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How Munich Abandoned Microsoft for Open Source
An anonymous reader writes "TechRepublic has the story behind Munich City Council's decision to ditch Microsoft Windows and Office in favor of open source software. The project leader talks about why the shift was primarily about freedom, in this case freeing itself from being tied into Microsoft's infrastructure and having control over the software it uses. He talks about how the council managed to keep such a large project on track, despite affecting 15,000 people and spanning nine years. He also warns against organizations justifying the shift to open source software on the grounds that it will save money, arguing this approach is always likely to fail."
A new set of verses is needed: In München steht ein Linuxhaus
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
The question is, how they managed to do this despite of Microsoft Economical Power. How they avoided bribery of the involved politicians?
-- --
He also warns against organizations justifying the shift to open source software on the grounds that it will save money, arguing this approach is always likely to fail.
Meh... maybe.
FLOSS changes the costs. You spend more in training, but save on material. If your organization already has significant training procedures to accommodate big processes (like, say, a government would have), you'll probably come out ahead on the deal. If you have an office of 50 people who were all hired already knowing Microsoft's products, you can expect significant retraining costs that might exceed what you'll save on licensing.
Of course, managers who are focused solely on the cost will decline any training investment, figuring that it's similar enough to older Microsoft offerings that there should be no problem. Then when the users complain that they don't know the software, they blame the software for the failure.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
The thing that blew me away is they had a much more advanced set of issues to deal with than a typical bureaucratic office would. The custom macros and apps isn't something that a normal company would be hung up on. That would imply to me that so long as your office can find equivalents of their core applications (whether it be accounting or graphics software), the rest shouldn't be so difficult to overcome. I've always rolled my eyes at the idea of a real-world migration for company of significant size.
Here's an interesting tidbit from the article about how Microsoft inflated the costs of their migration to put a negative spin on the project:
A team of just 25 people at Munich develop, roll out and provide final support for the Ubuntu-based LiMux client. A larger number of people look after the everyday administration of the city's PCs but far fewer than the 1,000 people cited in the Microsoft/HP report as implementing the LiMux project.
Another hidden benefit is even if your project doesn't look like it'll pan out, if you make it high-profile enough you know you can use it to leverage a better contract with Microsoft if you decide to stick with Windows.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
For that reason I used to send my course work as pdfs. I used Libre Office or Google Docs for editing and converted final documents to pdf format.
So MS Word couldn't change layout when document was opened by the teacher.
"He also warns against organizations justifying the shift to open source software on the grounds that it will save money, arguing this approach is always likely to fail."
so just to say FU MS?
Which is it? "Always" or "Likely"?
Pairing those two words together like that is always likely a mistake.
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
I suspect that everyone (except MS) are extremely happy to break the chains of monitoring licenses and making sure that their accounts are paid up etc.
If I were the CFO of a company I would love to answer the call from some MSDN "certified" bunch of losers call wondering where their renewal check is and I could then tell them that they can go to hell.
But now in these post Snowden times I would be extremely wary of any corporate data where a Microsoft OS has access to my data. How much state sponsored corporate espionage has been taking place with the cooperation of MS? None, Some, Tonnes?
Any foreign company competing with politically connected US corporations on billion dollar deals should take a long hard look at any US based OS and think, "Might the US government be grabbing my data in their National Interest?"
In some countries Cisco has been seeing huge drops in sales. I suspect that there is much more of this to come as it can be hard for a huge company to just throw their network gear out the window and replace it at the drop of a hat. But I also suspect that directives have been issued that all US gear is to be gone ASAP.
They will shit their pants when they see the open office suite completely messing the layout of the documents.
If it takes nearly a decade, they must be pretty constipated.
Tens of millions spent on new screens which provide less information than the old flippy-type info on upcoming and incoming trains/subways and they're down all the fucking time. ALL the time. Usually with the typical NT error message in a grey box on a blue screen. Or there's a dump and some module names.
They're German, they didn't vote for Obama, and they've had a universal healthcare system for decades longer than Obama has been alive.
Given past behaviour it seems a pretty objective fear. Same would apply to any project, proprietary or open source, that doesn't offer migration paths for data.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
The desire to save money is, however, subjective. Freedom is not "vague," however. If you use proprietary software, you're not the one in control.
Lol, the fact that you're still using ANY office suit tells us how out of touch you are. Word and Excel documents are dead...
I think you are thinking about the Exchange server filesystem api. for exchange server 2003 and performance reasons exchange would replace the file system io with a special customized for exchange version. A few competitors complained that this was unfair, i think the final verdict was if they wanted "fair" they where free to write their own drop in replacement for the filesystem i/o
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
That is my question... how does a large organization like a German city function without Exchange or being beholden to a SaaS for E-mail and other items? Some larger organizations (IBM) have their own infrastructure, but for a lot of things, Exchange is the only game in town once a place expands beyond what a single mail server can handle.
Is there a reputable F/OSS utility that is a drop-in replacement for Exchange (especially with dealing with multiple mail databases and e-Discovery rules) that has "earned its bones" in the enterprise? I've read about a few, but after a few months, they seem to drop off the planet, or get very poor reviews.
There were patches scattered throughout the Windows 2000 source code leak, all with comments along the lines of "Putting this in for the Office team". That was one of the big discussions around here back in the day when that story broke.
The GP is probably taking it to far saying they were doing it for deliberate competitive advantage -- all of the comments that I read sounded like standard bug-fixes -- but it's hard to dispute that Microsoft obviously has an advantage over Libre Office when trying to track down bugs in the O/S that cause problems with the office suite.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
"They will shit their pants when they see the microsoft office suite completely messing the layout of the documents."
-FTFY
Lol, oh teh noes! A company optimized its own software for..it's own software. Quick, call Brussels!
Given windows 8's bad interface, I'd say they were right.
The project leader talks about why the shift was primarily about freedom, ... He also warns against organizations justifying the shift to open source software on the grounds that it will save money, arguing this approach is always likely to fail.
I think that is the core difficulty in advancing the use of F/LOSS (in the US at least). We are so culturally indoctrinated to see money, and the single-minded pursuit of it, as the measure of success that it is institutionally difficult to grasp sacrificing money in the short run for freedom; regardless of the impact on our bottom line, society, or the larger economy in the long run. The American mindset believes freedom is good in theory, but fails to see that economic success is coupled to choosing freedom -- in a broader sense than the freedom to screw your putative customers -- over short-run revenue.
Wow, those are some seriously run-on sentences. Bite me, ... ummm, Sklansky and Malmuth? ... Case and Shiller? ... Black and Scholes? ... Ah, yes, I remember! Strunk and White! That's it. What was I talking about?
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Sure they are, there Johnny Future. You are truly "Guy who tells everyone how out of touch they are for 'still' using things that _everyone_ still uses."
Let me guess, those losers using PC's are so out of touch for still using them. Oh, and car drivers? Pfft, why I just saw a flying car prototype so you're totally a 1930's loser if you still drive cars maaaan!
Many years ago - maybe in 1995 or 1996 - I worked on a team that wrote a load balancing software. We did some in-depth performance measurements of a few web servers, which also included web servers running on Windows NT. We finally also wrote our own little test server. We concluded in our tests that the listen-queue length on NT could only be set to a certain maximum amount (maybe 5, or so) by anyone using the official socket API that was available. However, magically, Microsoft's own web server (IIS) was able to utilize a longer listen queue.
Clearly, Microsoft is not beyond using secret APIs to ensure a competitive advantage for their own software.
The comments here are about the difficulty, the expense, the problems with user acceptance, etc. All of those imply that this sort of change is somehow and optional thing that they can choose to do...or not. In actuality, however, this change is both mandatory and inevitable...and only a matter of time. Maybe next year, maybe in 5 years, or maybe in 10 years but every single enterprise will eventually be forced to make this switch as Microsoft evolves and changes ('implodes' is the word that comes to mind) as it tries to maintain growth and earnings while trying to continue selling the same thing to the same places that already have purchased more than they will ever need.
You mean MS Word messes up the layout of nice documents made by the LibreOffice standard ? Shouldn't you dump MS Word then ? Can you really work with a company that messes up standardized documents ? Are they idiots or what ? Too much rain in Redmond or something ?
Kerio Connect is pretty good.
The webmail interface is far Superior to Exchange web.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
I've only found a few with the same functionality as exchange, and i can say that they are not free. while they have "community" versions, to get full exchange functionality you end up having to pay licencing fees to access and use it, and in the end it is borderline cost effective vs exchange. (yes the licenses are cheaper but support and experienced techs aren't)
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Exchange may, to the end user, do what it does well, but i can tell you right now the Exchange 2010 server I just installed is likely to be the last one. What a fucking nightmare. I'm so tired of installing groupware that is nothing more than a badly stitched together bunch of spare parts where every solution to a problem seems to involve uninstalling and reinstalling IIS, and praying to the Web Server Gods that your partially malfunctioning mail server doesn't completely crap out. Everything about Exchange is fucking awful, and if there are any Redmond engineers or programmers reading this, all I can say to you is that I hope you die of awful awful diseases.
It's fucking ludicrous how bad Exchange is, how resource hungry it can be, and how simple fucking things like setting up a fucking mailing list or putting in some decent anti-spam tech (which doesn't amount to a rolled up version of SpamAssassin with some proprietary web pages and costs a bazillion dollars a seat) turns into a fucking nightmare. Fuck I hate Exchange. Hate it... hate it... hate it... hate it.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
VMware Zimbra
Oh, so we should all just throw our hands up and give up? Because the establishment doesn't have room for us?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I wish I had mod points. :-)
Of course not. I certainly didn't mean it that way.
The cloud is useful for two things and two things only:
1. Additional offsite backup.
2. Scalable processing.
Office 365 can fuck right off.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
In my town we had a Linux "advocate" that insisted we should ditch MS and Apple for Linux to save "millions per year" in our local school district (our entire IT budget was less than $3M/year) - he felt that by proving Linux ran on 10 year old hardware in his basement, that meant we could use 10 year old hardware in the classroom...
His argument found no traction with anyone, he felt (among other things) that there was no need for central management of 1,500 desktops & laptops, that our robust networking infrastructure could be replaced by unmanaged switches, and our seven campus WiFi network could be served with an infinite number of $40 routers flashed with WRT, etc.
Ken
If you're scared about the correct layout of your documents, why don't you try out some test documents first, or push your own documents through the officeshots.org round-trip test suite? And be sure to complain if something doesn't render your correct ODF document properly.
N.B. I have seen in the past that not all test engines are on-line all the time.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
You can still use Windows 7 for a long time.
for example:
http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/2/2898/1.html
Maybe next year, maybe in 5 years, or maybe in 10 years but every single enterprise will eventually be forced to make this switch as Microsoft evolves and changes ('implodes' is the word that comes to mind) as it tries to maintain growth and earnings...
Microsoft is doing extraordinarily well in the enterprise market and talk of an implosion is nonsense.
Commercial Licensing revenue was $9.594 billion, with a gross margin of $8.801 billion. This is growth of 7 percent and 8 percent, respectively. SharePoint, Exchange, and Lync all achieved double digits growth, and multi-year licensing revenue was up 8 percent.
Commercial Other revenue was $1.603 billion and had a gross margin of $0.275 billion, growing by 28 percent and 161 percent, respectively. Cloud revenue was up by 103 percent, with both Office 365 seats and Azure customs both increasing by triple digits. Two thirds of Dynamics CRM customers are now opting for cloud deployments.
Windows Division notional revenue is up 4 percent at $4.581 billion, but operating income is down 20 percent at $2.242 billion. This shows just how significant the impact of the decline of the PC market is, as well Microsoft's continued failure to capture any significant share of the tablet market.
Server and Tools revenue was up 11 percent to $5.052 billion, and operating income was up 17 percent to $2.026 billion. In contrast to the Windows Division results, this shows the much greater resilience of the purely enterprise-focused offerings.
Microsoft posts record Q1 revenue, increased operating income: Windows OEM revenue sharply down, but enterprise sales buoyant.
I get the frustration but if you have ever designed an API which can be used by thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of developers with different level of competence, you would think very carefully about this number. While I am not a fan of Microsoft (I do not own a single computer running a Microsoft OS and I have quite a few computers) , I feel confident saying that the quality of developers building their IIS core was certainly way better than an average developer found in the wild. I can easily think of another criticism if they did allow higher numbers - that they do not know how to design public APIs for use by typical developers.
I put it as a requirement that students submit in pdf.
I don't want to spend time trying to figure out what version of whatever they used to make it.
And the students can use whatever they want: word, libre office, latex, notepad, whatever.
That or use Classic Shell to give Windows 8 the important parts of Windows 7's interface.
Open source is not about saving money, is about having control, knowing what you run, modify it if you need, being the actual owner of your files and devices. Besides that, reality made their worst vague subjective fears into an objective nightmare.
I know. It's like my company over over 2000 users isn't going through and migrating to Exchange 2010 and Office 2010. It's not like we had constant problems with receiving emails with winmail.dat files until we upgraded from Thunderbird to Outlook. It's not like our customers and vendors are constantly sending us .docx files.
Hell the entire sector my company is involved with must be ass backwards.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
Tell us how you REALLY feel about Exchange. We can take it.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
Sucks for you, but as an end user paying for Exchange, it's most certainly worth it. Exchange ain't going anywhere anytime soon.
I don't respond to AC's.
For that reason I used to send my course work as pdfs. I used Libre Office or Google Docs for editing and converted final documents to pdf format.
So MS Word couldn't change layout when document was opened by the teacher.
This whole "Nothing else formats like Genuine Microsoft" thing is pure garbage.
I have never depended on a word processor to maintain constant pixel-by-pixel formatting. That's not what they're for. The only reason that Word documents don't routinely re-arrange themselves (the way they used to) every time you transport a document to a machine with a different printer/set of fonts is because virtually all word processing today is done with a standard set of scalable fonts. Word itself, like many other GUI apps that handle formatted text delegates a lot of the raw typesetting to the video card and the selected printer driver. When most fonts were hardware fonts, that meant some serious re-arranging was commonplace.
If you want precise placement of text, don't use a word processor, use a page layout program. And create a PDF.
And if you want basic formatting to be preserved but pixel-precise isn't important, don't use a word processor like it's a typewriter and jam in manual spaces and carriage returns by dumb brute force, use styles. No, it won't be as immutable as PDF, but at least what re-arranging does happen won't look like crap.
Hope someone lost their job over that ...
No matter what technical solution you end up with, if it takes you nine years to switch to a new platform, you can be pretty damn certain where you ended up isn't where you want to be or should be.
Yeah. Whoever tied them into a Microsoft contract that took nine years to escape from should be fired, pilloried, drawn and quartered, staked out on a fire ant hill, etc.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
Dear Employees,
We will be switching from Windows 7 to Windows 8. Whining about this change will not be tolerated. You must learn how to use the new system. Period. That is all there is to it. No complaining allowed.
Sincerely,
The person who can fire you
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
This is one of the major rollouts of Kubuntu and it's lovely they are working with us Kubuntu developers. We have a bug squashing party in the offices of the company incharge of this at the weekend which is a great way to work together.
Dear Employees, We will be sticking with Windows XP and IE 6. Whining about this change will not be tolerated. You must learn how to tolerate this ancient system. Period. That is all there is to it. No complaining allowed. Sincerely, The person who can fire you
This space intentionally left blank
I cannot speak to the specific issue you mention for at least three reasons
1) i'm not authorized to talk about it
2) I am not technically familiar with those parts of those products
3) I wasn't at MS yet back in 95/96
That said, what I can tell you _now_ is that product engineering groups spend effort on complying with previous court rulings that limit our usage of APIs that aren't publicly disclosed. The specifics depend on the products and product versions in question.
As far as how my product (Visual Studio LightSwitch) is impacted directly; as part of our release process we run some tooling that makes sure our code isn't calling APIs its not supposed to be calling.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Sometimes it helps to wonder for a moment, if you really need Exchange functionality, or if this is just a) overkill and b) forcing the organisation in a direction you didn't intend anyway.
Has it already been 9 years?
I wonder how the city of Largo Florida is doing these days?
If you go to a library in Munich there are good chances that you will find a CD on the counter. It's properly branded to the colors of the city and labeled "Linux für München". Ubuntu 12.04 Ihr Open Source Betriebssytsem (Your open source OS). It comes with a leaflet explaining the why open source is an alternative (open code, security, working on old computers, free) and why the city bets on open source (the LiMux project). Here's a picture: http://bit.ly/HXTODz
I find it very intelligent from the city to promote free tools to empower its citizens. An example to follow.
PS: I took the CD because I wanted to post this somewhere for people to know how far Munich has gone with open source. Thanks to /. and TechRepublic for giving me teh perfect opportunity.
Why is it a pile of shit, then?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
As someone who was never taught to use a word processor properly, I used to do the former. It would fuck up even between different versions MS Office.
I started doing the latter and it still fucks up between different versions of MS Office.
I will admit that it fucks up slightly less than it does to/from OO.org, but not by much.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Word itself, like many other GUI apps that handle formatted text delegates a lot of the raw typesetting to the video card and the selected printer driver.
It's amusing that you speak about it with such conviction yet it's all a fantasy, no less. Man, where did you get this "insight" from? Lest anyone be confused about it: fuck no .
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Oooh look at him, in his skinny jeans and his t-shirt with an 80's band that nobody had heard of even back then.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
This was a planned process and it took time for a reason. They did this slowly but surely. That's the only way to do it without blowing your budget many times over. I hope you recall that big software rewrites almost universally fail. This is a big infrastructure rewrite, it'd fail too if it were done in a "let's just rip it all at once" fashion. It's the same reason you need to be wary of many a company that grows too fast - usually it's internals can't keep up, and it'll eventually fail. Many companies failed just for not artificially limiting their growth. Southwest Airlines is a shining example that sometimes just artificially clipping your growth at 8% annually is a good thing to do :)
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
When you do this thing called "having a job" it often involves both of them.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Mentioned it once. Think I got away with it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Microsoft didn't feel a need to issue such a "security" patch for desktop Windows 8, so why would it issue such a patch for desktop Windows 8.1?
I've played a little with GOsa and its non-Munich fork FusionDirectory over the years which I believe is a major part of the infrastructure of this project. GOsa is the graphical front-end of the LDAP directory and extra RPC glue. Supported services are many, though personally I've used it to manage Samba, Cyrus IMAP, Postfix, SOGo (groupware), DNS, DHCP, rsyslog, Squid, OS installation via OPSI (for windows) and FAI (for Linux - though I don't have this bit working satisfactorally yet). There are many more plugins I've never touched. Has anyone else played with it? A community outside of Europe needs to be build around this stuff so that people can get some support - it has all the setup pain of your average enterprise software. I hang out in #fusiondirectory on FreeNode (ie. IRC chat), and I believe there is a #GOsa also. These channels keep to European working hours usually (which makes life difficult for an Australian like me).
In my organization, the initial answer would probably have been "No, we don't need it." Decent open source LDAP and calendar servers with discrete apps would have been fine. But Exchange was installed because it had been paid for as part of the Backoffice/Outlook suite, and it's like a drug. Once you've got it, you can't get rid of it, even if 75% of its features never really get utilized. I once raised the possibility of going back to discrete scheduling and email solutions, and the response was pretty negative. "You mean we wouldn't use Outlook, or Outlook wouldn't quite function like it does now?" And that was that.
But I'm done. I'm one of the managing directors of the company now, and I've put my foot down. This is the last version of Exchange we'll install. We'll either go with something like Gmail or with a managed Exchange service when we look at the next upgrade cycle in five years. This is the last time I build and manage any kind of in-house email system.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It's fucking ludicrous how bad Exchange
THIS!
When the hell are those damn FOSS slowpokes going to get off their asses and write their own fucking ludicrous substitute for Exchange?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Sounds like the problem exists between keyboard and chair. Not one piece of objective criticism in your post, just a fanboy rant about how you couldn't figure it out even though tens of thousands of others seem to having it working just fine. Exchange is the best of breed product in it's class, and most people with half a brain seem to get to work better than you. How you got modded +5 is beyond me. Oh that's right, this is Slashdot, incoherent MS bashing is standard fare here...
I got modded +5 because I'm not a sociopathic Redmond shill, shill.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Out of touch with what? You and your mum's basement? When you grow up and get a job you just might realise how stupid you once were...
No, I just happen to live in the real world.
So do I. We keep a copy of Office around. But once you move away from it to OO, OO becomes the standard, and MSO becomes the outlier.
The real world is not required to lock into Microsoft forever, and no escape is possible. Oddball changes for change sake, file formatting issues that make Office incompatible with itself, and interplatform issues that break office Documents make OO so much more of a real standard than MSO ever was.
The Microsoft Office Real World might just become a world of the past for many people and organizations. Already has for us.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Aehm, they are using Open Office templates? Using MS Office "templates" with OpenOffice would be pretty stupid.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Yeah and today is so yesterday, like, get with the times!
You seem to have no clue how professional IT management is done...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I had a look at the link that you gave, but couldn't see any mention about "Putting this in for the Office team" that was apparently one of the big discussions. I did manage to find this, but it doesn't really show a smoking gun for widespread collusion between the Windows and Office development teams, especially because they also mention of specific code for Borland, IBM, and Symantec in that article.
I think that the use of a few vague comments in the Windows source code leak as proof of secret API calls in Office is about as undamning as the focussing on a few instances of terminology in the CRU email leaks when trying to prove climate change is all one big conspiracy. If all the allegations were true, I would have expected to see more specific evidence.
As a web UI developer I can promise you there have DEFINITELY been no such shenanigans with Internet Explorer which has blown goats honestly at least since 2000 and probably since IE first actually had competition.
So are not-root-canals when compared to root canals.
shut up iis zimba.
just provide a config option, if you think having a limit of five was a good idea.
we all know that putting in #define limits was basically the whole idea behind some windows versions(so they could increase the number in those versions).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Any office having trouble with a docx file in 2013 without the use of MSO is backward. Haven't had a problem opening in Google docs in years. Pretty sure OO's had that covered for a while too.
Also, winmail.dat is 100% a Microsoft-manufactured problem. They translate certain types of attachments to a proprietary Outlook format for security concerns real or imagined on SEND rather than simply buffering with said Outlook shenanigans on receipt but not resend so nobody else has to put up with Outlook's slow-ass dinosaur app BS but Outlook users. To be fair to MS, I suspec the Microsoft TwoFace coin landed on the incompetent moron side rather than the one featuring the slightly less incompetent devious asshole that day or they'd be doing the winmail.dat thing with a lot more file formats.
But fortunately that problem's already been compensated for with this plugin for Thunderbird. Found it at the top of my first Google. It's been out for a year. Maybe you should let your IT guys know before they get locked into... oh... too late aren't I?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/thunderbird/addon/lookout/reviews/
Well at least when your users start pissing off some Thunderbird-using company that rightly identifies emails from clueless Outlook users as the problem, they can pass on that link so they don't have to pay money for the privilege of becoming a part of the same problem too.
There's nothing subjective about it. Had you read TFA, you'd see that they spent a good bit of effort rooting out the vendor lock-in and killing it. It was obviously real.
Then, to top it all off, they saved money. The fact that MS has cooked spreadsheets that claim otherwise (well cooked but the flaws are visible if you dig) shows that even the financial side can get fairly subjective.
Quite a dated article comparing the open source migration attempted by Freiburg vs Munich. There was also a slashdot submission on Freiburg
My understanding is that they went with KDE. The KDE alternative to Exchange and Outlook is Kolab (server) and Kontact (client).
It has some enterprise use, though I don't know if it has the features you mention.
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
Secretly... That's the key word I'm guessing you intentionally left out in your smug little post.
The crowd has spoken
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Then it goes to show that obamacare has been implemented very badly... You don't get people in established EU countries who can't afford healthcare, it's simply provided. Obama wanted to implement a much better system than what he's ended up with, but the proposals got watered down due to political fighting.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Would you like a nice game of chess?
Exchange is only necessary if you think it is necessary.
There are alternatives that work better. The different functions of Exchange are available, just not as a hodgepodge of functions pasted together.
I've crashed exchange servers just be sending a message with an attachment. MS doesn't seem to know how to reject a message properly.
Decades? Social insurance and (more or less universal) health care in Germany go back to 1880ies and were, in fact, a part of a broader anti-socialist program.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
What people want is groupware of some kind backed by the equivalent of Outlook. Most people don't give a monkeys about Exchange, but complain when the normal functions aren't there. The issue is that Exchange interfaces are mostly an undocumented mess. When MS fix something, they then best connectivity (even with older versions of their own clients).
See my journal, I write things there
Word itself, like many other GUI apps that handle formatted text delegates a lot of the raw typesetting to the video card and the selected printer driver.
It's amusing that you speak about it with such conviction yet it's all a fantasy, no less. Man, where did you get this "insight" from? Lest anyone be confused about it: fuck no .
I got it from my job writing printer drivers for Windows, where it was my code providing the support.
One of the apps that did this was Quattro Pro which had an extremely brain-dead (or pessimistic) on the differences between the page widths of "0", "00", "000", etc.. I likened my view of the app to the view from the bottom of the toilet bowl.
And don't even get me started on what WordPerfect for Windows did!
...
As far as how my product (Visual Studio LightSwitch) is impacted directly; as part of our release process we run some tooling that makes sure our code isn't calling APIs its not supposed to be calling.
Excellent product. Keep up the good work.
www.christopherlewis.com
I'm not kidding. If you're using flat documents as part of your business processes you're doing it wrong. I spend a LOT of my time getting companies we buy to abandon these horrible processes and move into a real database where their work is logged, archived, and is audit-able. We just turned an rather large company that we bought out of bankruptcy to profitability in 6 weeks by getting them into a real ticketing system. They went from an average SLA of a WEEK to under 30min. That's fucking progress. They were able to eliminate departments (sorry guys) wholes sole job was shuffling emails and word documents around. I've provided managers with real time reports that show them exactly how much work their employees have for the day, how much they've done, and what their projected workload is for the next 6 months. So far, everyone likes the new system (excluding the data entry people that got laid off) and I do this all day every day. I have a lot of titles but what my real job is, is removing the office suit from business processes.
Something being vague and subjective actually makes it MORE of a risk from a security and business continuity standpoint... Cost is well understood, and easy to assess the negatives of higher costs...
Making your business dependent on something you have no control of is very dangerous, you need to be able to have as much control as possible, you need to know how your data is stored and you need to have an exit strategy - that is a plan in place should the existing infrastructure fail or need to be replaced for whatever reason. Using software controlled by a single supplier is a HUGE risk in this scenario, especially when YOUR data is stored in formats also controlled by that supplier and which are difficult to migrate to something else.
What if your supplier goes bankrupt? What if they discontinue the product you depend on? What if they change the product in ways that are detrimental to your business? What if your supplier decides to expand into your area of business, becoming your competitor? What if they decide to increase prices? What if they stop supporting the version you currently use?
All of these are risks which are outside of your control and difficult to manage, if you have the sourcecode under a suitably liberal license then the worst case is that you can maintain it yourself or pay someone else to do so. Wether you do or not depends on other factors such as the importance of the software/data, the size of your organisation, how many others are in the same boat and can pool resources etc but having the option available means that you are always better off than with proprietary software where you don't have these options at all.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I'd mod you funny if I hadn't already posted.
The OP insinuated that MS was still using undocumented APIs for competitive reasons.
While I cannot authoritively refute that for all of MS past and present, I can tell you that at least for my product, we aren't doing that currently, and in fact, we are taking specific steps to not "accidentally" do it.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Thanks! Glad you like it.
Feel free to email me if you're willing to share your experiences with the product, and what sorts of problems you're trying to solve with it.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
They're German, they didn't vote for Obama, and they've had a universal healthcare system for decades longer than Obama has been alive.
You must realize that these things you've listed are also Obama's fault.
Maybe in times of Windows 2.x, 3.x and the 3.x-driver-under-95 this could have been true due to device-specific font brouhaha. Once non-device-specific fonts entered the scene (either truetype or bitmap fonts), the device-specific driver wasn't doing any typesetting. You know that, so please, stop with the misinformation. The GDI layer was doing it all, merely consulting the device resolution. Yes, many applications did their rendering such that the device resolution mattered since the fonts were scaled to device pixels. This is still a far cry from "raw typesetting" done by the driver. I don't even know who the heck still uses device fonts. Maybe some braindead label printer people, I don't even know if modern GDI still supports this crap.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
As I said, I did this for a living. So unless you are doing likewise or can point me to relevant Windows documentation indicating that they have dropped this practice, I'm going to have to disagree. Excepting cases where the printer driver renders to a metafile format, which was added at a later date to facilitate printing on network printers, the GDI system would typically render display pages in reference to the selected printer driver which, in turn typically employed the video driver as a graphics accelerator.
Originally, the "printer driver" was technically a print renderer more than a true driver. Then some genius noted that most printers were pretty much alike except for the command and escape codes and constructed a table-driven "universal" driver.
The reason for using the printer driver as the reference for on-screen typesetting was to reinforce the WYSIWYG behavior of the document composition, since the resolutions and capabilities of the video driver and printer driver generally differ and the ultimate goal was to get something that printed well.
Almost all current printers are raster devices and thus ultimately all printed text has to be rendered into pixel patterns. This can be done in one of 3 ways:
1. By having the application or a font-rendering subsystem construct a brute-force bitmap image of the text and use the driver's bit-blit rendering. This is bandwidth-intensive on most devices.
2. By invoking a hardware font built into the printer (fairly uncommon these days). That is, print a text string.
3. By downloading a software font into the printer and invoking it as though it were a hardware font (print a string).
Doing typesetting in complete ignorance of the target printer and its capabilities can give sub-optimal output. Even the smartest fonts like to know such things as pixel densities, whether variable-size pixels are an option, and similar refinements. This not only allows more precise determination of letter and word size, but also impacts kerning and micro-justification.
This sort of functionality does date way back, but removing it would degrade the flexibility of the the page-formatting process and for all Microsoft's sins, I can't see them doing that.
So in short, if you're going to be rude, I want tangible proof.
No, actually not - they spent nigh five years analyzing the ever-loving shit out of all it - the 22 separate departments, the specialized VB macros in each department's use of Excel, the lack of easy exchange of documents withing the city government, the creaky and idiosyncratic nature of a hodge-podge of hardware from desktops to servers, and so on. It really helps to read TFA, btw.
After, and all the while, looking at what they had, they focused on what they wanted to end up with - a government able to talk inter-departmentally, a supportable environment of existing hardware and new OS and office software with the rather obvious desire to get the job done, not just to have a neat project to play with. The accompanying theme was to have the freedom from licensing constraints, the flexibility to tailor everything to their needs, and the ability to support everything as much as reasonable in-house. Saving money, while certainly a consideration, was not the driver, but rather a pleasant consequence of good thinking put well into practice. The freedom of being in charge of their own IT infrastructure was not a trivial consideration.
I say they did an admirable job of all of it. Heresy or no, the article is worthy of the reading.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
Of course, everyone who disagree with you is a shill. Your argument is religious fundamentalism. No facts, just opinion and accusations of opposing points of view. Keep telling yourself that Linux on the desktop is almost there. Jesus loves you.