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Battle For Open Standards In Dutch Public Education
In his first accepted submission, pjstevns writes "The heat is on! With the rising use of online systems for school administration the battle for open and accessible solutions is here, now. Parents are forced to buy 'proper' operating systems from your favorite Redmond based supplier — just to be able to access their children's grades, or participate in classes. A petition addressed at parliament for proper implementation of the open-standards guidelines put forward by the Dutch government itself is buzzing around the Netherlands. Comply or Explain!"
It seems like a major supplier of education software in the Netherlands has written essential software in Silverlight that all students must use, claiming "...Magister is truly multiplatform because Silverlight is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux," despite it more or less being non-functional with Moonlight.
MS is now #3 (soon to be #4 after google). Won't someone please think of the poor underdog?
So much about .Net cross-platform.
At least with Java you have to go out of your way to create platform dependency (like hard-coding path separator as "\", and not querying it from the System object), or use 3rd party non-portable libraries with JNI bindings.
Hell, they would have faired better even if they just used some Adobe Air based solution.
Or just use ASP.Net and no Silverlight. They just choose the worst possible solution for a public facing portal.
Money circulates under the table, as always.
But it never hurts to let the people over "there" (wherever there is) know that people over here (wherever here is) are aware of their dependence on things that are fundamentally not dependable.
(Are you under the power of gold^H^H^H^H power?)
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
I find it wonderful that people are striving for what must seem like 'little' freedoms. I've recently come around to the idea that these small cracks become the gaping, festering ulcers of our society when left unchecked. OS
For making such a stupid decision to move away from Open Standards. If you want stuff to work on the Internet use open standards, simple as that.
Why should users have to go to a desktop computer with a specific OS in order to utilise the system? Maybe it should be made fit for purpose for the modern age.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
It will probably be difficult to act against a private company that chooses to support only the biggest player in their commercial software offering, but I think it is good that they also argue against the heavily subsidized Microsoft software in the educational market.
Giving away software to students only to make them buy it at full price later when they work in a company is like handing out crack in the schoolyard to make the kids addicted to it, then offering it to them at full price.
Besides on the desktop most open source GUI applications are buggy as hell. X.org crashes routinely on me.
Windows must be incredibly free then, since it also crashes routinely on me. Hell following your reasoning a bit further I should even have been paid for using Vista
This software only needs to run on one platform, the server. I didn't read TFA but TFS says "just to be able to access their childrens' grades" which should be implementable with a static page. I'm reading slashdot with Firefox on NetBSD, here can you imagine how much effort they must have put in to support that incredible combo? I don't even enable javascript!
They should invent a language which all platforms can understand.
We could call it HTML or something like that, but that's static, so we might need to invent something that makes it dynamic and still cross-platform-readable, like say php, asp.net, jsp,js...
If your X.org is crashing on you then you're holding it wrong.
And school application can and should be written as web, not desktop applications that work withing the browser. That's what other european countries do and it works out quite well for them.
I work for a major Linux distro in the education field. Around the world. Most decision-makers are actively bribed by Microsoft.
They shower Windows and Office licenses on schools and entire countries in exchange for brains.
Microsoft know what they are doing : *This*, the education market, is their bread and butter. They are extremely aggressive about that, just mention "education" to a Microsoft executive and observe his reaction.
pX
Windows applications crashes routinely on me too.
It could be that I throw run four CAD suites, MS Office, OperOffice and a slew of database clients simultaneously together with a bunch of other apps - I rarely go below 3GB RAM used - and I can throw blame around on Intel, AMD and a dozen different software vendors whatnot for writing bad (WHQL) drivers and buggy apps, but that is not going to help me. It is 2011 and I get daily crashes and a BSOD a month.
And no, the problem does not lie anywhere other than in softwarespace. It has been like this for years, over several computers and Windows versions.
Please hit them with a clue-bat at info@schoolmaster.nl. This page on their website requires silverlight as well: http://www.schoolmaster.nl/Foldermateriaal/Magisterboek/tabid/615/language/nl-NL/Default.aspx If you try installing the plug ins, you'll be redirected to the moonlight plugin. Which won't install because it is "not compatible with firefox 6". So in other words, it won't work on Linux. I wonder why am I not in the least bit surprised?
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
A wise post, I will now stay on the beaten path, do as I am told by my betters and take it up the arse like you have been doing all your life.
Sheep.
Please mark me as a foe, I can't mark you because there is no option for mindless twit.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Why do you focus on Linux? There's this other OS called Mac OSX, which happens to be used by many students who are also having trouble with this. Not to mention the government *itself* decided open standards should be preferred over propietary ones. And all this guy does it point out the hypocricy of that and that there is actually a substantial non-Windows userbase here that is being affected.
I run Linux, I expect no one to care about that and I'm fine with that, but in this case they are just screwing over *every* non-Windows user while there are plenty of alternative ways to present this sort of stuff while not depending on Silverlight. Hell, even Flash would be better (since that at least works, unlike Moonlight, which has never been of any use to me - not a single Silverlight applet I've ever tried actually worked with that..)
Whoever modded this "insightful" is an idiot. Commentor freely admits he has not read TFA. The software is not just a dumb html page. Its a bit more complicated.
http://www.schoolmaster.nl/Portals/0/Schoolmaster%202007/Screenshots/Magister/magister_breedbeeld_big.jpg
The problem here is as usual open source zealots assume that because they don't like microsoft nobody should like them or their technologies. Even if a company freely chose to use microsoft technology they must be bashed and called evil for doing so.
Why not just use C++/Qt and recompile for each platform? Seriously, unless you are being naughty and using platform specific code, Qt is platform agnostic. All that would be required is a simple recompile and you could have a Windows, Linux and Mac OSX (OSX seems to be overlooked here). An additional bonus that you get a binary out which seems to be there preference as bytecode is easier to reverse engineer.
However, if they go with something else, I insist they go with .Net compiled as MSIL or Java as they are not architecture specific (and way easier to reverse engineer!) :D
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
An excellent point of course. I didn't mention OS X because the blog seemed more focused on open source and the ideology of openness, which is traditionally more of a Linux focus than OS X, but you're still right.
Slashdot is fun. It reports news which basically doesn't exist. This is just some guy who is on an anti-Microsoft bender and wants to somehow make his ideology meaningful in a world which doesn't really give a shit (if the low Linux uptake has anything to go by).
This is not about Linux. It's about whether or not it is okay for public education institutions (and public institutions in general) to force the public to use a specific commercial product if they wish to partake. Given that there are various alternatives to said commercial product, and given that the government has adopted a policy of using open standards where they exist, I think forcing people to use a proprietary system is not okay. The fact that this system is also more expensive than many of the alternatives makes it even more odious.
His rant is way too emotional for something that the politicians and most parents won't even understand.
The story here is really simple: will we force everybody to pay for the most expensive option, or will we use standards, so that people can choose what they use?
If people refuse to understand that, that's still no reason to take the worse option.
I mean, everyone uses Windows right?
Even if that were the case, it would be irrelevant: if standards were used, then _any_ operating system would be able to participate, including Windows. It's not as if, by going with open standards, you would lock out the users who can now use the system. And that's the whole point: to not lock people out.
But they also made the decision to make life more difficult for themselves by going against the grain and choosing to use something other than Windows (an OS pre-installed on virtually all computers you can buy, so having to buy it yourself is unnecessary).
Now you're blaming the victims. It is not them who are making things more difficult, it is the people who implement systems that will only work with specific other products, rather than going with standards that can be supported anywhere.
One could argue that some fights are worth fighting for, but if so... a small petition from a bunch of geeks with too much emotion and too little tact is likely to not do a damn thing.
You may well be right there, especially considering that the government _officially_ has a policy to use open standards and even to prefer open source software - yet, in many cases, has gone for a proprietary solution without even looking into the alternatives.
On the other hand, it was also a small bunch of geeks who discovered that the voting computers we used to use in the Netherlands weren't reliable, and they were tenacious enough to eventually get them all banned - even though the initial reaction was denial, marginalization, and misinformation. It is a good example of exactly what you're up against if you want to replace a vested commercial interest with the right thing, but it also shows that you _can_ win. But you have to raise awareness, first, and that is what those guys are doing.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
iPad is the best-selling PC in the world for over a year now, and there is no Silverlight there.
If you are making something that everybody needs to see, you use HTML5 or you fail. It is that simple. The whole fucking point of the Web is to be the one platform that is universal.
Tell the bozo developer to go to w3.org not microsoft.com. And tell him computing is centered in Silicon Valley, motherfucker, not Washington.
A quick google gives me the following numbers:
iPad: about 10 million units sold first half 2011. So make that 20-25 million for the year. The total tablet market may reach something like 30 million this year.
PC's: about 350 million units sold in 2010.
iPad and other tablets may get all the press, but generic PC units outsell tablets by more than 10 to 1, and those generic PCs again come >90% with Windows pre-installed. No idea what you've been smoking but your statement is clearly nonsensical. You can stop trolling now. If you have something the world in general has to see, Windows is still a pretty good bet.
Preference of open standards over closed standards is mandatory for a while now in the Netherlands. Unfortunately it's not enforced, creating real problems for real people. If the use of a government service is mandatory it should not be tied to a single platform.
Actually, municipals (gemeentes) try to find ways to stay with MS products. Most of the time only because that's what they are used to, and don't want to change. As a government employed IT worker, I've seen it first hand and saw how contact with other municipals where contacted to find out how they circumvented any possible non-MS solution. A good one apparently is 'our software suppliers don't interoperate well with Openoffice (for example) and thus we must stick with MS Office'.
Huge shame really...
But then, you did rush to the barriers with excuses aplenty and not too much evidence of an actual original thought.
FYI, the issue is that a public body has made a decision to disenfranchise a minority of its users by going with a Silverlight-based system. And here was the world + dog thinking that public bodies should not be doing that sort of thing.
Apparently 5-10% of the students have trouble with Silverlight, so 90-95% running Windows would be more accurate.
What always amazes me with this kind of high market share argument, which I heard many times over the years, is the blindness for the fact that there are platform independent open standards available that have 100% market share. Use them and *everyone* will be able to use your web interface. The market share argument is an argument for open standards. They can use Silverlight for a cooler version of the presentation if they like, but they should provide a fallback to something that works for everyone.
And politicians understand more than you seem to think. The open letter asks the government to act on their own policy to embrace open standards and open source (the software is used in public schools).
An ipad is alot of things, a PC it is not.
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
If the school system provided a terminal server for the 10% of desktop users that opt for Operating Systems which do not natively support "Silverlight" to access the school web sites this would be a non-issue. RDP clients are plentiful and work fine on nearly all platforms. Even iPads.
Ken
It's pretty much dead in Microsoft's eyes. Maybe they'll get it right when they have to redo it in a few years because silverlight doesn't exist anywhere.
Wow, I didn't realize that HTML5 was so universal it is supported by all browsers, on all platforms.
Ken
Apparently 5-10% of the students have trouble with Silverlight, so 90-95% running Windows would be more accurate.
That assumes nobody using Windows will have any trouble with Silverlight.
(+1, Disagree)
iPad is the best-selling PC in the world for over a year now, and there is no Silverlight there.
I'm a PC, and I object to being compared to an iPad.
(+1, Disagree)
Was to give Microsoft an excuse so they could proclaim that their systems followed standards and were cross-platform. Of course in reality, the standards are always only possible if you're using Windows, otherwise you get only partial functionality, which means it's not really a standard.
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.