new keyboard, let alone an entirely new OS or new ways of doing things. In fact I'm sure a lot of them would rather have paper grades and typewriters. So when the price is $20,000 to switch to Linux $50,000 to upgrade Windows or just $0 to do absolutely nothing, many schools choose the free option especially in lower grades.

Re:In Soviet Russia

[hairyfeet]

Yeah a few years back I ended up giving a bunch of old office boxes to one of my local schools. I installed Win2K along with some basic office software OO.o and the like, and I bet they are still being used to this day. Why didn't i just use Linux? because unless I wanted to be their free admin for the rest of my days I had to install something their "IT" guy understood. This guy was such an old fossil he wanted to know where to input the DOS commands.

Most folks here talk about "Oh, Linux is free!" but sorry, that's bullshit. Yeah the OS may be free, but you ever priced a Linux Guru? Cheap they ain't because there simply aren't many of them. It is a LOT easier to teach a teacher how to go "clicky clicky, next next next" than to deal with a CLI. They know Windows, they use Windows at home, so they ain't scared of Windows.

After trying to give away nice older machines that I'd get given to me on jobs with Linux installed by me I quickly learned that old saying was true "Linux is free if your time is worthless" because i would get called back to service their 'free" machine when they couldn't get the printer to work, an update borked sound or video, etc. In the end it was just easier to wipe the machine, reinstall whatever Windows it had a license for, and then sell or give it away.

So while I appreciate the idea of a free OS for schools, unless they got the money to hire the Linux admins to run it I've found it just ain't worth it. Better to give them a locked down Windows box and just be done with it. Windows admins are cheap and MSFT is happy to give educational discounts to keep Windows in the schools, no different than Apple and my local college.

Re:In Soviet Russia

[symbolset]

Free software doesn't mean no costs. It just means cheaper, and usually only in long term. You have installation, training, support, cost of porting existing applications and data, etc.

TCO for Windows involves the risk of 17 years in a siberian prison.

TCO for Linux involves asking some people to work an hour late one day a week for a few months.

Plugging that into my ROI calculator gives a time to recover investment of... 1.2 milliseconds.

Re:In Soviet Russia

[symbolset]

Most folks here talk about "Oh, Linux is free!" but sorry, that's bullshit. Yeah the OS may be free, but you ever priced a Linux Guru?

I'm feeling my years. My grandmother has quite a few of them on me. It took me an hour to install her Linux over a year ago, and it still works fine. Nothing bad happened. I showed her how to install software and now she's got quite a lot of it. One of these days she's going to ask me to debug her wget scripts. Grandma never did learn to drive but she can MySpace like nobody's business.

Where I'm at Linux geeks are more common than the other kind so they're not expensive. Your mileage may vary.

Windows admins are cheap

Not always, but sometimes, you do get what you pay for. The problem with Windows admins is that you also need a LOT of them. Just techs to clean malware and fix twitchy software is >1% of headcount for some large organizations. IMHO most Windows admins see the internal workings of the machine as a "black box" and they are neither able to nor interested in understanding the lower level of activity that drives the magic blinky lights. Linux geeks are a different breed indeed.

Re:In Soviet Russia

[symbolset]

Ooh mister smartypants -the teacher did in fact buy the Windows from the government's official vendor at the going rate and he had no way to know they sold him cracked software. Nice try. You have no idea how government business is conducted in Russia, do you?

Re:In Soviet Russia

[symbolset]

This is going to shock you but written English is quite common in Russia and most Russians are multilingual. Also, most Russians are quite adaptable and resourceful - by necessity as they've been more challenged than we have in the west. Some of these teachers built their own schools from raw logs, and they had to do manual labor to get the tools to work the logs. I'm not kidding. After that experience figuring out Linux should be a cinch. In short these are not typically your inner-city career button pushers. The ability of Russians to endure travails without complaint that would wreck our average American polar explorer is legendary - they're almost British in this way.

Localization is trivial. I believe Russian interface is supported in every Linux variant I've ever used. It's just Cryllic alphabet, keywords and fonts anyway. It's not like it's got some fancy top-to-bottom or right-to-left glyph sequence or anything. Lots of Russians use Linux by choice and I'm sure lots of them have figured this out. This isn't Windows: localization has been part of the standard GNU project template for many years.

If they're complaining that they can't do it then it's because they've been paid handsomely to make such a complaint. Otherwise they wouldn't be Russian. Now, who would pay them to do that? And why is anybody listening?

Re:In Soviet Russia

[Arkaic]

I'd say you aren't much of a real Windows admin if all you know if the "click click" side of things. Even a halfway decent PC Tech knows how to effectively use things like ipconfig from a cmd prompt. I just recently did some online coursework for Windows Server 2008. Guess what? There are still PLENTY of tasks that can ONLY be done from the CLI, for managing DNS and number of other things. As much as Windows like to focus on the GUI for the average user, you will never get away from the CLI if you want to use all of the feature for managing a Windows machine. I have to use Windows on my work desktop, and I have always have a cmd prompt window open. Simply because its something faster for doing certain things, than trying to use the GUI.

Re:In Soviet Russia

[symbolset]

I don't know about the GP, but I've never done any command line or text file management of the Debian box I'm typing this on (up about a year now). Until I read your post I hadn't thought about at all but yeah, things have changed quite a bit in the last few years. I still wget on the command line and edit files by hand for programming projects, but for system admin? Not any more. I can't remember how long it's been.

Now, to config a server to give some options to a thousand netbooted clients whether to start various types of thin client, VDI, DBAN, Clonezilla or select from available installer images? That's going to be a text file, but what the heck - you can't do that in Windows no matter what you edit. But xorg.conf or .desktop? I don't even remember the syntax. Are they still on M4 or whatever the heck that heinous syntax was?

Re:In Soviet Russia

[shutdown -p now]

This is going to shock you but written English is quite common in Russia and most Russians are multilingual.

This is simply false. It may hold true for Moscow and a few other large cities (though even then I'm not sure), but most of the country is definitely not multilingual, English or otherwise. There's simply no point in learning it, and whatever schools give you is really basic, and is quickly forgotten for the lack of practice.

Re:In Soviet Russia

[symbolset]

OK, I've reviewed my posts from your reply to the top of the thread and nowhere did I say it was Microsoft's fault. It is an observed fact. It is, and to Russians to whom the blame belongs is irrelevant. They can choose to use free software or they can choose the risk. Microsoft has backed off some for now and so the risk is less, but eventually the risk will return because the software is not free and their Russian channel can never be reliably honest. In the Russian language corrupt government provisioning is so assumed that the reverse must be made explicit. I believe Chinese languages are similarly cynical. The safe choice is to be free forever. Free contains no risk.

If you want to fix the blame on Microsoft for not dropping the suit after finding out that the affected individual was in no way to blame for the piracy, that's on you. I didn't say that.

As to Microsoft's ROI, well, I don't know what to say here. Given the current state of free I can see how they must struggle to prove where they add value - especially when dealing with the malware ecosystem mounted against them which at some accounts is larger than the Windows market itself. I'm sure it's hard to deliver on this nine year old commitment when you can't even get your network software geeks to check their inputs on the most basic service they provide or even read the licenses of the software they publish.

You should probably check the corkboard on the way out of the blog center. I think there's a note there about me. Take your stuff with you when you go or you might not see it again.

Re:In Soviet Russia

[Captian Spazzz]

Right Click the network manager icon in the top tool bar.
Select EDIT Connections
Select DSL (assuming that's the type of connection your using PPPOE for, but it should work regardless)
Click Add
Enter username and password and any other settings required.
Connect
???
Profit!

Seriously dude I just bridged my DSL Modem and connected using the native PPPOE client in Ubuntu. No command line needed.

Re:In Soviet Russia

[symbolset]

I've said this before in this thread so I'll cut you some slack and refer to my other posts. In Soviet Russia manpower is cheap. It's a very top-down management system. People are so resourceful that some of them don't just build their own schools from raw trees, they have to go out and earn the scratch to buy the tools to do so with manual labor or barter. This doesn't just apply to schools - in some ways their space program works the same way. It's terrible to think about what an engineer will do to actually get to perform some engineering. The whole ROI thing does not work in Russia. If people protest that they need Windows it's because they have been paid to do so or incentivised to do so by other people who have been paid to motivate them to protest, and even in that they accept some risk. In most cases these folks are glad to have books, heat, one computer per classroom and a classroom to teach in. This is nothing close to a free market economy. They achieve great things with these constraints because they are well motivated (inspired) and because they hope to bring about progress. On average, they're also bright because being stupid is in their system more fatal than it is in ours and in this case Darwin wins.

Urban Russia is not like this but Russia is vast and Urban Russia is but a small fraction of the schools and those few are even more politically (and unoficially) motivated.

Russians are very adaptable and resourceful in ways you cannot imagine. The difficulty in switching software systems is absolutely nothing to them. It's background noise. Compared to the difficulties of their normal lives outside of teaching it's not worth considering. Some teachers have not been paid their salaries for years and eke by on donations from the families of their students or in barter where they develop value above and beyond their official duties.

Russia is a very different place than you are used to. So no, overcoming the objections you mount are so trivial to them as to not be worth consideration.

OSS is great, but it is rarely free for non-personal use.

Ok now you're just plain lying. There are some OSS solutions that are not also free, but they're so rare and limited as to be unworthy of consideration. How desperate must you be to lie about the plainly obvious? In FOSS not only can the average user download an operating system and 50,000 useful applications for every endeavor, they can do with it what they will whether it's personal or government or corporate use, without the risk of years in a Siberian prison that Microsoft solutions provide. They can install it on a billion machines and the only restriction is that if they make changes and share them outside their organization they have to include the source code. If they build on BSD they don't even have that problem as they can even sell their innovations for a profit and not share the source code. This may sound harsh to you but as an alternative to using your spare time to turn trees into homes for favored Russians who have cash, it's a slam dunk. The fact that Linux runs well on the legacy hardware they're faced with is just a bonus.

It is very un-Russian to complain unless you are motivated to complain by some promised money. Where is this money coming from?

Re:In Soviet Russia

[shutdown -p now]

Russia is a very large country that has a far richer history than the US. A good Russian church has more years of history than our country has.

I am Russian, not American, and I grew up in what we call "province" (i.e. not in a big city). I speak from personal experience, so don't throw WP links at me, especially when they're so out of context. Sure, there is a bunch of local languages - they're about as relevant in Russia as Native Indian languages are in the U.S. Aside from that, everyone speaks Russian, and most people belonging to minority nations don't speak anything but Russian as well (with exception of Caucasus republics, Tatarstan, and Bashkortostan).

And schools? Yes, they do teach English there, in theory. In practice maybe 1 out of 5 people taught that way will know English well enough, say, a year after school, to actually read a random English text of moderate complexity. Spoken English is even worse, especially understanding it.

Re:In Soviet Russia

[mlts]

Every single major Linux distribution I have used in the past 5 years can be completely configured from X-Windows. And with UNIX variants, once configured, they stay configured unless someone messes with them, some outside factor (router changed its IP), or hardware changes/failures affect the box.

I am an old UNIX person, so I prefer popping an xterm (or even better, control-alt-shift-F2 for a console TTY) and editing files or using curses based utilities. However, these days, you don't have to know the ins and outs of sendmail.cf (or even sendmail.mc) to have a mail server configured for you by modern day administration tools from KDE or GNOME. I would say that configuring a Linux distribution like RHEL or Ubuntu is just as easy as configuring a Windows box.

And if you are into remote management, Webmin and Plesk can allow you to do a number of sysadmin tasks from your Web browser. Webmin has been around for over a decade, and is a (for the most part) very stable tool. Plesk is a commercial utility that has gotten a good amount of praise as well.

So, don't let the fear of a bash shell stop you from running Linux. You can do an amazing amount of stuff without ever needing to even look at a "$" or "#" prompt. It might have been true about 10 years ago that graphical admin tools were at best good for only general stuff, and at worst, SUID root disasters, but time has moved on, and a lot of work has been done in this field.

Re:In Soviet Russia

[shutdown -p now]

Ok. I've got a real person onsite with with real needs. I'm happy to have an opportunity to help, as I'm sure many other slashdotters would be. How can we help you? Really.

I'm not "on site" anymore - almost a year in Canada now, and while I do not know where I'll settle down eventually, one thing I know for sure is that I'm not planning to return.

How can you help someone else there? In the large scheme of things, money and other donations can be handy locally in some very remote (and consequently backwards) locations, but on the whole lack of funds is not the issue. This isn't to say that Russia is rich, but it's not quite a third-world country, either. Schools mostly have computers (if outdated), and software to run of them (if pirated), for example.

The real problem is the present socio-political system, and more precisely, the corruption that it generates and protects. You can pour as much money as you have into that bottomless pit - most of it will end up in the pockets of people who run the show (and have much more than enough already). That system is what strangles middle class - it's very hard to run a small business there, because bigger fish will always seek to swallow the smaller ones, and they have plenty of money to bribe the bureaucrats with. Tiny middle class means lower wages for working class (they can only go to big business to work, and their negotiating power is consequently diminished), wrecked economy, and government which is the mix of the worst of oligarchic kleptocracy and tyranny of the majority.

The story in TFA is, to some extent, a case of that - the project may have been started to reap the true advantages of FLOSS in education, but in the end, it always devolves to a cash grab by corrupt government officials and their privileged businessmen friends. Large parts of money were almost certainly wasted like that - it's called "otkat" in Russian, and it's when a government official in charge of a public tender for a particular project will select a more expensive option, because the company backing that option will pay a percentage of its profit directly into his pocket.

By the way, It's also why proprietary will likely win in the end - there is more money to spend there, and therefore "otkat" is larger.

What you, or anyone else outside the country, can do to help that, I truly do not know. The change has to come from within, but I do not see it coming - rather the opposite, things have only been getting worse in the last decade, and seemingly with the silent consent of the majority. Which is part of the reason why I'm out.

Re:In Soviet Russia

[Spad]

If anything, Microsoft is moving *more* stuff to the CLI. Look at Exchange 2007; half the management tasks can *only* be carried out from the Powershell management interface and it looks like they're headed the same way with most of the new versions of their core apps (including Server core, obviously).

Not that it's a bad thing (I love Powershell, having been stuck with VBScript for automating Windows admin tasks for years).

Re:In Soviet Russia

[hairyfeet]

Wow thanks...I so rarely get to use this in a sentence....WOOOOSH! Way to not read the post there pal! Kinda miss the part where I said i didn't want to be their free admin for life? What should I do, constantly trawl forums for lists of supported hardware and hope like hell somebody doesn't drop any Lexmark printers or Broadcom wireless chips off?

The POINT was it don't take squat for time to show someone how to admin a Windows box. Lock it down, only allow limited users, hell your already halfway home! And then there is the MAJOR hardware issue with Linux. Does this wireless work? What about this printer? Can you tell me RIGHT NOW without looking it up which items on sale at Best Buy, walmart, and Staples work perfectly with Linux? Are YOU gonna rush out there every time a distro update borks video and/or sound?

I've said it before and I'll say it again-Linux is NOT like Windows, but is much closer to a Mac. It works fine IF and ONLY IF, you get the right hardware/software and don't mess with it. But we are talking donated machines? You know...bunches of Dell, HP, Compaq, eMachines, all with different funky ass hardware. Ever try to get Linux working with an Ali sound chip? How about a SiS network/sound/video combo? Just because it works good on the SINGLE box you picked out JUST FOR Linux, or tweaked for a day to get it just right, doesn't mean Linux will work in the situation we are talking about. You are talking apples, we are talking oranges.

And finally yes, I know about ipconfig. The point is this-do you know how many times I have HAD TO drop to CLI in Windows? In the nearly 15 years I've been working I can count the number on one hand. Last was during the Win9x era. Sure it can be faster to just go CLI, but you should NEVER EVER have to. And with Linux it is the opposite...often that will be the first, last, and ONLY answer you get to a problem. Yeah, no thanks. I have no desire to be a free admin for life just to push a "free OS" when I can reinstall the Windows license on the box (so it is free to them) and be done with it. My after sale/give away support costs? Zero dollars. That is the "free" that I care about. But hey, call your local school, I'm sure they'll be happy to have you admin the entire school for free, just so you can "sell" them Linux. Good luck with that.

Re:In Soviet Russia

[bemymonkey]

Hmmm, I can't remember the last time I had to edit the registry to get hardware working properly in Windows... I also refuse to use OEM "recovery discs", because they install so much crapware.

It's just a matter of finding the correct drivers - you don't need to config or tweak very much, because in Windows there's hardly anything you CAN tweak in this regard... if the driver doesn't work, install a different one. Not exactly ideal, either, but drivers not working at all on Windows isn't exactly common these days, as longs as you buy decent hardware. Sure, there's annoyances and bugs, but the core functionality is usually always there as soon as the correct driver has been installed.

I'm not saying that having drivers for common hardware included with the system isn't the way to go, but there needs to be something to fall back on... on Windows, if the drivers from the OS's driver database don't work or just aren't there, you just run an executable downloaded from the hardware manufacturer's site (something Grandma can do) - on Linux, you're SOL unless you can fix it yourself. And even if it's just a matter of changing a line in a config file, well... probably too hard for Grandma.

If you know what you're doing and all your hardware has decent driver support in recent Linux distros, then obviously setting up a machine with one of those distros is going to be a lot faster than setting up the same machine with Windows and a CD full of drivers...

And while we're on the topic of Linux (you seem to be knowledgeable when it comes to Linux) - is there a known problem with Ubuntu installs inside Virtualbox on an XP host eating themselves when you try to use the update manager to upgrade to the latest Ubuntu version? Mine's stuck in a reboot loop as we speak (after the upgrade)...

Re:In Soviet Russia

[HungryHobo]

Boring cheap wireless card in my new PC "just works" with vista but I've spent more hours than I really should trying to get it to work in unbuntu to no avail so I have to string a cable across the house when I want to use the net with linux.

I like linux, I like the philosophy, I just know damned well that it has more issues than a girl who starts sobbing for no apparent reason after a few beers.

Now the bright side of linux is that it tells you when something is wrong, it tells you even when nothing is wrong, it gives you all the details you need to figure out how to fix it, so many details that if you aren't equipped to understand them it worries you.

Which for me is better than the windows version (crash)"something went wrong.... it happened at memory address 3338127612945345345345"
or the Mac version (crash)"nothing is wrong. program? what program? all is well" or if it's really bad *sad face*

but for most users they don't know how to fix a computer, they really don't want to know, they don't even want to know the full details of what's gone wrong because they dobn't read error messages anyway, they're not going to spend an hour reading documentation to get their sound to work again.
And they shouldn't have to.

Re:In Soviet Russia

[Bert64]

Yes, virtually everything these days can be done from a graphical frontend if you so desire, unix has the (false) reputation that you need to use the cli because often the cli is better, and when a clueless user asks an experienced user for help, the experienced user will naturally use the cli.

One of the biggest problems these days however, is clueless users running systems... They have no real experience, no in depth knowledge, have no idea whats going on underneath and only have a surface understanding of the functionality presented by some gui app. These people result in extremely insecure setups which quickly get compromised....

And to make matters worse, these people are extremely plentiful and cheap, so short sighted businesses employ such people who are able to get "easy to use and often expensive" graphically managed systems limping along. Long term they could save a lot of money by employing more expensive skilled staff (higher paid but fewer staff, less costly downtime, cheaper software, more efficient use of cheaper hardware), but most businesses aren't thinking long term.

Re:In Soviet Russia

[AliasMarlowe]

Let's see... what hasn't worked on Linux (and by working, I mean being able to use all of the core features): [list of stuff].

Either you're skilled at picking dodgy hardware, or unlucky, or perhaps you tackled things the wrong way.

Linux and free software are great, but if you're not willing to invest gobs of time to make it actually work, it's not worth it...

Curiously, it's never been an issue for me, and I don't restrict my hardware choices. I also don't regard myself as a Linux guru or expert.
Caldera OpenLinux worked fine on my Dell XPS T450 at home starting about 10 or 11 years ago, and supported all of its hardware, including thinwire ethernet LAN card, 33k modem internet, ATI Rage Pro graphics, HP Deskjet (maybe the HP 720) and HP scanner (I forget which model). This system was finally retired about 4 years ago, although its peripherals were donated to a local school before that.
About 4½ years ago, the beta of Ubuntu Breezy worked immediately and configured all of the hardware on my Sony laptop (which is now 6 years old and running Karmic flawlessly). The wireless LAN, wired LAN, bluetooth, 1920x1200 screen, wireless mouse, etc. were all configured automatically and worked correctly. The HP 4100c scanner and HP PhotoSmart 1218P printer both worked immediately over USB. The only thing I had to add manually was support for the stupid Sony media keys. Before Breezy, this laptop ran SuSE, which admittedly needed more manual setup.
More recently, 64bit Karmic is installed and working on our two no-name desktops, each with core 2 quad, 8 GB RAM, 2 TB disk, ATI4890 with dual screens, wireless keyboard+mouse, Logitech joystick, Wacom graphics tablet, and external speakers. Karmic 32 bit is also on our 5-year-old Dell GX260 with nVidia 9600GT (not used much nowadays, apart from web). The only manual configuration needed for the three desktops was selecting the binblob video driver via the Ubuntu GUI. All four systems had to be told about the network resources (HP7410 printer+scanner, Synology DS207 server, SMC2804 router/firewall) and each other's NFS exports, of course.

I use Windows systems at work; actually I have used Windows since v1, the MS-DOS Executive. In my experience, the investment of non-expert time to get a given functionality on comparable hardware was about the same on successive versions of Ubuntu and on contemporary versions of Windows (2000 or XP). Your experience seems to have been different.

Re:In Soviet Russia

[bemymonkey]

Interesting... maybe I really am just unlucky :P

Obviously there are a lot of cases in which the user has no problems at all, and all the drivers are installed automatically without a hitch, leading to a fully functional system with no setup at all - but what about the cases where it doesn't work? All I've gotten for answers so far are, "Well, it worked on my setups," or things along the lines of, "You're a shill!" (see the first AC reply :D)...

There just doesn't seem to be a one-size-fits-all recipe for solving this problem, other than buying only hardware that's known to be Linux-compatible. Obviously that's also the only solution for Windows, but the thing is that almost all the consumer hardware available already IS Windows-compatible...

Re:In Soviet Russia

[BitZtream]

Admins aren't cheap, lackeys are. You don't need a lot of admins, you probably need a few lackeys to deal with users.

Admins aren't the people dealing with users, those are basic tech support people. Admins automate to the point that they can cover a LOT of administration by themselves.

This applies to any OS, Windows, Linux , or whatever. if you need a lot of 'admins' then you don't have admins.

Example: National cable company, 7 admins with 24 hour coverage, for 3 million subscribers, for every system they run. They are REAL admins. The manage hundreds of machines to server all the services to those people. The use Solaris, Linux, AIX and Windows machines for servers.

However, they have hundreds of tech support people reading scripts to deal with calls from users. Two entirely different things.

2 or 3 admins should be plenty of a school district. 7 or 8 should be plenty for most states. Those are expensive.

The lackeys you need to deal with end users are cheap per person as you can train a monkey to do it if the admins are doing their job. You just need a much higher ration of lackeys then admins.

The problem is, like it or not, Windows is easier to use for a number of reasons if its setup right. You do the same thing with Windows you do with UNIX. Netboot or PXE installs, no admin access for users, good software setups to keep it stable.

The only difference with Linux geeks is the overwhelming urge to think they are different. Most Linux 'geeks' can't debug shit with source so using the 'Windows is a black box' argument doesn't hold true in almost every real world situation.

Re:In Soviet Russia

[jedidiah]

...then such a person is going to run into problems unless they are their own guru.

There is simply no avoiding this.

They will inevitably plug in a printer into Windows before they've installed the driver. They won't notice the red tape or fully realize what it means.

Re:In Soviet Russia

[Alex Belits]

That system is what strangles middle class - it's very hard to run a small business there, because bigger fish will always seek to swallow the smaller ones, and they have plenty of money to bribe the bureaucrats with.

I guess, you didn't get the memo -- in US "middle class" means "all people between about 150% and 2000% average income", in Russia "middle class" means "people who generate income from property but can't manipulate the market through their property".

I can assure you, small businesses in US are thoroughly fucked in all areas where it is possible to run a big business. "Middle class" mostly consists of professionals and middle managers in big businesses.

Re:In Soviet Russia

[hairyfeet]

The problem is which hardware Linux supports, which in my experience is REALLY old shit! Which is fine for the box itself, since we are talking donated machines, although on the low end good fucking luck with those Ali and SiS chipsets, but generally the peripherals that will be hooked to these machines will NOT be "old shit" and there is where you are royally boned with Linux.

Look, there is an easy peasy way to prove my point, just step right up and take the "hairyfeet challenge" and see for yourself. Just go to Walmart.com, Staples.com, and Bestbuy.com, the 3 largest retailers in the USA. Write down all the PC devices on sale or under $100, then go to...lets say Ubuntu forums, since Ubuntu is the most popular ATM. Look up how many devices on sale RIGHT NOW are supported. Go ahead, I'll wait.....You're looking at MAYBE 30%, and that is if you count "support" as an assload of CLI commands that may or may not work depending on whether they have gone from firmware a to firmware f without changing the box (which they do ALL the time)

Believe me, as a PC retailer there is NOTHING more that I would like than for Linux to become a viable contender, because I could lower my costs and undercut the competition. But there is a REASON why PC retailers don't sell Linux, it is because without a stable ABI and a quick and easy way to tell your customers which devices will/won't work without trawling some damned forum (which BTW, they will NEVER do) Linux quickly becomes a support nightmare from hell. With WinXP, WinVista, or Windows 7, it is as simple as "look for the certified for" on the box. Takes the customer all of 5 seconds. I repeat Linux is free if your time is worthless. I get paid a minimum $50 an hour, so it only take an hour and a half of jumping through CLI bullshit to make that cost of WinXP Home worth it.

Sorry, but unless my customers can shop Best Buy, Walmart, and Staples without studying like it was the ACTs, then Linux just don't cut it. And please don't say that bundle bullshit, because unless your last name is Dell that will quickly break you, as there is no way in hell you can match the razor thin margins Dell works on and hardware gets old way too damned fast. I have NO desire to stock printers, wireless USB dongles, TV USB tuners, etc. I sell PCs and Linux blows through my profit margins like you would not believe. And in this case I had NO desire to be a free admin for life just to sell a "free OS' when I could just reinstall Win2K Pro and be done with them.

Re:In Soviet Russia

[supersloshy]

Boring cheap wireless card in my new PC "just works" with vista but I've spent more hours than I really should trying to get it to work in unbuntu to no avail so I have to string a cable across the house when I want to use the net with linux.

1) Did you try ndiswrapper?

2) You can't blame Ubuntu or Linux in general for something like that. Whenever you install an operating system you are never guaranteed (except maybe by the hardware's manufacturer) if it will or won't work out of the box. Linux is way more out-of-the-box compatible with devices such as printers, webcams, and (IIRC) tablets than windows ever was. Sorry about your wireless card, but nobody ever said it would work right away.

3) Did you try Ubuntu Karmic Koala (9.10)?

Now the bright side of linux is that it tells you when something is wrong, it tells you even when nothing is wrong, it gives you all the details you need to figure out how to fix it, so many details that if you aren't equipped to understand them it worries you.

...

but for most users they don't know how to fix a computer, they really don't want to know, they don't even want to know the full details of what's gone wrong because they dobn't read error messages anyway, they're not going to spend an hour reading documentation to get their sound to work again. And they shouldn't have to.

Oh gosh... This isn't a problem at all. You're making a mountain out of a shoebox; creating a problem where there isn't one, if that makes sense to you. Linux error messages are much more human-readable (at least on Ubuntu with it's Apport system). Not only this, but it (Apport) gives you the ability to report the problem, tells you what will be in the report (optional) and since the code of whatever crashed is most likely Free, a fix is MUCH more likely than otherwise. Nobody ever said reading documentation was a "problem"; it should be obvious for some programs, right? Why aren't you mentioning this as a Windows or Mac problem as well?

Special pricing.

[palegray.net]

This is business as usual for governments and Microsoft. The government in question threatens to roll out an open source solution to a large number of machines, problems magically pop up early in the deployment, and Microsoft pitches their solution for next to nothing in upfront costs. Note that the ongoing costs of managing the deployment down the road are virtually never considered, and the taxpayers wind up getting screwed with a "solution" that eats up enormous amounts of money in overhead, future licensing fees, and security issues.

Re:Special pricing.

[value_added]

Well, we don't know whether the government was playing politics, or was honest in their intentions. Either way, it's fair to characterise Microsoft's moves as good business for them, but problematic for everyone else.

By problematic, I'd use the analogy of a loan shark giving you a special rate on a new load to get you past the missed interest payment you missed on your last unpaid loan. Sure it resolves the crisis, but the underlying problems and high costs remain.

And speaking of underlying problems and high costs, the following article is appearing on news.google.com.

Are Microsoft to blame for "hidden" malware costs

Re:Special pricing.

[palegray.net]

Of course it does. The difference is primarily that you don't get yourself locked into a single platform for years to come that winds up costing a small fortune in licensing fees, and your overhead for managing the systems is lower over that period as well. I've worked on both sides of this equation for over a decade.

Free

[p0rnographer]

In Soviet Russia, free costs money!

Re:Free

[Anonymous Coward]

In Soviet Russia, joke misses you!

Donations?

[Tablizer]

It almost smells like sabotage. I imagine MS wouldn't directly do it, but instead pay people to "keep an eye on the project" with a lot of wink-wink. I wonder if there's not a way to donate to the cause?

Costs

[Idiomatick]

"Funds for the project have been cut back..."
FOSS should seriously be cheaper to roll out than XP. Windows would have to reduce the price to near nothing... Does this say something sad about the usability of FOSS?

Re:Costs

[Idiomatick]

Agreed. My point was that the roll out costs in FOSS should be similar unless we are deficient somewhere. Working on that would be a good thing.

BTW, whoever modded me troll. It was a question, Sorry for wanting to improve FOSS, way to take criticism jackass.

Low'ing price in face of competition not a "trick"

[harlows_monkeys]

Moody says:

Finally, Microsoft has been up to its old tricks of offering special deals for its software

How is that a "trick"? Isn't that what competition is supposed to do--cause vendors to lower price?

We need free books first

[CrazyJim1]

I'm currently working on a video game project I can finish in a couple months that may make me some money so I can support myself and do other more ambitious projects. The #1 project I feel that needs to be done is the freeing up of textbooks in education. If someone doesn't offer a free textbook that is important, we should have a community that rewrites it without plagurizing, and then provide it free of charge. The Internet should be a global library. The old problem with distribution was printing, but that problem is solved. Publishers like newspapers have less importance in this society. The new problem is compensating people who provide free information, but this problem is less of a problem than restricting their information from eager minds.

My theory is that computers can do books better than books do books. We can have multimedia experiences yes, but we're so new at knowing how they help people learn, we don't need to consider them at first. We need to do books, and link a course together by the books people need to tackle to get through them. We can have videos that train people like lectures. We can have LOTS of redudandant passive learning eventually. We can even have live tutors through live chat and email. There is a definite revolution in education looming at the horizon, and I hope that I'm not the only one who sees it because I'm horrendous at being able to accomplish big projects on my own, with no funding.

I'll Take Overhead for 600 Alex

[TheStonepedo]

Trebek: This state failed to consider the cost of changing software and training users.
Yakov Smirnoff: What is free market Russia?

Get the hackers involved

[iamhigh]

Offer free use of the bandwidth from 5pm to 7am (or whatever off hours are over there) in exchange for a usable school system. I guess if they must have a bunch of shady sites and scammers, might as well get some education out of it.

In Soviet Russia, spam funds school!

Re:Low'ing price in face of competition not a "tri

[symbolset]

Let's remember the original cause of this Linux migration, shall we?

Re:Where can I send disks?

[mk_is_here]

You're trying to offer DDOS (Disk Delivery Overseas Service) to Russia?

i see a pattern...

[cies]

i get the feeling its not just microsoft being "clever" in always offering highly discounted versions as a last resort to prevent a free software takeover. it is also governments who cleverly threat to switch to free software (back up by some actual action), on which microsoft drastically cuts price.

i think the same about china for instance. they wanted to put the whole government and education system on their red flag linux. microsoft now gives them windows+office for a couple of euros (or even less i forgot) per machine.

so i suspect free software is used as a threat in order to make microsoft cut its prices. is that a problem? i think it contributes to free software's growth in the end -- but it is surely not as beneficent as the free software actually being used to run on computers.

Re:Special price

[kiwimate]

How else can you beat free software?

By ignoring costs for retraining on the new OS, retraining on the new applications, headache costs when the specialized educational/academic/back office software doesn't run on Linux, and so forth?

Solaris time!

[Akir]

If the problem with deploying Linux is not having enough trained professionals, why not go with Solaris? OpenSolaris is free, and Sun offers training for it. Don't know if they have russian solaris training, though. Or they could go through multiple other training sources that are available for Linux. No matter how you put it, paying for windows, no matter how low your discount is, doesn't make sense. For chrissakes - if everyone in Russia were running Linux, wouldn't that get rid of the training problems?

Re:Special price

[Chuq]

I've noticed costs for retraining somehow are never an issue when changing from eg., MS Office 2003 to 2007, or XP to Win7, but are showstoppers when open source software is involved.

Re:Microsoft's competitive behavior

[mysidia]

Not really.. it's not robust competition from MS. It's a special temporary deal to try to dissuade them from going to free sw.

Once they're using MS sw, they'll be locked in pretty quickly and can't switch, the price will shoot right back up immediately.

Actually I suspect things are going very well.

[seeker_1us]

Many of us were suspicious from the start that the Russian government was never serious about using FOSS. Rather, it was just a ploy to get MS to drop their prices. Now that MS will drop prices, FOSS is becoming "too expensive" with the trite old arguments about retraining blah blah blah. Government saves face, gets the price on MS software they wanted, and Bill/Ballmer keep their monopoly. Everyone wins, except, of course, the people who use the computers.

Re:Actually I suspect things are going very well.

[petrus4]

Everyone wins, except, of course, the people who use the computers.

No, computer users win, too.

I've just recently largely gone back to XP from a combination of using Arch Linux, and FreeBSD since May. Every time I try and use Linux long term, I inevitably end up going back to Windows, purely due to the amount of sheer misery it causes me. Why?

a) The "community." This is the single biggest issue. As a group, Linux users are among the most toxic, hateful, myopic, delusional, generally vile human beings on the face of the planet. Stallman's cult, and the people defending it, gets really old after a while. The persistent, ongoing hatred of Microsoft is also as pathetic as it is toxic, especially when it mostly consists of arguments which were relevant in 1999, but really aren't now at all.

The icing on the cake here, is the scenario where the FSF's boosters refuse to accept the fact that the only basis for their belief system is pure, raw Stallmanite mind control. The FSF's perspective isn't based on anything logical, or anything that the neurotypical population remotely cares about.

b) Stability. I bet you'd never expect the time to come when a Microsoft OS could claim to be better than Linux in this department, did you? The time has come. PulseAudio (as but one example) is a disaster, and I also had other programs (such as Xine) crashing under Linux when they didn't under FreeBSD.

c) The need to endlessly screw around with things in order to get them to work. This isn't exactly the same as the stability argument above, but it's close. I realised a couple of days ago, that with Linux or FreeBSD, there's an instinctive expectation with me, for something to crash once or twice, and for me to have to tweak it somehow, before it will work without a problem. In Windows, that is never the case. Everything just works.

Those are the three areas where Linux needs fixing. The cult, the lack of stability, and the need for gratuitous over-configuration. Of the three, the cult is the only one which I fear actually isn't fixable at all.

Free Software For The Windows OS

[westlake]

Last year, we discussed here a Russian plan to install free software in all its schools. Seems things aren't going so well. Funds for the project have been cut back, some of the free software discs already sent out were faulty

There is more to FOSS than Linux.

One of the great strengths of the Windows platform is that it has always been licence-agnostic.

The system never frets or complains when you try to install an app that doesn't meet Microsoft's standards of political correctness.

The Linux distro can make you jump through a hoop or two or three before you get to that closed source app or binary driver.

Windows does like to see a signature.

Which makes perfect sense when you realize that there are thousands of independent Windows "repositories" with names like Download.com.

OLPC ran into trouble because of its "all or nothing" attidude.

The education minister was expected to buy into its bundle of hardware, software, and constructivist philosophy of education without any inconvenient doubts or questions.

When the minister took his business elsewhere there was suddenly room in OLPC for XP and MS Office.

The moral of the story being that it isn't always wise to try to take all the apple in one bite.

You can successfully introduce FOSS into the Russian classroom without trying to replace the whole of the existing Windows infrastructure at the same time.

The competition might even force you to look more closely at the quality of your open source product.

Free Windows SW is cheap marketing.

[FrankHS]

Microsoft gives the schools free software and Russian students learn to use it. They get the Microsoft propaganda (Lower TCO, innovative, how easy is is to do ... etc). In a few years these students are the experts and will be working in government, industry and where ever. When they are asked how to solve a problem they will usually recommend Microsoft because that is what they know. Now had they been trained on OSS they would recommend that. This is a quite a bargain for Microsoft, even if they give the schools free software forever. If it works for them a large part of Russia will be using and paying for Microsoft software, just like here.

Re:Free Windows SW is cheap marketing.

[ledow]

In theory, you may think you're right.

In practice - by the time these kids get into management, it's unlikely that anything will even be similar. I grew up on BBC Micros, BBC BASIC and a CP/M word processor in school - and I'm only 30. The entire face of computing changes on a regular basis (e.g. the whole Internet thing becoming popular).

Additionally, you go with whatever makes business sense. If MS makes business sense to you, go with it. If not, then don't. It's quite simple. There are no end of dirty tricks, especially in education, but to say that what the students grow up with determines the future is incorrect. What they grow up with determines what they *fix* in the future.

And I'm a complete OSS fanatic. But I work in education. There, the child matters. I use OSS servers and OSS web apps and OSS utilities and little OSS programs. But the bulk of the desktop in a school is proprietary educational software with *no* free equivalent at all because it takes decades of teaching experience to write a good program, it needs to be kept up to date with all the latest curricula (down to the letter) and not overwhelm the user with curricular choices. The only OSS desktop app I've ever got into schools in a big way was TuxPaint in primary schools (because over here it effectively replaces something called RM Colour Magic that's a heap of shit)... and only because it worked on Windows too.

Education is a *completely* different market and you can't understand it until you've worked in it. Backend? Nobody cares. Whether the desktops actually run Windows / Office, nobody cares. But if something they want to pay £5000 for a site licence for can't run (because it saves the teacher 30 mins a day in the course of their job), that's a dead system to them. Percentage of software that is *required* for my current school to operate for this term, which can run under WINE? About 5%, not including Office (which can be replaced with an equivalent).