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A Public Funded "Microsoft Shop?"
An anonymous reader writes "I work at a public hospital in the computer / technical department and (amongst others) was recently outraged by an email that was sent around our department: '(XXXX) District Health Board — Information Services is strategically a Microsoft shop and when talking to staff / customers we are to support this strategy. I no longer want to see comments promoting other Operating Systems.' We have also been told to remove Firefox found on anyone's computer unless they have specific authorisation from management to have it installed under special circumstances. Now, I could somewhat understand this if I was working in a company that sold and promoted the use of Microsoft software for financial gain, but I work in the publicly / government funded health system. Several of the IT big-wigs at the DHB are seemingly blindly pro-Microsoft and seem all too quick to shrug off other, perhaps more efficient alternatives. As a taxpayer, I want nothing more than to see our health systems improve and run more efficiently. I am not foolish enough to say all our problems would be solved overnight by changing away from Microsoft's infrastructure, but I am convinced that if we took less than half the money we spend on licensing Microsoft's software alone and invested that in training users for an open source system, we would be far better off in the long run. I would very much like to hear Slashdot's ideas / opinions on this 'Strategic Direction' and the silencing of our technical opinions."
It seems to me that all you're really looking for here on ./ is validation of your own opinion.
This is the sole purpose of "Ask Slashdot".
As an IT Director (who came up through a 17 year career as an IT support person), I'm increasingly frustrated by IT admins who just don't see the big picture.
Using the Firefox example:
YES, it is absolutely true that Firefox is superior to IE on a user-by-user basis, in 90% of the cases.
YES, most exploits are written to take advantage of IE (or, rather, its various bloat that accumulates).
NO, the corporate management tools for Firefox are in no way comparable to what is commercially available to IE.
Without question, a *current* version of IE which is *properly patched* is superior (security-wise) to a 6 month old, unpatched version of Firefox.
I'm able to control my IE deployments down to a microscopic level, all from a single scree (and tied in to many of my other deployed applications). I'm not able to do that with Firefox. I'll gut it out and take my chances with the IE that I can control (including to blackhole communications at a moments notice if there's a problem), rather than Firefox which I cannot.
The first 8 years of my life were spend as a CAD systems admin (Unix systems). I run Squid. I love open source. But don't even begin to tell me that because you're looking at "what browser is superior for Joe's computer" that you can plan a corporate infrastructure.
Are you saying that this linux can run on a computer without windows underneath it, at all ? As in, without a boot disk, without any drivers, and without any services ? That sounds preposterous to me. If it were true (and I doubt it), then companies would be selling computers without a windows. This clearly is not happening, so there must be some error in your calculations. I hope you realise that windows is more than just Office ? Its a whole system that runs the computer from start to finish, and that is a very difficult thing to acheive. A lot of people dont realise this. Microsoft just spent $9 billion and many years to create Vista, so it does not sound reasonable that some new alternative could just snap into existence overnight like that. It would take billions of dollars and a massive effort to achieve. IBM tried, and spent a huge amount of money developing OS/2 but could never keep up with Windows. Apple tried to create their own system for years, but finally gave up recently and moved to Intel and Microsoft. Its just not possible that a freeware like the Linux could be extended to the point where it runs the entire computer fron start to finish, without using some of the more critical parts of windows. Not possible. I think you need to re-examine your assumptions.
It's entirely possible that your hospital signed a deal with Microsoft...by exclusively using their products, they would get a discount.
It certainly wouldn't be the first time...
Which for a hospital often can directly impact health care. I see this all the time working for a hospital. The IT department doesn't know anything but Windows, doesn't want to support anything but Windows, and summarily declares anything but Windows 'not their problem'. The trouble is that patient care is often determined by the tools that do the job. We'll use Radiology as an example as they have been computerized due to the nature of their work for longer than most other departments in the hospital. Back in the day (10 years ago or more), most radiology was all Macintosh. Macs were built to do graphics and had networking abilities built in. It made sense that they would be used by many companies doing radiology apps and devices for use in hospitals. However, the hospital I worked at IT's department doesn't do Mac. Therefore, Radiology got no IT support. At that time, about 25% of the departments and clinics at the hospital were Macintosh. They all got no IT support simply because the people the IT department decided they'd rather support what they knew rather than what was required for their job. From talking to the networking guys, the situation was the same a few years earlier when the hospital was 50% Mac. Unfortunately, nobody gets fired for buying Microsoft. Today, there are many Radiology apps are on either linux or the Mac. IT still ignores that they exist or that patient care depends on those apps running and often talking to the rest of the hospital.
Of course, what this means is that the Radiology department just had to go and hire their own IT department. The hospital IT department keeps trying to take over but is never willing to actually do the work that is needed to run things.
"As a taxpayer, I want nothing more than to see our health systems improve and run more efficiently. I am not foolish enough to say all our problems would be solved overnight by changing away from Microsoft's infrastructure, but I am convinced that if we took less than half the money we spend on licensing Microsoft's software alone and invested that in training users for an open source system, we would be far better off in the long run."
Sure. Take your decision right to your boss, just like that. And he'll say, "Exactly how did you arrive at your estimate of 'less than half', what's your measuring criteria for 'far better off', how long is 'the long run', and what training makes this magically appear?"
At that point you'll probably stammer something like, "Open source good - Microsoft bad! Nerd SMASH!" and then your boss gets to push the button that opens the trap door beneath you.
There's a reason for professional support services in the Linux sector. That can buy you back-porting, bug fixes, a whole host of other services that allow an organization to standardize on a single linux distribution for years. No sane company using Linux to their benefit is using "the flavor of the month". They weigh their needs, their budget, the pros and cons of each distribution that meets their criteria, pick a version and test rigorously. Then you don't fuck with it or upgrade for a few years.
Linux can only be successful in an organization that is open to change and this is very much culture dependent. Your example of tools that are put together hodge-podge that nobody knows about happens plenty in Windows also. The most egregious example of this is managers who think they can write VB applications in Microsoft Office. They can bastardize code and make something work on their computer, but the code is often so poorly written that it won't work across MS Office versions and crashes on the next upgrade.
Bad practices aren't limited to any one operating system.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
State procurement laws don't prescribe the degree of openness or standardization within the government. They establish rules to ensure that procurements are handled appropriately. Its very common for technical requirements to specify that an application work with Windows, Internet Explorer, Oracle, .Net, Tomcat Java Server, etc.
I pushed to get Firefox tested within the large organization that I work in. It was an abject failure. While Firefox is free to download, Mozilla doesn't care about enterprise IT shops and makes it impossible to support the browser in a cost-effective manner. We support hundreds of applications and dozens of business critical applications with browser interfaces. We need to have a robust testing process before we can upgrade code, and Firefox makes that really difficult. Browser add-ons routinely break, it's difficult to manage user profile settings, and if you disable auto-updates you need to manually package patches for distribution.
IE is hardly perfect, but we can test and distribute patches easily, use group policy to configure browser settings to provide a good user experience and had fewer complaints about add-ons with 50,000 users than we did with 300 Firefox pilot users.
At the end of the day, we have 4 folks managing desktops for 50,000 people, and they have more compelling things to do than futz around with Firefox. A small government agency with a few hundred staff with have 2 IT folks, a supervisor and maybe a couple of interns. For them, the Microsoft "stack" is unfortunately the only viable way to deliver the IT services that they need.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK