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German Foreign Office Going Back To Windows
vbraga writes "The German government has confirmed that the German Foreign Office is to switch back to Windows desktop systems. The Foreign Office started migrating its servers to Linux in 2001 and since 2005 has also used open source software such as Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice on its desktop systems. The government's response to the SPD's question states that, although open source has demonstrated its worth, particularly on servers, the cost of adapting and extending it, for example in writing printer and scanner drivers, and of training, have proved greater than anticipated. The extent to which the potential savings trumpeted in 2007 have proved realizable has, according to the government, been limited – though it declines to give any actual figures. Users have, it claims, also complained of missing functionality, a lack of usability and poor interoperability."
I find it curious that Linux on the desktop should be so well accepted in some markets (especially Latin America) and resisted so vigorously in others. Anyway, this is sad news, whatever the reasons.
Let's blame the report rather than being introspective about real usability problem with Linux.
Switzerland and Spain are doing great with OSS in government. What makes linux a bad match for the German Foreign Office? Or what are they doing wrong?
It is worth noting in this context that there were a number of changes of government in Germany, implying that party politics might also have played a role. Between 1998 and 2005, the German government was a coalition of social democrats and greens (with a green foreign minister); between 2005 and 2009, the government was a coalition of christian democrats (conservatives) and social democrats (with a social democrat foreign minister); and since 2009, the government has been a coalition of christian democrats and liberals (with a liberal foreign minister). The "SPD" mentioned in the article is the social democrat party.
A comment from someone in the government shows that this isn't going down without a fight. The FO's answers to inquiries claimed driver costs were high. Officials say that something's wrong if writing drivers costs more than refitting the entire bureau with new Win/Office licenses.
Put identity in the browser.
It's hard not only for governments. A retail operation was trying to switch to Ubuntu boxes and one of the problems became Zebra LP 2824 thermal printer drivers, which are all for windows and none are for unix/linux. Of-course CUPS support these printers to an extent, but not completely and the worst part is printing in Cyrillic - it doesn't work. Barcodes do print and English prints though. Is this a show stopper for Linux on desktop? It well could be in this case.
You can't handle the truth.
Someone at the top of the ladder @ Microsoft must have seen where this was going.
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-10-06/microsoft-s-ballmer-to-invest-billions-in-cloud-data-centers.html
I am sure that with the money they spend in Windows licenses, they could have bought new compatible printers and scanners. Come on, most high grade, networked all-in-one printers and scanners are compatible with Linux.
While it's very likely that Microsoft-addicted users complained, I am absolutely certain that no resources were spent on "writing printer and scanner drivers", thus making the whole claim untrustworthy.
Someone has to be investigated for corruption -- IIRC, in Germany it actually something that matters.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Really?
I mean, I suppose I don't really know much about this, but did they really have the sort of volume where a rollback to Windows was cheaper than writing printer drivers, and writing printer drivers was cheaper than buying a printer with open drivers? Seriously, what doesn't CUPS support these days?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
what the number of security / virus issues was (or wasn't ) during the period of using Linux in the office ? I do tech support for a medium sized school district and we are constantly getting pretty sophisticated phishing emails to some of our staff. And some staff still fall for them or send out emails or try to reply ... Fortunately we are 70% Mac based so most of that just blows by.
The issue with teachers is that they regularly email parents and students who may have infected PCs and their email addresses are then harvested.
Its not the years, its the mileage
We still have some staff members using typewriters. I shit you not.
Never underestimate just how reluctant people are to change.
Especially when there is no incentive to do so.
And you want them to work harder to learn something that does the exact same thing except its cheaper for you.
And you expect them to get the same amount of work done different system.
And you cut their pay.
And their money isn't worth as much anymore.
And they could probably earn more as a bar tender.
Ways to make a change feasible.
Rule #1: If it doesn't make sense to the person doing the work to switch ie. no discernible benefit your screwed before you even started.
Rule #2: Build solitaire directly into clones of word and excel.
Rule #3: Build facebook games directly into all office apps.
Almost no need for comments here in Slashdot as the second half of the article "balances" the initial assertions.
Essentially, one group in a political party is against the use of F/OSS in favor of Microsoft and other BSA groups' products. They give arguments that do not contain any figures to support their claims. The article indicates this much but also asserts that the costs of creating various forms of support for hardware are CERTAINLY less than the costs of Windows and other software licenses. (You can almost certainly expect Microsoft to step in to offer discounted license costs to the German government to prove that's not true as they have in the past)
With all that said, it certainly does show there is still an uphill war going on where hardware support is concerned. Without question, the battles have mostly been won though the determination of developers, hackers and crackers where the results are an extensive pool of hardware supported under Linux. Trouble is, hardware development hasn't stopped and new ways to shut out access to Linux users have been added as it goes on. One that gets under my skin most recently is NVidia's Optimus technology that has made the use of the nvidia gpu impossible on my little alienware.
Until hardware makers are legally inhibited from doing so, this will go on for as long forever or until Windows becomes the next IBM or Novell. (Nobody believed IBM on the desktop could be killed off... nobody believed Novell on the server could be marginalzed either and they both happened. Why anyone thinks Microsoft Windows will still dominate in 5 years amazes me. They might, but they might not -- things are changing rapidly and there is still lots of government support and development of Linux around the world.)
FTA:
Henning Tillmann, a colleague of Oliver Kaczmarek, the SPD MP who raised the question, and a member of the SPD executive committee's web policy discussion group, told our associates at heise Open that the government's response was not satisfactory. "The reasons given for the return to Windows are implausible," says Tillmann, "We need the figures."
It sounds more like a change in IT leadership to me.
moi
The foreign office is run by Guido Westerwelle, leader of the FDP (so called "liberals") who are pretty known for having close ties to companies and the industry in general. To be more blunt: pay them enough money and they do what you want them to do. Just recently they halved the taxes on hotel bills - after receiving a noticeable amount of money from a company running lots of hotels (Mövenpick) for their election campaign a few months prior.
So it's safe to assume that some coffers with money changed owners in return for this step. They are corrupt (pretty much everyone knows this) and they use it where ever they can. So far they (mostly) managed to stay within the legal limits (which is not too hard considering that there are very few restrictions for politicians in Germany, so basically once elected you can do pretty much anything you like without too much fear of of any serious consequences).
The foreign office is in the hands of a party (FDP) that from its political standpoint would clearly favor proprietary software over open source. The open source initiative was started by the previous office holder, who came from the other end of the political spectrum (the German Green party) Whatever real problems there may or may not be, they almost certainly are not the reason for this switch.
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
We can do an instant poll of /. readers right here inline! Then it wouldn't be anecdotal. Errrr, well, maybe it would but it would be less anecdotal. Except for the self-selection and lack of double blind and randomly selected poll targets and...
Personally, I'm typing this on a linux system and have been using linux desktops more or less exclusively for oh, fifteen years, sixteen years, who can remember. Since the days that Slowaris replaced SunOS. I do run XP Pro safely in a nice little VM on the rare occasions I need a specific piece of Win-only software, where it can do no harm. Obviously Linux cannot possibly provide a functional desktop, and the fact that my Luddite wife is typing away on the other side of the room is some sort of atavistic exception or the result of spacetime distortion from another dimension.
One does wonder just what the German Foreign Office was doing that required them to "write printer and scanner drivers" or train people. I envision a training session just like this:
Hello, today I'll be your personal trainer, and we'll see if we can wean you away from Windows. Let's see -- login, check. Type your userid into this itty bitty box, then your password. That's p-a-s-s-w-o-r-d. Now, to write a word-processed document you have to click this icon and select this second icon. No, I know, there's no fourcolor box at the lower left. Yes, I mean the foot. I know, a foot isn't as pretty as the fourcolor square thingie, but click it anyway, there. Now that one, yes. Good job!
What? You don't know what to do? Look, see the funny little blinky thing? That's called a cursor. Now, press a key. Look! A letter appears on the screen! It is the same letter. If you want to write a document, say a strongly worded note urging Mubarak to step down, you press these keys in sequence to type a letter. I know, I know, you miss your Microsoft Word (tm). It came with Strongly Worded Letter templates and Open Office doesn't, but try to bear with me. Now, let's see if you can s-a-v-e and p-r-i-n-t. Yes, yes, yes, no, not that one, down one, oh, sorry did we forget to change the character set and language settings to German well here, oh look now you can read all of the commands except of course all of the icons are little pictures and you don't really need to. Goodness, it isn't printing!
Hans? Hans! Could you write a print driver for this printer? She wants to print. What's that? Did we actually plug the printer in to the system and select it from a menu? No, we tried inserting this CD that came with the printer and it wouldn't run, said something about needing Windows. Cups? No thank you, it is too early for a cups of beer, but cups of coffee would be nice. Systems administrators? Why certainly. All of our systems were set up by MCSEs, who (as everybody knows) have the best possible education in systems management and training that money can buy and earn fabulous salaries as a consequence. Hans? Well, he's our only linux trained admin -- we didn't want to have to fire all of our former staff -- and because none of these CDs work, he has to spend all of his time writing drivers for these cheap-ass Taiwanese printers we bought.
Now let's work on the Internet. We are going to s-u-r-f the w-e-b using a b-r-o-w-s-e-r. I know, I know, there is no little "e" on the menu bar, click on that reddish orange thing. It's supposed to be a "firefox". What? Yes, I know there is no such thing as a firefox. Y'know, it does look a bit more like a pearl dripping orange sherbet or a plucked out eyeball, now that you mention it. Look, try squinting a bit. See it? A firefox. Anyway, try clicking it. I know, you're used to clicking the "e" for "explorer" and this is quite different, but go ahead, give it a shot. There! See? Where are all of the ads? What happened to the viruses you used to get that would send Mubarak offers to
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
To be fair, that applies to most people in most areas of life; people like the things that they're used to, that they know how to use and don't have to spend ages thinking about.
Or are you saying that if I took your Linux machine away and gave you a Mac instead, you wouldn't find it annoying that not all the apps were the same and that things didn't quite work the way you wanted them to? I know I find it annoying when I switch between OS's and something I'm used to isn't there anymore.
Linux as a desktop doesn't do everything I want it to, so I still run Windows; as a server, on the other hand, it does everything I want it to for some tasks, so I use it and where it doesn't, I use something else that does.
Microsoft staff + vendors posting as AC in 3...2...1...
Just as people who work on Open Office or Ubuntu or Django or anything else that isn't produced by Microsoft will also post on Slashdot, sometimes logged in, sometimes as AC. What's the problem? You're implying that anyone saying something positive about MS or their software must be doing so because they have a financial interest. That isn't so. For example, if I had a choice between using MS Excel 2010 or Open Office, I would certainly choose Excel. If I have a choice between running Apache or IIS, I will certainly choose Apache (unless I need some particular integration with IIS by other software). Many of us here discuss things as they are, not because we have some absurd allegiance.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
We have scanners and printers running no problem in our office on Ubuntu. Why exactly does he mention having to program printer and scanner drivers?
Now I'm just throwing this out there, but it might be possible that there's more then one printer company that makes more than one type of printer so that there might exist in one of the foreign offices of the German government a printer of a make and model which isn't the exact same as yours?
In other words: They are able to do their jobs now with what they have and you want to "help" them continue doing their jobs by making them learn something new.
I made money modernizing offices, and the attitude you have shown is counter-productive.
The number one error that office managers seem to make is buying a PC with a word processor and a spreadsheet program and installing it on each employee's desk. After which they instruct the employee to learn how to use it, and quickly go to their superior and brag about how they modernized the office. The mistake being that no effort was made to understand why the employee was so productive, and giving the employee a general purpose tool to replace what they were accustomed to using. This results in the employee having to learn something new "to make someone else's job easier" and the employee "knowing" that the office manager is trying to make himself indispensable by introducing something into the workplace that only he understands.
In one of the offices that I "modernized" there was an employee that used a typewriter to keep up with the inventory. It worked flawless for him, and since the trucks arrived very early in the morning, he had all workday to do the tallies. He would white out the totals and add new truckloads to the bottom of the list, cross out the truckloads that were no longer at the warehouse, add up all the numbers, and put a new total at the bottom of the list. He would then make photocopies of his "master list" and send them to the other office workers. He did this every day for the past 15 years, and he was able to do all this quickly (much faster than I thought possible). I was able to "win him over" by creating a specialized spreadsheet application that allowed him to continue to work the way he was accustomed to, and he saw that the instantaneous totals made his job easier. The key was to make the software conform to the worker.
Today I see the reverse being done. Terminals that had forms that the data entry clerk could quickly fill in are being replaced with window machines running software that don't even come close to being the same thing. Worse I've seen terminals being replaced by windows machines running terminal emulators. This shows a lack of thought by IT. No wonder employees despise them. Of course IT people are accustomed to windows, so they don't see why the employees are so problematic...
I did this all in the 80's when personal computers in the office were new. I'd thought people would have it easier today.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...