Microsoft Cheaper To Use Than Open Source Software, UK CIO Says

colinneagle (2544914) writes "Jos Creese, CIO of the Hampshire County Council, told Britain's 'Computing' publication that part of the reason is that most staff are already familiar with Microsoft products and that Microsoft has been flexible and more helpful. 'Microsoft has been flexible and helpful in the way we apply their products to improve the operation of our frontline services, and this helps to de-risk ongoing cost,' he told the publication. 'The point is that the true cost is in the total cost of ownership and exploitation, not just the license cost.' Creese went on to say he didn't have a particular bias about open source over Microsoft, but proprietary solutions from Microsoft or any other commercial software vendor 'need to justify themselves and to work doubly hard to have flexible business models to help us further our aims.'"

Comments

Translation

[Torp]

"Microsoft gave us a 98% discount in exchange for this article."

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[asmkm22]

Yeah, I've never known MS to be flexible and helpful in the way he describes, so I'm guessing he's getting special treatment.

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[msobkow]

You're not negotiating for a big enough organization. All the vendors can be extremely helpful when the dollar signs in front of them are big enough.

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[fustakrakich]

Exactly. Has anyone ever seen a big depositor waiting in line at the bank?

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[Casandro]

Well, but a week long Exchange semi-outage still costs money, no matter what your support level is. (Happened at a large German manufacturer of household appliances) Microsoft software just doesn't seem to be enterprise ready.

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[Anonymous Coward]

FTFY: "Well, but a week long Exchange semi-outage still" gets you support from a barely trained script-monkey (not the type that writes scripts either) who can barely translate your question into English and has no ability to follow up on cases, so that the problems they fix every day still won't be addressed next time Microsoft wants you to pay for an "upgrade".

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[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft software just doesn't seem to be enterprise ready.
That's what the London Stock Exchange said a few years ago. Nothing new though, the New York Stock Exchange and Chicago Mercantile Exchanges switched to Linux a few years earlier. Somehow the stock exchanges found the total cost of ownership for Open Source to be lower. But what do they know about money...

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[MightyMartian]

Things look a bit better for the Win 8/Server 2012 network stack, but my experience with Windows in high connection rate environments is that it just doesn't compare to some of the *nixes.

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[ArmoredDragon]

Another thing to consider too though, is how long ago was he doing business with Microsoft? The reason I say that is because of this bit:

proprietary solutions from Microsoft or any other commercial software vendor 'need to justify themselves and to work doubly hard to have flexible business models to help us further our aims.'

In other words, it's because of Linux that Microsoft has to step up its game and do better than it did in the past. Had it not been for Linux, Microsoft would behave more similar to how you expect government services to behave (think rude employees, long lines, and general disregard for customer service at the DMV.)

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[Anonymous Coward]

I hear that all the time...
Things are better for Windows 95
not
Things are better for Windows 98
not
Things are better for Windows XP
not
Things are better for Windows 7
and on and on and on and on and

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[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft software just doesn't seem to be enterprise ready.

As opposed to what, exactly?

Are you saying no software is enterprise ready? That's probably somewhat reasonably close to the truth, at least.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Externalities.

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[Jack Griffin]

Different environments from most businesses which just need file, email, web and a few app servers. I'm sure you can find any special use case to suit your argument, but the fact remains, for most people, most of the time, walking into an MS shop requires the least amount of effort. Try not to let you religious beliefs stand in the way of reality.

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[Anonymous Coward]

"Microsoft gave us a 98% discount in exchange for this article."

Grow up and write better trolls.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. Has anyone ever seen a big depositor waiting in line at the bank?

No, but I have seen plenty of big investors being fleeced by the bank. Normally with a to good to be true special offer. That's more or less directly Microsoft's standard MO. Every product will have a base set of decent features and for those features every box will be checked. There will even be an "Open" XML format that you will seen to be able to export your data to. The trick is that, built into your software will be some extra freebie small feature you can't escape from. Once your users start using that feature, they are hooked and can't escape. In the price of every Microsoft Word license you have to include the potential that it forces you to invest in an entire set of SharePoint servers and an outsourced support company. There are entire countries like the UK and South Korea (which had an ActiveX control as a key part of it's banking infrastructure!) which have been tricked by this. Double doesn't even come close.

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[Anonymous Coward]

I'm too broke to go to the bank, you insensitive clod!

smitty_one_each

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[rioki]

Apps, apps apps.

Basically the Windows / Unixlikes divide has little to do with actual technology. If you have lots of servers, the license costs add up and chances are you are running custom apps. If you develop your own apps, the target OS matters little. But if you intend to buy applications, windows is the go to OS. The license costs for the OS pale in comparison to the cost of developing the application for a different OS.

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[Chas]

Exactly. Has anyone ever seen a big depositor waiting in line at the bank?

Only when the bathroom is full.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Strangely, the use cases for a stock exchange and a police force are not the same.

A stock exchange is all about uptime, precision and speed within a very specific information domain. A police force cares more about filing, traceability and metadata of very heterogenous data sets.

One of these domains is something that MS does very well. The other - isn't.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Yes of course, and they are actually getting worse. Microsoft are a dying beast trying to latch it's tentacles on to anything it can to survive. Things will definitely be getting scarier.

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[K. S. Kyosuke]

Have you read The Million Pound Bank Note?

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[sproketboy]

To clarify: They switched to Java running on Linux instead of .NET on Windows.

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[sillybilly]

Because of this I've become a big fan of Microsoft. And in that not their latest crap, like Win8, that I've never tried, just read about, but their oldschool stuff, DOS 6, Win95(comes with DOS7) and Win2000, and I use XP, but I never really liked it, because of the bloat, spying and Activation built into XP. In my mind oldschool Windows 2000/Office 2000/SQL Server 2000-ADO/VB6SP5/Delphi 5 or 7/FL Studio 5/Autocad 14/Visio2000/Chemstation/etc are by far the best software ever written, and even today they represent the best balance between bloat, and features. Out of those the SQL Server part is the one that sucks the most, because it requires server client access licenses, which are a ridiculous way to make money, and the alternative of Linux/FreeBSD or even Solaris running PostgreSQL 8 is cheaper, even if not as good as SQL Server 2000. There are lots of other database engines that are small and fast and usable, like Firebird, I don't know why they think a database is such a miracle piece of software, especially when you compare it to say, Office. What's the big deal about a database other than corporate users, who should be smart enough to pick something else, or they are idiots and don't know how to make money, meaning they are an aberration, temporary corporate users, not corporate users for the long haul. SQL Server should be priced less than Office, per copy, and the CAL's should be dropped, and instead individual copies of office used as a sort of CAL, if they ever go back to the oldschool stuff. Win95/Office97 is also a marvelous deal, running blazing fast on hardware that runs 2000 stuff slow, or just has low memory. And just yesterday I was at a steel company, and they run custom software, that I know simply won't run on Win8. The split, the chasm has happened, with most businesses or people forced to hunt for old hardware and old windows, as no way in hell can anybody afford to rewrite old software that took a team of 35 really smart guys, most of whom are dead, 5 years till they got some miraculous thing going, and another 5 to iron out the quirks, and the quirks and idiosyncrasies and artifacts that are left every users knows, and knows how to work around them. Rewriting the whole thing is inhumanly expensive, and there would be new quirks and artifacts that users would have to learn, and forget the old ones. That's a lot of built up knowledge wasted. In an ideal world hardware companies would realize this market demand, and start making lots of oldschool motherboards, or even equivalent chips, especially if the giants, like Intel, keep going head against the wall, and refuse to make stuff that functions like the oldschool stuff. There is an important market potential there, with high demand and little supply, pretty soon. I find it that there have been millions of things written for old windows for which no equivalent for mac or linux has ever been made. Like American Heritage Talking Dictionary program for Windows 95 that comes without a friggin EULA - it's one of my favorite programs. Granted it runs under Wine too, but there are things like FL Studio old versions, which really kick ass even on old computers, and they won't run as fine on Wine. I'm using XP these days with the last nondotnet Zonealarm, 7.0.473.000, which you can no longer buy online, but boxed copies work, and hoping for the best when it comes to security and viruses. But XP was never my favorite, my all time favorite was Win95, which was a huge step in computing "goodness", a huge step toward a better world. All Win98 was was an integration of internet explorer browser with windows explorer file manager, and such dirty trick trying to kill off Nutscrape - I really hated Win98 for that. It also had USB better than OSR2 of 95, but that's a natural progress. By the way looking at 95 today, it lacks good looks or pizazz, or even decent appearance, but back then I remember it looking great. I always hated 98 for the bloat, like registry bloat, and especially ME that even took the DOS boot goodness away. The only time I relented was Windows 20

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[DaveV1.0]

Congratulations. Rather than actually deal with the truth, you just accuse the man of unethical conduct. That makes you a lying piece of fanboy shit. And, it is the exact kind of shit you are spewing that shows the attitude alluded to by the article. I have used FLOSS for about 25 years now and while everyone talks about community and how much help is available, the truth is the most common answer to a question asked of the community is silence, followed closely by "RTFM, n00b!", "Stop your shit questions and use Google", and other such helpful responses.

With MS, they can go to MS and MS will bend over backwards to help them. What do they get with FLOSS? Well, they can try to find someone who is competent, but who do they go to and how do they find out? I guess they could use Red Hat, but I have worked with Red Hat and know what you get for that support contract.

And, I know this is going to get modded down by FLOSS fanboys and I don't care. You fuckers need to hear the truth. Just look at the non-confrontational responses that have been modded troll. The troll post is Torp's.

But, hey, don't let the fact that Torp is making shit up because you fuckers like his opinion solely because it feeds into your delusions. Go fuck yourselves.

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[DaveV1.0]

So does a week long SendMail outage. Which one do you think is easier to get support for SendMail or Exchange?

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[BitZtream]

The cost of a full price microsoft license, even some of their most expensive software is generally less than a weeks pay for the person using it.

That makes the licensing cost pretty much irrelevant to any business that isn't going to fail next week anyway.

The fact that you are hung up on license cost shows a distinct lack of understanding the actual costs involved in using one piece of software over another.

Nothing wrong with using OSS and license cost is something you must consider, but if your battle cry continues to be 'OMG licenses are expensive' then you don't need to be part of the conversation about TCO.

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[SpzToid]

Your comments are the strongest reasons for you to have switched to something like Ubuntu and its open-source databases like MySQL/MariaDB or Postgres long ago. Bite the bullet buddy, and you'll be glad you did, and don't look back. Seriously.

I could give several examples of my working on-site as a consultant and with the ability and knowledge to just download whatever software I wanted to do my job with, without need for license over budget-approval. And everytime I was more valuable to the client's need at the time than someone that would have needed to get a purchase order approved, along with the delay of shipping or some such, just to get a tool with which to deliver a project. And time is money too.

Windows 2000 was pretty good for MS, but its over. Very much. It is time to move on and consider the new *technology* available.

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[Anonymous Coward]

> You're not negotiating for a big enough organization. All the vendors can be extremely helpful when the dollar signs in front of them are big enough.

From my own experience (big enough organization, won't tell which one, sorry), that doesn't happen.

M$ doesn't help. They call partners for that (like an University). Such partners seek for a business opportunity, be it for money or curriculum (it's important to have us as clients, there are others who would buy if we buy from them). M$ itself won't do anything, because their business is the OS -- not drivers, not special devices, not additional services, not a lot of things.

Also, they can't make it really cheaper. They're after our money. Making cheaper decreases the rate by which they suck money from our pockets.

I'm surprised there's still someone who comes with that line in 2014. It would be less weird if the person claimed proprietary can be cheaper, but why the specific mention to the "Microsoft" brand?

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[Bacon Bits]

The trick is that, built into your software will be some extra freebie small feature you can't escape from. Once your users start using that feature, they are hooked and can't escape.

Our users are tricked into using software with features they like and actually make their jobs easier! What a dastardly move by Microsoft in actually making a product that the end user prefers! How dare they compete so unfairly! It's like they think the quality of the product matters.

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[jalopezp]

The bathroom truly is democratic.

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[BVis]

How dare they compete so unfairly! It's like they think the quality of the product matters.

The quality of the product only matters until they achieve lock-in. After that, they don't care if the program even runs.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Your calm, reasonable and expletive-free arguments certainly convince me.

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[BVis]

Rather than actually deal with the truth, you just accuse the man of unethical conduct.

Percentage-wise, it's a pretty safe assumption.

That makes you a lying piece of fanboy shit.

Not if he's right.

With MS, they can go to MS and MS will bend over backwards to help them.

What color is the sky on your planet?

Well, they can try to find someone who is competent, but who do they go to and how do they find out?

You imply it's easier to find someone to support your MS stuff than it is to find someone to support your FLOSS stuff. I am skeptical of that; there's a lot of MS support out there, true, but the vast majority of it sucks in my experience.

And, I know this is going to get modded down by FLOSS fanboys and I don't care. You fuckers need to hear the truth.

Your version of it, probably not.

Go fuck yourselves.

Hypocrisy. Complain about someone being a troll by trolling yourself. Shouldn't you be in math class?

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[Junta]

I think those fall into a class where you need in-house expertise or you are simply screwed no matter what. When you have high quality in-house expertise anyway, the open source world empowers those experts to do things they could not pull off with a proprietary solution.

However, the general market is very large and there are also plenty of places where in-house expertise isn't so critical. A lot of those can get by with open source too 99.5% of the time, but when something goes really off the rails, those guys need help. The difference between RHEL and Windows isn't so big in up front costs. Ongoing costs mostly depend on the subjective preferences of the staff you can secure. RHEL and Windows appeal to very distinct sensibilities overall, so it should be no surprise that both viewpoints can be truthfully found in the world.

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[Anonymous Coward]

<Impenetrable wall of text>

Are you a bot?

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[Medievalist]

The trick is that, built into your software will be some extra freebie small feature you can't escape from. Once your users start using that feature, they are hooked and can't escape.

Our users are tricked into using software with features they like and actually make their jobs easier! What a dastardly move by Microsoft in actually making a product that the end user prefers! How dare they compete so unfairly! It's like they think the quality of the product matters.

Sometimes is really is like that, although it happens just as often with non-Microsoft (or even, gasp! free) sorftware as with anything else. The reality is that quality of code and product aren't determined by brand names; IIS and WinXP are both Microsoft products despite their vast differences in quality and user experience.

So, that being said, Microsoft's biggest wedge in corporate settings is Outlook, which incorporates such "features" as training the user to use a semicolon to separate addresses, in violation of all standards and common sense, and egregiously mangling RFC822 email addresses. Users (some of whom may well reply to this post) will insist that this is totally reasonable and desirable - because they are at least as brainwashed as your average emacs user.

Humans want to root for a team and the quality of software products has almost nothing to do with it. It's like Democrats .vs. Republicans, tastes great .vs. less filling, etc.... not evidence-based.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Hey bigmouth: You're being called out (why're you running "forrest"?) http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

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[westlake]

The quality of the product only matters until they achieve lock-in. After that, they don't care if the program even runs.

Microsoft continues to dominate in the workplace.

The geek is only fooling himself when he claims that Microsoft isn't consistently delivering top-tier products and services.

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[BVis]

The geek is only fooling himself when he claims that Microsoft isn't consistently delivering top-tier marketing and salesmanship.

FTFY.

Just because something is popular doesn't make it any good. See Apple products, Wal-Mart, etc. All are wildly popular, despite some obvious shortcomings.

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[causality]

So does a week long SendMail outage. Which one do you think is easier to get support for SendMail or Exchange?

I would never use Sendmail or BIND given their security history. Better tools are available.

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[jbolden]

That's like saying pro football players didn't find a car door to hard to open so why should the average customer? Stock exchanges have first class IT teams. Companies with first class IT teams are used to handling a variety of technical applications.

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[Karl Cocknozzle]

You're not negotiating for a big enough organization. All the vendors can be extremely helpful when the dollar signs in front of them are big enough.

...So what you're really saying is that Microsoft won't be remotely cheaper for anybody that isn't one of the biggest 500 companies on earth. ...And since most people don't work for those largest 500 companies, that most users experiences relating to price and flexibility will be utterly different than this article describes.

All of which makes it a great piece of astroturf. But not something that should be, you know, believed or relied on by anybody living outside that mega-enterprise bubble.

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[expatriot]

There is too long, didn't read, and there is too long without paragraph breaks, didn't read.

you are not doing yourself any favors with your lack of formatting. Unless you are adding breaks and /. is removing them.

If using HTML, add
. If plain old text, carriage returns.

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[jbolden]

How do you have a week long SendMail outage? SendMail doesn't have all kinds of untraceable configuration files and documents what's wrong pretty clearly. SendMail is harder to setup initially, SendMail is less user friendly. But no question SendMail is way way easier to fix if something goes seriously wrong.

As for support I'd say SendMail there is a ton of online documentation and great books. If you mean paid, either. If you mean naive support by an admin Postfix or Exim are far better choices for people who don't know the SendMail programming language and don't want to learn.

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[Anonymous Coward]

I worked in-house IT for a fortune 100 company. MS wasn't helpful ever. Things we could eventually google from MS related websites (not owned, just sites about MS products) gave more info.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Wall Street makes more money then the Queen of England...

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[bzipitidoo]

I was wondering if there were still any genuine MS fans, or whether MS has become so uncool that all they have left are paid shills and resentful, locked in users who dream of jumping straight into the smothering embrace of another closed world because Apple looks sexier right now. MS hasn't been the least cool since the 90s, with, as you point out, the possible exception of Windows 2000 and XP despite the activation crap. Your love of MS is nostalgia for the old.

Anyway, you probably can install later versions of Windows 100 years from now. Just need an emulator and a crack, and they are out there. In the future, it might be the only way to install the likes of Windows 7. That's the way it is now for many old Apple II games. The companies that produced them have moved on or gone out of business. The only usable version of the game is the cracked one.

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[kimvette]

Agreed. Microsoft is inflexible and they are not above outright lying about system and license requirements to get a job sold even if specifically asked about best practices with several reps confirming, only to find later that you need several additional licenses for a configuration to work.

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[aethelrick]

"Microsoft gave us a 98% discount..."

While this is undoubtedly true (at least it is in my own experience with the NHS). I also think that the "if it ain’t broke, don't fix it" approach to maintenance is partly responsible as well. I can't fault someone for taking this pragmatic approach to IT systems, but it does mean that once a vendor gets in, it's really hard to get them out even if the competition is cheaper, better and faster Etc.

I believe that many companies or government departments could run on open source software if will to do so exists within management. However, It's always easier for jobs-worth staff to maintain the status quo even if doing so is detrimental to the budget.

The idea that it is cheaper to pay for windows and office as opposed to using open source alternatives is incorrect in my own experience. I know that MS advocates like to talk about total cost of ownership and the cost of retraining staff, the price of a UNIX admin vs the price of a Windows admin etc however in my own experience, the average government employee is woefully under-trained with their current windows system never mind a new one and you don't need as many UNIX admins as you do windows ones because a well configured UNIX environment is far more smooth running. One of the most significant cost differences presented in TCO analysis is the bespoke software that will need to be re-written to run on the open source OS. The reality is that these systems are still running on a dusty COM+, Windows 2000 and SQL 2000 cluster in the rack. What the non-technical management bods don't get from the TCO analysis is that this lot will all need re-writing for the next version of Windows anyway.

It is incorrect and disingenuous to suggest that change needs to be all-or-nothing or that the cost of change needs to all be paid in advance, reality is that many versions of many operating systems are already running in Mr Creese's organisation, he's probably got more than one version of MS office installed in his organization as well. At the very least he will have migrated from old versions of office to newer ones in the past and frankly if he's moved staff from any previous version of office to any version of office after they changed to use the ribbon menu he's already had and paid for the level of change and retraining he could expect to migrate from MS office to LibreOffice.

It's good management to minimize unnecessary cost and protect your organisation from over-exposure or reliance on any one vendor, this is especially true when you are running a government department. What is Mr Creese doing to manage this risk of over-reliance on Microsoft?

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[smash]

Depends. Having done both open source and closed source (and currently using both) - the problem with open source solutions is often the death by a thousand cuts. You'll get something to mostly work apart from a little problem playing with something else. Inevitably, any support in the form of google, etc. is a case of "well the other closed system is broken". That's all well and good from an idealistic perspective, but people in the real world need to get shit done. A classic case is DHCP based WPAD in both Mozilla and Chrome. Bugs (some with patches) were submitted in 2006 and 2009 respectively.

It still doesn't work. Internet Explorer has been able to autoconfigure via DHCP since at least version 5 from memory, and probably IE4... but because the guys doing Mozilla or Chrome don't personally have to deal with enterprise proxy configuration, they take years to even bother looking at the bug. I've been following the open ticket for it in Chromium since 2009... i'm not holding my breath.

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[jedidiah]

>> Microsoft software just doesn't seem to be enterprise ready.

> As opposed to what, exactly?

IBM. Sun. DEC.

Just about any other server brand you can care to name is more enterprise ready once you get beyond secretary terminals.

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[smash]

There's a reason Microsoft Office is the industry standard, and not iWork. For all its warts (and they are legion) people can actually use it to get shit done. They (end users) can plug it into other systems and use it to develop in-house applications for menial jobs without needing a proper coder. Any enterprise employee will be able to confirm the legion of shitty little access databases, and ODBC linked spreadheets throughout the typical company that are embedded into the business process.

Until a competitor can do similar things, with some semblance of stability and ease of use, it will not replace MS Office. No matter how free it is.

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[smash]

Yeah and I'm sure the traders are running Ubuntu on their desktops too.

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[smash]

No, just mildly retarded by the looks.

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[BVis]

Again, just because it's popular (owing to the marketing machine, not the quality of the product) doesn't mean it's good. It's become a standard despite its cost because of lock-in.

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[smash]

LOL. Sendmail online documentation. Good one. As a sendmail administrator of about 15 years now, I'm just going to put this out there: Sendmail documentation is complete and utter fucking BOLLOCKS. Yes it may give a blow by blow description of every feature you can use in sendmail.cf. No examples, no best practices, etc. Look at any two sendmail boxes and they will have a variety of different hacks to try and fight spam and the majority of them will only be somewhat effective. I'm not defending exchange here by any stretch, it's a piece of shit. But sendmail... documentation.... lol.

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[Joey Vegetables]

I'm willing to give credit where credit is due, and Microsoft's enterprise products have improved a great deal. Their development tools are great. C# is about as good as I can imagine a compiled language ever becoming. Yet, constant churn is built into the platform. (E.g.: MFC -> VB6 -> WinForms -> WPF -> WinRT; ODBC -> OLE DB -> ADO -> ADO.NET -> EF.) One can't avoid it, due to the need for constant patching. And it is not uncommon for that churn to remove functionality without fully replacing it, or to degrade the user experience, rather than improving it. So I still see the open source alternatives as tending toward lower TCO, even if they require a somewhat larger investment in money and time up front. If you want something yesterday, I don't think the MS stack can be beat. You'll get something decent quickly and for minimal cost. But over time it will rot. It will end up costing more and more and more over time, just to keep it alive. If you want something to last, then build it using FLOSS technologies. More cost up front, maybe even a bit more time, but the potential to be WAY more solid, robust, and future-proof than anything coming from Redmond, even though the latter has improved a lot over the years.

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[smash]

^ my thoughts exactly. I've been using (and still do, for select tasks) open source since the early 90s.

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[smash]

Exactly. And if you consider the random wierd shit you run into when attempting to use open source in a desktop situation and multiply the hours spent over a few weeks by the user's pay rate... it just doesn't make sense.

In my experience, OSS makes sense in non-user facing situations (firewalls, proxies, mail relays in my case), or for people at home. If they're on the clock, at work and need to send data to/from other people or deal with enterprise systems it's a no brainer.

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[Joey Vegetables]

-1. Offended. :) Seriously, though, your point is noted, and valid, not in every case, but in far too many. Many FLOSS projects, including some I like a lot, suffer from poor, outdated, or no documentation. I am often still willing to use it myself, if I can figure out how. But I'm reluctant to use it to build software for clients, knowing someone else without my familiarity with these projects may have to maintain it. PostgreSQL and (although I dislike it for other reasons) PHP have decent documentation which I believe has contributed to the popularity of both projects. These are a few good examples. There are plenty of bad ones as well. Generally, it is hard to feel good about the quality of a software project, especially if it is a development tool, server, or some other component of a larger software solution, if it suffers from inadequate documentation.

Re: Translation

[smash]

In terms of software quality, i agree it is not good. But it has the features that make it useful. ODBC, VB, COM, etc. Being able to build apps with office is what has made it so entrenched, its nothing to do with stability, user interface, etc. It's because Johnny from accounts can pull data in from the SQL server into his shitty little Access database, munge a whole heap of data into it, do some basic processing on it, generate some pretty sports, and export the data into an excel worksheet that the boss can crate pivot tables out of and put up on slides for the board.

Try to do that sort of thing with LibreOffice or whatever it's called this week on a Linux box and you'll run into a game-breaking bug within the first 10 minutes. I know, I've tried it.

Whilst office is a piece of shit, the alternatives are far, far worse from a "how can i get this shit done" perspective.

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[lister king of smeg]

There's a reason Microsoft Office is the industry standard,

Yes there is a reason. It involves antitrust law violations.

Windows aint done 'til lotus won't run.

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[smash]

sports = reports. many other typos. don't care. you get the point, hopefully.

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[whitroth]

Really? I work for a (civilian sector) US gov't agency. Several years ago, one of our Sun/Oracle servers had motherboard problems. It was still under warranty. It took a MONTH for their FE to get out and replace the m/b, and that includes two *weeks* of exchanging emails with a technical support in Chile, who was working on a number of other things, and I couldn't call the guy.... Then there was the in-country engineer... who *ONLY* worked 3rd shift, and the "I'm the manager, I'm taking ownership" that I got, three days in a row, from three different managers.

The US gov't ain't big enough for Larry?

Some companies just don't care. Anyone trying to claim M$ cares?

                mark

Re:Translation

[lister king of smeg]

Different environments from most businesses which just need file, email, web and a few app servers. I'm sure you can find any special use case to suit your argument, but the fact remains, for most people, most of the time, walking into an MS shop requires the least amount of effort. Try not to let you religious beliefs stand in the way of reality.

The city of Munich did just that. They run a kUbuntu derivative now. They found for email web and an office suite linux works fine.

Re:Translation

[Bacon Bits]

Actually, I have to side with Microsoft on your example. Outlook uses the semicolon because RFC822's standard of using a comma is not appropriate. The default nomenclature for a name is "Last, First Middle". That's not Microsoft's selection, that's the English standard to make alphabetic names easy. Since the friendly name uses this nomenclature, and because modern applications search contact databases against this friendly name, and because it's a major point of usability that users should be able to use friendly or partial names, and because there's no way to tell if a comma should be part of a friendly name or separate addresses, specifying a different address separator is simply superior design.

Microsoft may be against RFC, but the RFC is defining an aberrant standard that doesn't work in the real world. The RFC demands that usability be impacted for zero benefit -- the only benefit of using the comma over any other character separator is obeying the standard. The RFC is in error.

Re:Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

Congratulations. Rather than actually deal with the truth, you just accuse the man of unethical conduct. That makes you a lying piece of fanboy shit. And, it is the exact kind of shit you are spewing that shows the attitude alluded to by the article. I have used FLOSS for about 25 years now and while everyone talks about community and how much help is available, the truth is the most common answer to a question asked of the community is silence, followed closely by "RTFM, n00b!", "Stop your shit questions and use Google", and other such helpful responses.

With MS, they can go to MS and MS will bend over backwards to help them. What do they get with FLOSS? Well, they can try to find someone who is competent, but who do they go to and how do they find out? I guess they could use Red Hat, but I have worked with Red Hat and know what you get for that support contract.

And, I know this is going to get modded down by FLOSS fanboys and I don't care. You fuckers need to hear the truth. Just look at the non-confrontational responses that have been modded troll. The troll post is Torp's.

But, hey, don't let the fact that Torp is making shit up because you fuckers like his opinion solely because it feeds into your delusions. Go fuck yourselves.

If you use ask questions in community websites in a simmilar manner, I am not surprised the most common answer is silence.

Re:Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

And with the great software they provide, like Windows 8, who could possibly want something else?

Re:Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the apps anyone would use for open source are already made. That goes all the way back to when I was in junior high and they made the argument then to not buy apple because you would simply not be able to get any software for the machine. It was as bogus an argument then as it is now. MS blade server can cost up to $60000 a license. For that price you could sen employees to night school if you wanted.

Re:Translation

[smash]

That was 30 years ago. If office was that bad, then surely it would have been replaced by now.

Re:Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello ribbon. What a piece of shit.

Re:Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

followed closely by "RTFM, n00b!", "Stop your shit questions and use Google", and other such helpful responses.

What I have found is that TFM is never updated to include the changes in the new distros's/program's version of doing things different than the last version (which apparently changes a lot in some) but all the docs are mostly written for several versions ago. I just spent some time trying to figure out how I can use AD auth on our ubuntu systems running 12.04 and all the docs are for 8.04 and 10.04 and half the config files in the how-tos either don't exist or the options are no longer valid (I gave up after 3-4 days and I have better things to do)

And googling just brings up the same as above: outdated how-tos that no one updates, forum posts with no answers (other than the typical it should just work, RTFM, etc...), or links to commercial products that sometimes work but you have to buy support (wait, wasn't I going to FLOSS to avoid that in the first place?)

There are things to bash MS over, but from a large org. stand-point AD management is not one of them. It is one of the easiest to manage that just works despite the bugs (most of the time anyway...)

Some (most) OSS projects work very well, other still after years need a lot of work just to get the basics working.

Some in the OSS community need to get their act together if they want to be taken more seriously. (And we're not saving money if we have to expend lots of time that cost the same if not more to accomplish the same goal)

Re:Translation

[cmdrbuzz]

Thats weird, because I work for a FTSE 100 financial services company and we had a few little issues when nearly 72,000 members of the public attempted to use our online services at the same time, when our usual concurrent volume is around 4,500.

We planned for a "worse-case" of 50,000 concurrent trades, but our system DDOS-ed itself at around 71,000 (gotta love fast-switch cluster failover, and back, and over, and back... Oracle FTW!!!)

Anyhow, before we could even think to phone Oracle and shout that our newest 1.2 million pound server wasn't handling particularly well, the head of Oracle UK phoned /us/ and offered us a team of their best engineers to help get us fixed.

I'd have thought we'd be smaller than a US gov agency, but hey ho, Oracle (plus Cisco, Juniper and EMC) parachuted people straight in, nothing too much to help.

Admittedly now we have bought a lot more kit, but they weren't to know that we'd do that considering the failure.

Re:Translation

[TemporalBeing]

There's a reason Microsoft Office is the industry standard, and not iWork.

It's called the Microsoft Marketing machinery.

MS typically markets to CEO types and get them to force the organization to use the MS products. They also introduce subtle differences.

Back in 1994 WordPerfect and Quattro Pro was the kind of the Productivity suite. Then MS released Win'95 and in the process convinced Novell to implement their Win'95 version using new APIs in Win'95 (namespaces) then pulled the new APIs at the last moment (only to later release them) setting Novell's Win'95 version back 6 months. (http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=20041115070558892).

No, MS didn't gain market share because they really had a superior product, but because they manipulated the market into using their inferior product. It was also well known that you could import WordPerfect and QuattroPro documents into MS Office equivalents, but that the conversion back was not very good - so it was essentially a one-way conversion. So the CEO got a copy of Word, imported the WordPerfect document, and then everyone working with them needed it too because of incompatibility issues.

Re:Translation

[M1FCJ]

For fucks sake, who uses Sendmail thse days?!

Re:Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

In the Earth I live on, the default format for names written in English is "First Middle Last".

But if you want your email address to be "Bits, Bacon" <BaconBits@slashdot.org> the RFCs don't have a problem with that. You can use commas to your heart's content in any decent mail client, only Microsoft has issues with perfectly valid punctuation used in RFC compliant addressing. Only Microsoft, of all the big names.

Like most people who have primarily used Outlook, you've become accustomed to the absurd and counterproductive things Outlook does, to the point where they have become the standard by which you judge other things. That's how Outlook works; it takes advantage of human psychology and warps the perspective of the user in a sort of Stockholm Syndrome.

Microsoft may be against RFC, but the RFC is defining an aberrant standard that doesn't work in the real world.

The RFC standards clearly do work in the real world, and in fact Outlook takes everything you compose and translates it into something approaching the RFC standard form before sending your mail to anyone else.

Re:Translation

[david_thornley]

Except that Microsoft marketing sucks. Case in point: a few weeks ago, my wife and I wandered into a Microsoft store in a mall (it wasn't crowded, honest), and I looked at the Surface and Surface Pros (I wanted to see if I might want one, and decided not). My wife was looking at them too. She's smart, observant, and tech-savvy. After we left, she didn't know the difference between a Surface and a Surface Pro. Since the two are way different in capability, you'd think Microsoft would put some emphasis on making sure people knew the difference.

The whole Surface/Surface Pro Windows RT/Windows 8 thing has been a marketing fiasco, right from the start.

Re:Translation

[DaveV1.0]

I don't ask questions in community websites. I answer them. The rest of you are an embarrassment.

Re:Translation

[DaveV1.0]

Rather than actually deal with the truth, you just accuse the man of unethical conduct.

Percentage-wise, it's a pretty safe assumption.

Prove it or shut the fuck up.

Re:Translation

[Jack Griffin]

Yes and the city of Munich is slightly less than "most of the people" right?

Re:Translation

[gonnagetya]

If you're been pissed off at the Linux community failing users for so long, you'd be resorting to emotive language as well. Some people just are too stubborn and won't listen to politely written complaints about the state of things. Sometimes you need to swear - don't be pious and pretend you don't do the same (verbally at least) sometimes.

Re: Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

Because of this I've become a big fan of Microsoft.

Because of your post I've become a big fan of paragraphs. How many energy drinks have you gulped down today?

Re:Translation

[RazorSharp]

Go fuck yourselves.

Try developing a sense of humor. The original post was an exaggeration and a joke, but a like any joke worth telling, it hinted at a truth: Microsoft is known to go out of their way to have nice things published about them. That includes bribing "tech writers" (I loath to call them journalists) and giving customers discounts to say nice things about them. Read all about it on Wikipedia.

You might have a decent point about how support in the FLOSS community can be lacking in a way that's off-putting to some and costly to some businesses, but your hostility is unwarranted and your whining about the moderation system is pretty pathetic. Personally, if I was using mod points on this article I wouldn't mod you troll. Your post is straight flamebait.

Re:Translation

[BVis]

If it's a for-profit company, it's nearly certain that something screwy is going on. Profit is more important than ethics.

Re:Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

"No, but I have seen plenty of big investors being fleeced by the bank."

Sure, you have, Sparky. You might have fooled 5 mods into giving you points, but the smart people know that you are making stuff up.

Re:Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

They were directed to do so by the Bilderberg Group and the Bavarian Illuminati. The Conspiracy will not allow OS to displace its receivers for the Orbital Mind Control Lasers.

Re:Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

I use MS Office because Open Office is complete shit.

Your results may vary.

Re:Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

no I under stand what this CIO is saying. When you're negotiating for a VERY large organization MS can be very helpful and VERY flexible. These very large organizations often follow a very long and complex change management process which includes ALL software patches within the environment. Several open source projects often move to rapid release cycles which can sometimes make migrating to them too difficult for these larger companies. By the time their Change process is complete the version they were reviewing is not longer the latest version available. In most change management processes an update being installed is treated differently then a complete re-install. When business applications and other pieces of the organization use this software fore the bread and butter of that organization it is critical to be able to control the roll-out. The other element of a major change AWAY from office is cost of change.

Re: Translation

[josquin9]

I can't tell whether I should vote you up for your witty sarcasm, or vote you down as a hopeless Microzombie. If it weren't for the posts below taking you at your word, I would have assumed the former. Please advise.

Re:Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. While I like and use many open source packages. I also deal on a professional level with a few vendors, particularly Autodesk, Adobe, Apple and Microsoft. Part of my job is managing two systems that deploy software to over 500 PCs just over 200 Macs. As such, while we aren't on the scale of (say) a multinational company, we are not small scale either.

Whenever I have had to deal with Apple, Adobe or Microsoft (not so much Autodesk), they've all bent over backwards to help, even to the point of getting the staff involved in the development of a product to contact us when we've reported bugs. Hell, even now, I am in the middle of an email conversation with one of the developers of Apple Remote Desktop. Admittedly, we do spend over £100,000 a year with each of those companies, so I would expect them to bend over backwards to help me.

What's the best help I've received when using open source software? I'll admit, I've never paid for a support contract with any open source company, but the best help I've received is to be told to Google it. Most of the time, I've just been ignored. That's fine for me personally. If I have a problem, I'm happy to try and solve it myself, and maybe learn something. On an enterprise level, that attitude can be disastrous. If I report a bug or raise a query on behalf of work, I need it to be answered quickly because we are probably losing money as a result of it. Potentially a lot of money if the problem is at the heart of one of our main systems,

Then there is the legal aspect. If you buy a product from a company, the law offers you certain rights and protections. As such, the manufacturer of the product you just brought has certain responsibilities to you, regardless of whether you have a service contract with them or not. If you use open source software without buying a service contract (assuming the O/s package(s) you are using have service contracts available), you are offered no protection.

There is also training. Microsoft software is pretty much everywhere. You can guarantee that 99.9% of your staff will have at least some knowledge of at least one Microsoft package or OS. They may still need training to get the best out of the MS software you use, but most won't. Packages like LibreOffice are good, but most people will not have even heard of them, let alone seen or used them. Similarly, most people will have used Windows at some point. Can any *nix based OS say that?

Finally, there is the problem of dead projects. I use many Open Source products, and in the past, development has simply ceased with little or no prior warning. This is fine for me personally, I'll either carry on using the old version or find another package that does the same thing. If some part of any of our systems at work relied on that project, it could cause a major headache. While that system may be working well at the time, what happens if a security flaw in the project that has ceased development is discovered?

Re:Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

Then there is the legal aspect. If you buy a product from a company, the law offers you certain rights and protections

The protections offered by real legal systems aren't particularly impressive. Oh, in theory they can sound good, but in practice? Good luck actually getting anything without paying through the nose for years to keep a law firm employed, especially with software, and don't expect a happy outcome.

At best, you might expect to be able to get a small amount of the investment in the product back. Note that the cost of the product has little to do with the total investment. Your time and trouble will almost never be compensated (and if they are, it's not because of the legal system, it's a marketing decision).

In short, this is an argument with little merit.

True Costs

[Anonymous Coward]

'The point is that the true cost is in the total cost of ownership and exploitation, not just the license cost.'

Yeah, exploitation IS a cost. That's why I don't use Windows.

Re: True Costs

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually I just listened to a talk today about UCSD exploit that started with a pass the hash attack. It took them close to a year to get rid of it. The main culprit MS windows.

Re:True Costs

[khb]

Perhaps the language from "across the pond" is hard for some US readers to parse. "Exploitation" meaning "use effectively" ... without knowing more about what this bloke's department(s) are tasked to do, it is hard to call him to task for his choice.

I would not be surprised if Macintoshes were even a better match for his user base.

I cannot seem to find it, but I recently ran across a bizarre claim that the average office worker's time is dominated by outlook (duh) but that Microsoft Word was number two at a paltry few minutes per day, and Powerpoint even less than that. Quite possibly true, and while that does tee up the question for why they need Microsoft products at all (since casual users needs can be met by a wide variety of FOSS projects) it would explain why retraining is *so* difficult. For people who live and breathe computing, learning a new platform isn't hard and is even "fun". For people who really only need to tinker with a few characters in documents that pass through their hands for a few minutes per day ... virtually ANY change is highly disruptive.

Re:True Costs

[Anonymous Coward]

"virtually ANY change is highly disruptive"... you mean like replacing heirarchical menus with a dog's breakfast ribbon?

Re:True Costs

[Anonymous Coward]

hahaha no one has a response to this, because its so true it hurts them too much.

Re:True Costs

[Vlado]

One of the main reasons (or THE main reason) for why MS is still leading in the end-user environment is the Office.

Even though it may be hated by a lot of people for any number of reasons it is the standard. Why? Because FOSS simply is not compatible enough with it. If it's because of the fact that MS uses proprietary formats or because FOSS solutions could not be bothered to be compatible enough does not matter at the end of the day. If I can not use Libre Office or Open Office (or anything else) to edit Word-generated documents and return them without formatting disasters, I cannot use anything else than MS Office products.
End of story.

You may argue that others should switch to FOSS as well. Well, until they do, my livelihood depends on whether or not they will accept my products (documetns, presentations, spreadsheets,...). And if they don't then I simply don't have the alternative.

Re: True Costs

[cyber-vandal]

Yeah I can just see the headlines if a government department bought Macs for its staff.

Re:True Costs

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's because of the fact that MS uses proprietary formats or because FOSS solutions could not be bothered to be compatible enough does not matter at the end of the day. If I can not use Libre Office or Open Office (or anything else) to edit Word-generated documents and return them without formatting disasters, I cannot use anything else than MS Office products.
End of story.

I'm not sure if you're trolling or just an astroturfer, but you couldn't have chosen a more easily disproved line of bullshit.

New Office won't open Office documents from older versions. That's just a simple fact of life. Can't explain why, but I don't need to.

I have no problem with Libre Office editing old Word documents, none whatsoever. There have been a number of times that I've opened older documents in a text editor, removed all the extraneous formatting crap, and then pasted the remaining text into a new document.

Word is not as great as you explain. Also, we don't use Office products at my work - a TV station. We use Open Office.

End of story.

Re:True Costs

[bloodhawk]

Outlook nowadays is far more than just a mail client, in a properly configured environment it integrates everything from your mail, calendaring, lync, voice and collaboration. currently their is no easy match for a correctly configured outlook desktop experience for many users.

Re:True Costs

[Anonymous Coward]

no one has a response to this, because its so true it hurts them too much.

Re:True Costs

[serviscope_minor]

Outlook nowadays is far more than just a mail client, in a properly configured environment it integrates everything from your mail, calendaring, lync, voice and collaboration. currently their is no easy match for a correctly configured outlook desktop experience for many users.

Actually, I've found sticking forks into my leg while hitting my thumb with a hammer to be somewhat less painful than that comibination.

I can see why MS bought Skype because Lync stinks. I mean the idea is fine and sorta handy but it is a really flakey heap of crap.

And outhouse still deserves the name. For some reason they still make it nigh-on impossible to properly quote emails, so unless people are really careful it's hard to tell what is a reply and what is original text.

Seriously those tools stink.

But hey, integrated calendaring!

Re:True Costs

[Anonymous Coward]

Try some of the open source stuff in this area, they make MS seem positively flawless.

Re:True Costs

[L4t3r4lu5]

It's also a single point of failure. How much work could get done when your mail, calendaring, lync, voice, and collaboration are all offline at once?

Something something "eggs in one basket".

Re:True Costs

[TheRaven64]

If I can not use Libre Office or Open Office (or anything else) to edit Word-generated documents and return them without formatting disasters, I cannot use anything else than MS Office products. End of story.

You can only guarantee this with MS Office if you both have the same version of Office and you both have the same printer drivers installed, but MS marketing has been very good at convincing people to ignore this...

Re:True Costs

[Vlado]

That may be your experience, but it's not something that I've seen since the times of Office XP.

I develop lots of training materials that go through people on all sides of the planet in their revision/editing process. It's not very unusual for some to have Office 2008, others 2010 and some 2012. In all cases I do not remember formatting problems to occur. And that includes different regional settings and so forth.

And I'm not even sure what you meant with the printer drivers...

Re:True Costs

[fibonacci8]

I'll see your anecdote and raise you. Microsoft Works is still in use by people. Remind me again the ease of sharing documents between someone using Works and someone with Word, without formatting errors. Your memory is pretty selective if you're only considering Microsoft Office.

Re:True Costs

[gnasher719]

"virtually ANY change is highly disruptive"... you mean like replacing heirarchical menus with a dog's breakfast ribbon?

Before that: Arbitrary removal of menu items that the user hadn't been using in a while. Seems like an excellent idea (removing the clutter), but makes it impossible to find unused items. Until after ten minutes of search, clever users realise or ask someone who realises that Microsoft hides menu items.

Re:True Costs

[RabidReindeer]

That may be your experience, but it's not something that I've seen since the times of Office XP.

I develop lots of training materials that go through people on all sides of the planet in their revision/editing process. It's not very unusual for some to have Office 2008, others 2010 and some 2012. In all cases I do not remember formatting problems to occur. And that includes different regional settings and so forth.

And I'm not even sure what you meant with the printer drivers...

Office - and a lot of other GUI apps (not just Microsoft ones) - use the printer driver to do their typesetting, since it already knows about fonts and specifically the way that characters will be spaced when printed out. So why would a vendor spend a lot of effort duplicating those algorithms when it can borrow them? In the same way, printer drivers often borrow raster manipulation functions from the video driver, where they are already essential parts - and can on top of that, leverage the video card's hardware accelerators.

People don't see it as much now that soft fonts are the rule, but in the olden days before TrueType, an HP LaserJet printer might come with about half a dozen HP bitmap fonts built into its ROMs and the printer driver supplied by HP contained font metric information for those fonts. If you took an MS Word document to some other printer - even an HP printer with a different resolution - the font metric information would be different, and the on-screen (and print) page flows and line breaks were often severely disrupted.

Most of the "incompatibility" between the open and MS office suites comes from this characteristic. A lot of the re-arranging can thus be avoided by not attempting to use the word processor like it was a mechanical typewriter, forcing new lines and new pages via brute-force typed-in spaces and blank lines, using styling instead. Virtually all of the incompatibilities can be eliminated by using a soft font that's available to both Windows and non-Windows machines, if the problem is coming from transporting documents across operating systems.

Re:True Costs

[whois]

so it integrates mail and calendar, as well as two things you just made up that nobody uses?

Re:True Costs

[westlake]

I recently ran across a bizarre claim that the average office worker's time is dominated by outlook (duh) but that Microsoft Word was number two at a paltry few minutes per day, and Powerpoint even less than that.

No mention of Excel?

Not that it matters. You don't choose an office suite for the "average worker." You choose what best serves the needs of your clerical staff as a whole, whether it be ten workers, a hundred, a thousand, or ten thousand.

casual users needs can be met by a wide variety of FOSS projects

FOSS remains solidly anchored in the era of the stand-alone office suite --- sans Outlook.

While Microsoft positions MS Office as simply one component of an integrated office system that sales to an enterprise of any size. Microsoft Office 365 for Health Organizations

Re:True Costs

[BitZtream]

... you do realize that anyone who actually uses Office and tries Libre office knows your story is completely bunk right?

Libre Office is about as useful at opening and saving word docs as notepad and vi. If that works, good for you, but you didn't need Word or Libre/Open Office from the start anyway.

On wait, you knew that ... you're just being a douche and pretending documents are just text and formatting or other features are irrelevant.

Grow up fanboy.

If you don't need the features of word than other software will work just fine. Use the software that fits your needs regardless of who wrote it, but don't try this bullshit of flat out lying about. The real world disagrees with your fantasy.

Re:True Costs

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I supposed to know what a "lync" is?

Looks like a misspelt text-based Web browser to me...

Re:True Costs

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are using MS in a government institution, yoiu are probably also using Lexmark printers. It the bribes^h^h^h^h^h^h^h economy stupid!

Re:True Costs

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a bad idea to let any "Word-processor" to reformat the document according to the printer in use. Pain and suffering awaits those who open their 150 page thesis with the "Word-processor" so configured.

Re:True Costs

[Anonymous Coward]

> It's not very unusual for some to have Office 2008, others 2010 and some 2012. In all cases I do not remember formatting problems to occur.

That is true for Office 2007+, but not if you have Office 2003 in the loop, as I had the unfortunate experience. It can completely break all equations in the document, mess up styles, and ruin cross references. I don't think that LibreOffice is any worse, although I do know that it suffers from the very same problems.

Re:True Costs

[Anonymous Coward]

if you work in an enterprise that using the MS stack then yeah you would know what it is.

Re:True Costs

[bloodhawk]

Seriously you think nobody is using instant messaging and the telephone? well fuck me, I guess my organisation must be the exception as after email these are the next 2 highest use items.

Re:True Costs

[MikeBabcock]

I have a lot of customers who upgrade their PCs a few at a time ... as they upgrade, they get new versions of Office, and then inevitably call and complain about how the documents are changing or can't be opened by other users. Its not uncommon, and its really annoying.

Re:True Costs

[causality]

Perhaps the language from "across the pond" is hard for some US readers to parse. "Exploitation" meaning "use effectively" ...

Because as we all know, no one would ever use the fact that a word has multiple meanings to make a humorous statement. They can't possibly have done this intentionally, with full awareness of the intended meaning of the word versus the different meaning they are using in their humorous statement.

Thank God that never happens! Therefore you have done a tremendous and necessary public service by pointing this out. All of us would truly be lost without your guidance. You are to be commended, sir.

Between the repetitive memes and endless XKCD links ("obligatory" implies "redundant") on one end, and people who feel a need to spell out the obvious because they think they're so much clever than everyone else on the other (so it doesn't occur to them they might be interpreting it incorrectly), humor on Slashdot is on the decline.

Re:True Costs

[gothzilla]

The jump from Office 2003 to 2007 was the last time there were compatibility issues. We deal with a lot of very complex spreadsheets and word docs, and the only problems we see are with people who are still on 2003. Everything from 2007 forward has been compatible. I also haven't seen any issues with different print drivers in many years. I think you're working from really old information.

Re:True Costs

[BitZtream]

So is your computer, which would have all those apps on it even if you didn't use outlook.

So since you already have all your eggs in one basket, why exactly are you bitching.

Re:True Costs

[BitZtream]

If by nobody you mean a large portion of the large companies in the world, then sure ... nobody uses it.

Re:True Costs

[jbolden]

And I'm not even sure what you meant with the printer drivers...

What Raven means is that because Word is WYSIWYG the printing subsystem determines document layout. Change the properties of the printer driver and you change the document. For example most home / office printers can't print to the edge of the paper. If you are using a document formatted with no margin and then configure the document for another printer the entire document will reformat automatically as Word tries to avoid bleed. Try it. If that person then saves the original the reformatting will stick.

This is part of the difference between Word Processing and typographical systems which handle proof print and final output very distinctly and the properties of the document even in intermediate stages are aligned for the final output device.

Re:True Costs

[Agent0013]

I have had to use Open Office to open a Word document that was somehow corrupted and Word would fail to open it. By opening it in Open Office and then saving it to a new name, Word was able to open it again.

And I have not found something in a Word document that Open Office could not handle. That's not saying there are NO things, just saying that they are not used.

Re:True Costs

[Anonymous Coward]

"I'm not even sure what you meant with printer drivers..."

Which means you've never had to baby-sit 10,000 office suite users and their sad little lives inundated by pesky issues.

One of those pesky issues is THAT GODDAMN MICROSOFT WORD DOESN'T HAVE THE SAME VISUAL FORMAT ON ONE COMPUTER AS IT DOES ON ANOTHER YOU FUCKING TWIT.

AND IF YOU HAD EVEN ONE IOTA OF EXPERIENCE THAT RESEMBLED WHAT MIGHT BE LOOKED UPON AS A TINY TINY TINY SAMPLE SIZE THEN YES YOU MIGHT HAVE PEBBLE TO STAND ON. SO SHUT THE FUCK UP.

everyone else who has, knows that different versions of office, and different printers will change the viewed and printable format.

end of story.

Re:True Costs

[jimicus]

You are technically correct, but you miss out one important fact.

99% of the time, that does not happen. The last time there were major incompatibilities between versions were in the days of Office '95 - there were interop issues between '97 and '95.

Assuming you are not using a version of Office that's old enough to vote, you can exchange documents between Office versions all day long and never see a problem. Oh, sure, it can happen, but it's rare. So rare, in fact, that I think you'd have trouble finding anyone who's ever found it to be a significant problem.

You will absolutely not have the same experience between LibreOffice and Microsoft Office.

Re:True Costs

[Anonymous Coward]

Clippy?

Re:True Costs

[david_thornley]

Yup. That's why I do all my word processing in vim.

Re:True Costs

[gonnagetya]

If you have such contempt and hatred for your users such that you feel the need to mention their "sad little lives", I suspect it's you who's got the saddest of them all.

IT'S JUST SOFTWARE.

Re:True Costs

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps the language from "across the pond" is hard for some US readers to parse. "Exploitation" meaning "use effectively"

It translates just fine. He was making a joke.

Re:True Costs

[Anonymous Coward]

the average desktop has dozens of single points of failure, they are nearly impossible to avoid at the desktop level without insane expense. How much work do you get done when your network is down? how about your desktop? or even just your monitor? hell even the crappy $10 keyboard is a single point of failure that can take out a desktop for 1+ hours while help desk is contacted and provides a replacement.

Re:True Costs

[L4t3r4lu5]

All of those "apps" (services) are tied in to one central server (which may or may not be distributed / redundant) which is mandatory for their functioning. If that server fails, all of those services are gone for the entire organisation. If your client PC dies, nobody else would be affected.

if you don't get that, I'm not sure you're qualified to comment here.

Re:True Costs

[L4t3r4lu5]

All of those "apps" (services) are tied in to one central server (which may or may not be distributed / redundant) which is mandatory for their functioning. If that server fails, all of those services are gone for the entire organisation. If your client PC dies, nobody else would be affected.

if you don't get that, I'm not sure you're qualified to comment.

Re:True Costs

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be doing a very poor job at managing their networks then.

Re:True Costs

[rmdashrf]

Of course people are using those. It's just that a lot of people want to be able to pick and choose *which* tools they're using.

Also, just recently been forced to use Lync and the bloody chat history is in a fscking folder in fscking Outlook and can't be refererenced from the actual chat tool itself. That doesn't make any sense whatsoever.

And that's just one of several dozen idiotic design decisions. Don't get me started about the ribbon, combined with a non-sensical 'regular' menu in certain places. It's a hodge-podge of different styles. The UI designer should be shot, preferably several times just to be sure.

Re:True Costs

[MikeBabcock]

You have no idea how consulting works, do you?

I can tell them what the right thing to do is until I'm blue in the face, its still their money and their decision to make, and mine to work with.

Discrimination is swell

[Anonymous Coward]

I love the fact that proprietary solutions have to "work doubly hard", making people who sell the products they create second class citizens by default.

Freedom, baby. Free as in .. what?

not about cost in my oppinion

[Anonymous Coward]

I know the whole argument is centered around cost but it's not the point in my opinion. I use linux at our company because it's more catered to our needs and has many more advantages than price. I'm happy for Microsoft's OS to be the bottom of the barrel system.

Re:not about cost in my oppinion

[sjames]

It says cost, but the whole of TFAs boil down to MS is big and you can't depend on small vendors just because. So, ignoring Red Hat (reason not given) and IBM (reason not given), there are no large vendors of Linux. QED(ish, sorta).

Re:not about cost in my oppinion

[Anonymous Coward]

The irony is that RedHat has its UK HQ in his County (Farnborough) and IBM has a big R&D Site (hursley) just a few miles from his office.

And as a resident of Hampshire, I have to say that the County Council are a bunch of [redacted]. This guy is a perfect example of why they are cluless idiots with no real understanding of the real world.
It might be nice to have the chance to vote him out of office in a couple of weeks but his position is not one of those up for election. Sometimes the US way of electiong everyone including the Dog Catcher has its merits.

Re:not about cost in my oppinion

[BitZtream]

Redhat isn't large by any measure, and IBM only uses Linux as a gimmick to lock you into their proprietary items, they might get themselves in the door with Linux, but the rest of the time they're selling you things that are FAR more expensive than Microsoft and more or less REQUIRE you to pay for IBM consultants to get the mess to work.

Re:not about cost in my oppinion

[sjames]

Redhat is large compared to a council office.

Meanwhile, you act as if MS will actually provide anything for the money other than not suing you.

Re:not about cost in my oppinion

[Anonymous Coward]

>Red Hat
Costs just as much as M$

>IBM
Costs just as much as M$

There's your reasons.

Recruiting policy

[hcs_$reboot]

most staff are already familiar with Microsoft products

So the guy hires Microsoft compliant engineers and surprisingly they're most efficient on MS products. What isn't said is that probably that guy himself has always been a Windows user, and thus he prefers to hire windowsians. And there... I am not surprised. How would you feel hiring Linux people when yourself you don't have a clue about what it does and how it works. The thing is, Linux engineers would have no problem learning Windows stuff, while the opposite is more seldom. Hiring engineers interested in open source, Linux, openness in general would be more profitable for the company in the longer term, though.

Re:Recruiting policy

[_Shad0w_]

He's the CIO for a county council, when he says "staff" he means office staff and he's talking about Microsoft Office and Microsoft Windows for the desktop. His entire IT department probably fits in one fairly small room. I'm frankly impressed they haven't just outsourced the whole of their IT management; it's how councils here usually seem to work. Come to think of it's it's quite possible they have and he's actually the only person who works for the council directly.

Re:Recruiting policy

[VortexCortex]

Not to mention with Open Source there's no such thing as Win XP's end of life, and subsequent shift to the "buy updates for the bugs we already sold you" model.

The FLOSS model monetizes work on the software too. Only difference is that you only pay a FLOSS dev once for their work, instead of multiple times. Imagine if a mechanic adopted the proprietary software model.

Each person who drove the car would have to pay up for all the fixes done. To monetize the work done once multiple times he'd just put a coin slot where the ignition switch used to be.

Re:Recruiting policy

[msobkow]

No, instead you have the end of support for even LTS releases, and then you're hooped if the upgrade doesn't work.

Open source is definitely not superior to Windows in that regard.

I have yet to work for a company big enough to be rolling their own updates and patches, even though anyone could, in theory, do so.

Re:Recruiting policy

[Anonymous Coward]

What isn't said is that probably that guy himself has always been a Windows user

Or equally likely is that it is not said because your inference isnt true. Given that Microsoft dominates the market I would assume most people are familiar with Microsoft products, even those that may be more (or less) familiar with competing products like Libre/Open Office or the iWork suite.

and thus he prefers to hire windowsians.

Does not follow, in fact there really is no such thing except in the "us and them" perception of the world. Most people are quite happy to translate their personal computing tasks across applications and platforms from Windows to OS X to Android to iOS to ChromeOS and various Linux desktop distributions, very few people these days restrict themselves only to Windows.

How would you feel hiring Linux people when yourself you don't have a clue about what it does and how it works.

Hiring people to do the stuff you dont understand or want to understand is one of the very reasons you hire people.

The thing is, Linux engineers would have no problem learning Windows stuff, while the opposite is more seldom.

Have you not seen the vitriol on Linux boards, even on this website from Linux diehards against Windows? I think perhaps you need to take your head out of the sand.

Hiring engineers interested in open source, Linux, openness in general would be more profitable for the company in the longer term, though.

Again, does not follow. Just because the company uses Microsoft doesn't mean it has hired engineers that are not interested in open source just like a company that uses Linux is not necessarily interested in open source. Microsoft stuff can inter-operate with open source and vice versa.

Re:Recruiting policy

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing is, Linux engineers would have no problem learning Windows stuff, while the opposite is more seldom.

"no problem" might be a bit optimistic. I've never known a Linux sysadmin that passed up an opportunity to go on lengthy rants about the various real and perceived virtues of Linux and open-source software.

Re:Recruiting policy

[exomondo]

Imagine if a mechanic adopted the proprietary software model.

Each person who drove the car would have to pay up for all the fixes done.

No they wouldn't, just like each person who uses a computer doesn't have to pay for the operating system on it.

Re:Recruiting policy

[TClevenger]

No, instead you have the end of support for even LTS releases, and then you're hooped if the upgrade doesn't work.

As opposed to Windows 8 where upgrading isn't even an option?

Re:Recruiting policy

[AudioEfex]

That would be great if Linux IT professionals existed in any number to make it useful. Can you find one? Or even a few? Yeah, but it's not sustainable. Most engineers with a pedigree required for that kind of work are not going to be in nearly the abundance of those trained in Windows. That's the entire point - it would cost a lot more to headhunt and find those with the specific skills needed for such, when you can throw a Wiffle ball and find a half dozen qualified Windows IT professionals. And when they leave, you have to start again - that's the sustainability issue.

Re:Recruiting policy

[sjames]

How about small enough then? For a while, I maintained Debian 'Woody-Potato' for a 10 person shop.

Re:Recruiting policy

[colinrichardday]

Yeah, because Ubuntu is the only company that can support Raring Ringtail. Nobody else could possibly read the source.

Re:Recruiting policy

[phantomfive]

I don't know, there's a guy here on Slashdot who still supports software built on Motif, without any problem. That's the equivalent of being built on Mac Classic. And it will continue to work for the foreseeable future.

Re:Recruiting policy

[Anonymous Coward]

That's exactly right. I have seen many posts on this site about how Linux admins are paid more than their Windows counterparts so naturally that means that the administrative cost contribution to the TCO is higher for Linux than Windows.

Also it is great that I can develop on open source myself but do I employ developers to build new features or do I document what I need and contract a company to do development or if I use proprietary software the development is done by the vendor who spreads the cost over all their clients. I *may* contribute to the cost of things I dont need and others may contribute to the cost of what I need even though they dont need it directly and if there is something that I really need that isnt being worked on but I really need that I am willing to pay to have independently developed I can *usually* do it even with proprietary applications through the exposed APIs. In all they are about the same so I will favor the incumbent until there is compelling reason to change.

Re:Recruiting policy

[AHuxley]

"haven't just outsourced the whole of their IT management;"
That can depend on the security and police clearance. A lot more eyes are needed to track local issues on web 2.0 and social media at a town/city level.

Re: Recruiting policy

[TomBarders]

Try opening a Linux file system with any version of Windows. OK, that didn't work. How about this one, write a document in MS Office, save it in an open format such as .odt. Still nothing? Hmm. I can read Windows file systems, write to a .doc file, even install some Windows applications on my Linux box. If you prefer Windows, good for you. On this one though, your facts are backwards.

Re: Recruiting policy

[TomBarders]

The post didn't say the Linux admin would like using Windows, just that he'd have no trouble learning it.

Re:Recruiting policy

[cmurf]

It's hardly any different than the mainframe days when PC's were first appearing on the market. Who would buy a PC? No one can support it in the business environment! Fast forward to 2011 and you have a bunch of pay outs by the big mainframe support companies to get their mainframe specialists to retire early.

Re: Recruiting policy

[Anonymous Coward]

Try opening a Linux file system with any version of Windows.

My linux file systems are on my linux machines which I access over the network, works fine. There are also drivers for accessing ext file systems on Windows if you want to plug the drive in directly.

How about this one, write a document in MS Office, save it in an open format such as .odt.

Why? Just send it as a word doc or a pdf or upload it to gdocs.

I can read Windows file systems, write to a .doc file, even install some Windows applications on my Linux box. If you prefer Windows, good for you. On this one though, your facts are backwards.

I can read Linux file systems, write to .odt (if for some reason i wanted to, using LibreOffice) on my Windows box so my facts are perfectly valid, you are just uneducated on the subject.

Re:Recruiting policy

[ruir]

Lets face it, it is probably what he uses, all he knows, and all he wants to use. However from there to it is cheaper, it is a long stretch.

Re:Recruiting policy

[Anonymous Coward]

We're on our 2nd LTS upgrade where I work. It took us three weeks. No one noticed fuck all nothing.

The last Windows upgrade I was a part of took six months. Why? We had to fight an uphill battle because of legacy shit wouldn't work on the new Windows thanks to MS deprecating features it relied on.

Windows is DEFINITELY not superior to open source in that regard.

I have yet to work at or talk to folks that work IN a Windows environment where they haven't dealt with the same shit.

Re:Recruiting policy

[cmurf]

More like less expensive overall for the Hampshire County, rather than more profitable. I wonder what the 50 year archiving plan for Word, Excel and Powerpoint looks like for a government entity. And funny how email is already open source the way it flows on the Internet among MTAs but then as soon as it gets to a Microsoft Exchange server all of that data is now proprietary. Now the county is encouraged to use proprietary solutions to archive it and also index it for searches. All of this exact same software used the same way all over the world by all of these city, county, state, federal governments and yet instead of sharing the same code base that they all own collectively, no they each pay billions in licensing fees and SLAs to support closed solutions that they effectively rent.

Re:Recruiting policy

[cmurf]

Why doesn't the upgrade work? Oh you mean Vista. That's a really good point because that a huge part of the XP problem, is that people were scared shitless into not upgrading, so the fixation on XP was much stronger than it otherwise would have been. And now the upgrades to Windows 7 and Windows 8 are even more challenging for those XP users because it's such a huge change.

If you mean 5 years of Ubuntu LTS support isn't long enough, I think you can pay for longer LTS support from Canonical, and if not the Red Hat has a 10 year support program with feature enhancements, with an option for 3 more years of extended support. That's a long time. The hardware won't last that long.

Re: Recruiting policy

[bruce_the_loon]

Word 2013 does open and save ODT files.

Re:Recruiting policy

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using linux for 8+ years, I usually don't format my disks, and simply upgrade from release to release. And you know what? I've had few problems with upgrades (although some were serious, like a botched grub or some problematic video driver), that I ended fixing "myself" (report the bug, wait for a patch or a newer package) without having to reinstall the OS... because, being open source software, you can actually help to resolve the problem, by reporting the bug to your distro, by talking directly to the devs, etc. and they will be happy to fix them in a matter of hours. I even move my whole operative system from machine to machine without any problems.
You are too accustomed to the windows way of doing things, and you don't really know how to use linux.

Re: Recruiting policy

[Frobnicator]

Word 2013 does open and save ODT files.

And the organization-wide license upgrade from Office 2010 to Office 2013 is how much?

Re:Recruiting policy

[Bert64]

There's thousands of people out there who will claim to have windows knowledge, and the vast majority of them don't have the first clue. So you'd end up with an extremely poorly configured network just limping along (as happens in many places)...

Theres a lot less people claiming linux/unix knowledge, but the vast majority of those who make such claims actually do have such knowledge, and experience, and in many cases its a genuine interest for them rather than a 9-5 job.

Finding competent windows engineers is generally *harder* than finding competent unix engineers simply because you have many more incompetent ones to sort through first. And generally the most competent people have experience of multiple systems anyway because one of the key differentiators is that someone highly competent will do proper research and use the best tool for the job at hand, rather than just using what they're most comfortable with or what they think is expected.

Re:Recruiting policy

[dbIII]

That would be great if Linux IT professionals existed in any number to make it useful. Can you find one? Or even a few?

Try a place that has a CS department that is not sponsored by Microsoft and you'll find such a thing in close to 100% of CS and IT graduates since about 2005.

Re:Recruiting policy

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no company called Ubuntu, idiot. Do you also think "Macintosh" is a company?

Re: Recruiting policy

[exomondo]

And the organization-wide license upgrade from Office 2010 to Office 2013 is how much?

At a guess I'd say in the tens of dollars per seat, so if you lost even just 1/2 a days' productivity in the switch from MS Office to Google Docs or Libre Office or iWork you'd probably be in the red. Not to mention if you're using Exchange (and most large orgs are) you'd have to then buy Outlook standalone or alternatively find an email client that integrates well enough with Exchange to replace it or replace your email system.

Selling an alternative purely on a small cost advantage is never going to work well, it needs to be a disruptive and compelling alternative not a penny-pinching exercise. Organizations rarely want to risk throwing a spanner in the works for the cost of a few dollars so any alternative has to be more than a "similar but cheaper" product.

Re:Recruiting policy

[bhcompy]

It's much harder to find a good Linux admin than a good Windows admin. A good Linux admin also costs more than a good Windows admin. A good Linux admin is not nearly as uniform in how they implement their environments than a good Windows admin. Basically, Windows admins are cheaper, easier to replace without a complete reevaluation of the existing implementation, and Windows has better enterprise support to boot.

As someone who works in the public sector, I can tell you that the pay of the public sector does not attract good Linux admins. They'd rather go work for companies that will pay more handsomely for their services, like financial companies, biotechs, etc(where I live, at least).

Re: Recruiting policy

[Anonymous Coward]

Not needed. Office 207 and 2010 already support these formats as well.

Re:Recruiting policy

[Savage-Rabbit]

I don't know, there's a guy here on Slashdot who still supports software built on Motif, without any problem. That's the equivalent of being built on Mac Classic. And it will continue to work for the foreseeable future.

I support a few Motif apps at work. but what is this "without any problem" phenomenon you speak of?

Re:Recruiting policy

[Jack Griffin]

MS has 90% market share on the desktop. Whether you like it or not, that means 90% of the computer using population are already familiar with the interface. Now you may argue that French is a more romantic language than English, but if we already speak English then there has to be an enormous justification to get every single person to change. FWIW, I worked in a place that had Lotus Notes. Everyone hated it and wanted to move to Exchange, even the mail admins. But it would never get approved because there was no justification for spending millions (large org) to get the same functionality with slightly improved interface. That is how life works. The incumbent has an advantage.

Re:Recruiting policy

[emj]

I support a few Motif apps at work. but what is this "without any problem" phenomenon you speak of?

Indeed AFAIR Motif Apps were a problem back in the day.

Re: Recruiting policy

[yuhong]

I think they had much poorer support though.

Re:Recruiting policy

[phantomfive]

I support a few Motif apps at work. but what is this "without any problem" phenomenon you speak of?

Try a visual basic app and come back to me.

Re:Recruiting policy

[yuhong]

with an option for 3 more years of extended support.

Read the fine point, the 3 more years do not include any updates.

Re:Recruiting policy

[yuhong]

That is a different problem.

Re:Recruiting policy

[Anonymous Coward]

Hampshire County Council are trying to set themselves up as the place where other Councils outsource to. They've invested a lot in becoming an IT service provider.

Re:Recruiting policy

[L4t3r4lu5]

I'd have reservations between updating between LTS releases. Ubuntu LTS is a 5 year term; I wouldn't dare to guess how much has changed between then and now, especially as LTS is really just a snapshot-and-fork with ongoing maintenance, and the next LTS release will be based upon the next "new shiny". You may skip two LTS releases before your support period ends.

Re:Recruiting policy

[Xest]

You really don't have the slightest clue about what a council does or how big it's operations are do you?

I used to work for a council doing IT support. There are many things wrong with working for a council in terms of the fact it will sap your soul as you watch people get promoted based on whether they're over 60 and need to be given a higher paying job to pump up their final salary pension, or whether you generally just give a shit about doing a good job and get that beaten out of you because anyone who suggests improvements is shot down as a shit stirrer.

But I'll give them credit, one thing they're not is small operations, and if I took absolutely nothing else away from working there I did at least take away the fact that it was one of the more interesting networks I ever got to work on for it's sheer scale. Few private sector businesses give you the experience of scale and number of distributed sites and the level of network management that goes with that as a local council can.

We had around 10,000 desktop computers and laptops to support, we had a network that spanned many hundreds of distributed, and sometimes quite distant sites. You had fairly complex active directory setups because there was originally (later amalgamated) multiple IT teams - one for education, one for central services, one for social housing and so forth with a forest containing a top level domain run by central services and the other departments own domains branching off that. We had 100mbps pipes running from 170 schools to a central location that had it's own connection to the internet as well as a link to janet. You had links to youth centres, satellite offices for social services, for social housing and so on and so forth. Infrastructure for handling customer complaints, for managing property boundary data of every house in the district, for managing the births and deaths registers, for running elections and god knows what else.

As an aside, well, actually, more on topic, Microsoft invests a lot of time and money into wooing councils because they are such massive customers. 10,000 Windows and Office licenses and a hundred or more Windows server licenses as well as tons of exchange and SQL server licenses amongst other things is nothing to scoff at. Especially when there are hundreds of such local authorities in the UK meaning the net worth to Microsoft of capturing as much of UK public sector as possible is in the many hundreds of millions range at very least. I overheard our head of IT joking with a Microsoft salesman once about how they both fiddle expenses buying themselves more expensive meals and hotel rooms and services than necessary. My boss was set on a trip to Reading where Microsoft entertained them at a bar, with good time girl stood around using the sexual desperation of your average old boys club council manager to buy them over. Yes this shit really does actually happen.

A quick Google shows Hampshire County Council has around 40,000 employees. Some of these will be folks like bin men, but this larger than the council I worked for even, so I wouldn't be surprised if they have around 20,000 - 30,000 computers for those staff.

Councils are offloading a lot of services to private sector now, either selling them off, or just outsourcing the services. But the majority of councils still do IT in house.

I'm a developer nowadays working in private sector and am far happier for it, but if there's one thing local councils IT departments are generally not, it's small backroom operations.

Re:Recruiting policy

[rioki]

Then why did I buy a Windows 8 license? Why can I get a PC without an OS for less money than with an OS? Just because the OS is not explicitly labeled in your boxed PC does not mean you do not buy the OS.

Re: Recruiting policy

[rioki]

Learning it? In almost all cases an admin that uses Linux basically already knows Windows on the contrary a Windows admin, in most cases knows nothing about Linux. The reason being that almost all Linux users have used and administered Windows before. Also in most organisations it is either a pure Microsoft shop or a mix of everything. Mostly Linux in the servers and Windows and Mac in the desktops. So the admins will need to know about administering all the systems.

Re:Recruiting policy

[Sad Loser]

absolutely right
same goes for health
however the common theme is that the way that these organisations work is that there is no structure to pay competent FOSS IT people 50-60k a year to administer the network.

It therefore seems 'cheaper' to pay for Microsoft products and to have a bunch of low grade IT staff who can only cope with Microsoft products on 25-30k a year who end up running the helldesk, which casues more unhappiness.

IT staff are like classic cars. the cheapest classic car will always work out the most expensive.

Re:Recruiting policy

[Anonymous Coward]

How many Linux admins do you know? Three? Four?

Re:Recruiting policy

[TheRaven64]

How long you get support for depends on how much you're willing to pay and what you actually want. Most companies don't want 'no upgrades ever', they want:

• Minimal UI changes that disrupt work
• No upgrades that break their in-house software
• Hardware that works
• No unpatched security holes
  • The first is a problem for companies like MS, because they justify selling you the new version largely based on the UI changes: that's what consumers see. It's not a problem for a company that is being paid for support, rather than a product, because the lack-of-change is a feature in what they're selling you.

    For a corporate desktop, you don't need all of a typical distribution's packages and there are lots of companies that will happily back-port security fixes to older versions of a few hundred packages, if you want them. And if all that you're doing when you upgrade is installing back-ported security fixes then the updates won't break in-house software unless they rely on unsafe behaviour.

    The final requirement, working hardware, can be addressed by either only buying hardware that's certified by whoever is doing your software support, or by paying them to write or back-port drivers to whatever kernel you're running.

    With a Microsoft solution, you get UI changes whenever Microsoft rolls out a new version. You get hardware that works, as long as you're on the latest version of the OS. You get big upgrade headaches for your in-house software whenever you move to a new OS version (or a new Office version if you've written a load of VBA). And you get security updates right up until they decide that they want to EOL the software that you're on. Sometimes, they'll let you pay vast amounts to be allowed to have one year of security updates past the EOL date. Often, it's a hard cut-off date.

Re:Recruiting policy

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with companies and IT in general is incompetence. You shouldn't be using hardware dependent on proprietary software. It's no wonder it stopped working on you because some company in the chain of your hardware discontinued support for some component you were dependent on. It's the same thing in the Microsoft Windows world. But if your going to argue that you need long term stability where nothing changes GNU/Linux is getting to a point where it's better than Microsoft at that. Even Canonical has now extended it desktop long term release to 5 years. While that's nothing compared to XP's support there is also Redhat's offerings. The life cycle of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is 10 years for versions 3 and 4, while it spans 13 years for more recent versions 5 and 6.

My company sells GNU/Linux systems and we've never had any systems stop working from one release to another. Maybe they should simply replace what they're purchasing with what we're selling and then move to Redhat Enterprise Linux. Honestly though I think Ubuntu's 3 year LTS was more than adiquiate provided you purchased the appropriate free software friendly hardware as everybody should be doing anyway so that you can be guaranteed to be able to get the updated versions.

Re:Recruiting policy

[Carrot007]

> The thing is, Linux engineers would have no problem learning Windows stuff, while the opposite is more seldom

Totally not true. When you are talking about engineers.

The thing is a lot of windows people are not engineers they just know enough and do not want to know more. An engineer wants to know more. Unfortunately computing is not the only industry to be sullying to term engineer these days. (I look at boiler engineers that know nothing about boilers and just do what their big pop up boiler fixing book says, etc and so on).

Re:Recruiting policy

[Xest]

To be fair where I worked we did have a few Unix folk, although it was some ancient proprietary version. We did make some effort to use FOSS, but it all went out the Window when Mr Corrupt at the top took his Microsoft backhander or whatever and signed them up to Microsoft's software assurance programme. I was already gone by that point though.

Re:Recruiting policy

[RabidReindeer]

most staff are already familiar with Microsoft products

But has anybody told him that XP is no longer supported?

Where did they put "Network Neighborhood" on this version of Windows????

Re:Recruiting policy

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of councils do outsource their IT, its just around here (I live in Hampshire), most of them outsource to Hampshire Council Council, so they have quite a large IT department handling a lot of diverse systems for not only their own needs but the needs of the other local councils that rely on their services.

Re:Recruiting policy

[jaseuk]

Amusingly I was the competent FOSS guy brought in to our council, after a year or so getting into the reality of the environment, I actually recommended a Microsoft EA, rather than the muddle of Linux/Windows we were using. I couldn't do *everything* and there was minimal scope for investment in new staff / training.

The grandparent post and the guy at hampshire is absolutely correct, Open Source desktop / office offers no *cost* advantage in a typical council. Working in IT for a council is an absolute slog, the app portfolio is in the hundreds, all of which are "business critical" to some team or other. Faffing around with a Linux based Desktop or Swapping out Microsoft Office is a poor use of time, which you'll soon realise is impossible without either utilising Windows licenses anyway for a terminal services solution for non-compatible apps or where App XYZ uses VBA for letter generation / mail merge etc. Before you know it, your spending more in time working out who can and can't use OpenOffice than the license itself costs. Office is one app, and in itself it's not that business critical, except for perhaps Outlook/Exchange for which there hasn't been an obvious candidate for an OS replacement.

We do of course use Open Source where it makes sense. GIS is very much going open-source, we have a few dozen CentOS/Redhat Servers (firewalls/file servers/tomcat etc.) , including our Council Tax system running on Linux. We are absolutely not scared of Open Source or Linux, but it just has a limited role on the desktop.

Jason.

Re:Recruiting policy

[MikeBabcock]

Every grad coming out of our local college's IT program is versed in Linux and a number of other actually common technologies.

Have you talked to your local college about which programs offer Linux training so you can watch for those on resumes?

Re:Recruiting policy

[Sad Loser]

I can see your point.
In health we still have shedloads of horrible kludged Visual Basic and IE6 stuff around, which is why healthcare can't get rid of XP any time soon, despite being a viurs/ trojan/ worm magnet.
happy days!

Re:Recruiting policy

[gothzilla]

You changed the subject. AudioEfex wasn't talking about a ratio of competent to incompetent professionals. He's only talking about the competent ones and how there's a severe lack of competent linux professionals. If you do manage to find one, you're in a world of hurt if they leave. There may be a large number of incompetent windows professionals, but there's more than enough competent ones to make finding a replacement pretty easy.

Re:Recruiting policy

[BitZtream]

An oxymoron.

If it didn't have any problems it wouldn't need to be supported.

Re:Recruiting policy

[swv3752]

Use of Linux and Free software can be done and eliminate all use of Microsoft. Look at what Largo, FL has done: http://www.largo.com/departmen...

Re: Recruiting policy

[BitZtream]

Less than a weeks pay regardless of how little that employee is paid, in most cases, less than a days pay, if you're buying it in the box from best buy or some other retail store. An upgrade of any size from microsoft direct is ridiculously cheaper.

Seriously, bitching about license cost shows that you really have no fucking clue what it takes to run a business or even the IT department.

Re:Recruiting policy

[BitZtream]

So you'd end up with an extremely poorly configured network just limping along (as happens in many places)...

Just like most 'linux admins' are some guy who installed it on his home PC and then does nothing but browses the web all day.

Linux admins are no better in ratio than Windows admins, they just whine and bitch more.

Re: Recruiting policy

[Anonymous Coward]

Utter horseshit. It seems like every piece of software I have to deal with that comes from Linux-land seems to fuck something up fundamentally about how Windows actually works.

Re:Recruiting policy

[who_stole_my_kidneys]

Linux engineers would have no problem learning Windows stuff

Quite the opposite, I work with allot of high caliber Linux engineers , and one of the most difficult challenges is getting them to understand windows and how operate it. When they continually try to 'grep' files instead of using power-shell, 'ls', or even 'nano' a text file. They tend to flock to OSX that offers them and environment that is more like the environment they are used to.

The over all issue, repeated here is that Windows admins are cheaper than Linux admins. Any Linux admin worth their salt is not going to take the low paying desktop job that a college grad might take as a first real world job.

Re:Recruiting policy

[swv3752]

No, Linux admins contribute less to TCO because Linux requires fewer Admins per hundred servers.

Re:Recruiting policy

[cmurf]

What do you mean by "any updates"? ELS updates include security and major bug fixes, from year 10 to year 13. For any minor dot release you can choose EUS to extend the support for that minor dot release rather than upgrading to the next dot release.

Re:Recruiting policy

[Anonymous Coward]

No wonder Council Tax is so high.

Re: Recruiting policy

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing. Most large companies (in my experience) are using enterprise agreements with software assurance. In this case, we only care how many PC's are running Office, we don't care about which version of Office is installed. So we can upgrade at our pace, one at a time as PC's are replaced, 10% per month, a department at a time, one big roll-out - any way we choose to migrate.

Re:Recruiting policy

[yuhong]

ELS is only available for RHEL3 and RHEL4 which would otherwise have only 7 years of support, and it covers only a limited number of packages. Read Red Hat's lifecycle page.

Re:Recruiting policy

[colinrichardday]

OK, Yeah, because Canonical is the only company that can support Raring Ringtail. Nobody else could possibly read the source.

Re:Recruiting policy

[Anonymous Coward]

XP in healthcare is a HIPPA Violation. that shit needed to begone yesterday.

Re: Recruiting policy

[Anonymous Coward]

wait are you trying to install a program that was designed for Linux on a Windows machine? of course it wont work.

Re:Recruiting policy

[exomondo]

Then why did I buy a Windows 8 license?

I don't know, what's that got to do with the analogy? If the PC were a car then each user of the PC doesn't have to pay for the OS just like each person who drove the car would not have to pay up for all the fixes done to it.

Why can I get a PC without an OS for less money than with an OS?

Because the one with an OS comes with an OS which costs money...duh.

Just because the OS is not explicitly labeled in your boxed PC does not mean you do not buy the OS.

Obviously...what's the point you're trying to make here?

Re:Recruiting policy

[mpe]

That's a really good point because that a huge part of the XP problem, is that people were scared shitless into not upgrading, so the fixation on XP was much stronger than it otherwise would have been. And now the upgrades to Windows 7 and Windows 8 are even more challenging for those XP users because it's such a huge change.

XP to 7/8 isn't really an "upgrade". There is no easy way in which you can take a working XP machine and convert it to 7/8 with a fair chance of having all the applications still work as they did before. Even if you could there would still be UI differences to trip up end users.
Such a move is far better described as a "migration".

Re:Recruiting policy

[mpe]

We're on our 2nd LTS upgrade where I work. It took us three weeks. No one noticed fuck all nothing.

Which is the way things actually should be :)

The last Windows upgrade I was a part of took six months. Why? We had to fight an uphill battle because of legacy shit wouldn't work on the new Windows thanks to MS deprecating features it relied on.

IME changes in such functionality between Windows (and Office) versions tend to poorly documented. This may be part of the reason it took you so long.

I have yet to work at or talk to folks that work IN a Windows environment where they haven't dealt with the same shit.

How often are these the people making the decisions (or waving around TCO numbers)? Another issue is that there appear to be a fairly large number of "Windows only" sysadmins. Who don't have anything to compare it with.

Re:Recruiting policy

[Xest]

Honestly you're dead right, contrary to whining by the unions many jobs in local councils are grossly overpaid - your minimum wage secretary gets the national average wage, which is about two fold increase on the private sector going rate for the largely unskilled role.

As I say, IT support guys get as much as 32k for the bottom of the rung jobs that get only about 18k in private sector.

This is before you factor in the massive amounts of out and out wastage.

This is why it makes me really annoyed when we see shit like "Oh, well, we've got to cut down on collecting your bins because we want to upgrade from Office 2007 to Office 2010 this year". Of course they don't say that last bit, but that's exactly what they fucking mean.

The problem is there's zero accountability in councils, you can literally blow £1million on a pet project, completely and utterly fail, and still get a promotion a week later. I'm not pretending this shit doesn't happen in private sector sometimes too, of course it does, but the magnitude of the problem in British councils is such that you could cut council tax and central government council funding in half, possibly more, and still not require any reduction whatsoever in services IF, and it's a big if you can do something about the vast amount of idiots, and the massive amounts of wastage and overpayment.

Re:Recruiting policy

[jaseuk]

Largo did this 20 years ago, and never got into Microsoft. They are very quiet in these summaries about technology use, but they use IBM AIX / SCO unix / Oracle / Linux solutions for their business applications These are not "free beer" or even "open source". They are also using a Citrix Metaframe on Windows, so they still need Windows Server CALs, RDS CALs and so on for these users, it's unclear to what extent access to these services are required, but 8 servers should easily host 100-200 concurrent users, so this implied that for most if not all users were still utilising Windows licenses.

We are still also not comparing like-with-like. A US City Council doesn't have the same remit as a UK Unitary Authority / County Council. We have responsibility for Education (From 3 years through 19, plus lifelong learning), plus social workers / care for 3-DEATH, including residential homes for seniors and life-long care for the disabled. This somewhat complicates the staffing and application portfolio.

I've used - although it is being phased out now - a Linux based thin-client OS for our Windows Terminal Services / Citrix Environments. I wouldn't however try to claim that this is a significant use of Linux or Open Source on the Desktop.

Shrug

Jason

Re:Recruiting policy

[vandamme]

So get a rolling release if you're too lazy to type "sudo apt-get upgrade" every 3 years.

Familiarity

[Anonymous Coward]

The real problem is familiarity.
Users use MS at school and they use it at home as well.
And that's what they expect to work with when they start working for a company.

Same thing why XP just won't die.
Change needs to be subtle and gradual for most people to accept.

Re: Familiarity

[Anonymous Coward]

Users are not the problem. We have plenty of switch stories where users learn quickly.

Re: Familiarity

[exomondo]

Users are not the problem. We have plenty of switch stories where users learn quickly.

Right, but users will adapt when there is a reason to do so. Look at how users adapted to the smartphone concept as we now know it when the iPhone was released, because it was a compelling and disruptive concept, people moved from the existing smartphone concepts to Android/iOS devices because they were significantly more appealing to the end user and provided a better user experience. The desktop Linux distros and free office suites suffer from a problem of not being disruptive in their respective markets and instead argue back and forth over the numbers in Total Cost of Ownership calculations...how compelling!

Re:Familiarity

[JaredOfEuropa]

Switching from old school Office to the horror that is the Ribbon, is as much of a step as going to LibreOffice is. I've seen plenty of people (mom & grandpa types) switch with no training and no issues. A Linux desktop might be a step too far though, and it's likely some people will need special software only available on Windows.

Windows+LibreOffice is a great combo. My question in this case would be: is there anything that comes close to the functionality of Outlook + Exchange, either as a completely separate stack or Exchange server + a 3rd party client?

Re:Familiarity

[Anonymous Coward]

Switching from old school Office to the horror that is the Ribbon

OMG it's like toolbars but properly categorized, tabbed and with names rather than just grouped icons randomly all over the place! The horror! What are you actually struggling with in the ribbon concept? For corporate drones perhaps the learning experience is quite daunting but take a look at say the manufacturing industry with applications like Creo and Inventor or perhaps AutoCAD with its myriad of add-ons for particular industries or the film and gaming industries with the likes of 3ds max, nobody even batted an eye when those industries moved to ribbon interfaces. But here its all corporate IT people telling you how they know office workers that hate the ribbon in MS Office. Nobody actually seems to be having as much trouble as a lot of people here make them out to be.

Re:Familiarity

[emj]

I've never understood what exchange+óutlook actually gives you, please enlighten me. I supported a couple of houndred people using exchange in grad school, the most complicated question I got was how to make your address book sync properly. It might be all those extension that people write for Exchange, which sync to strange places.

Re:Familiarity

[JaredOfEuropa]

Those extensions can be very handy; we have extensions that automatically set up conference calls and/or book rooms when scheduling a meeting. Also: the ability to check other people's agendas is important; when trying to schedule an appointment with a large group of people, Outlook provides an overview of every participant's availability.

Re:Familiarity

[Anonymous Coward]

I've heard this one dozens of times - it was sold to me as the reason that Internet Explorer is used by more people than Firefox, yet for some reason at holiday time Firefox has an explosion (at least, a /. article from a few years ago said as much).

Re:Familiarity

[DogDude]

The real problem is familiarity.

That IS a problem! I'd much prefer to use some tiny open source product that changes constantly. That's a much better business decision than stupid consistency!! Sheesh!

Re:Familiarity

[Anonymous Coward]

Two-Three years back I would advise to try Zimbra. I successfully migrated company from Exchange 2007 to ZCS 6 (around 150 users in three cities). Users basically didn't notice anything, Zimbra supplied plug-in (only in paid version) for Outlook so it basically thought it's connected to Exchange. Other users used Thunderbird+Sunbird combo and I used Zimbra client and everyone was happy. Same functionality as Exchange, but far better logging and administration GUI / CLI.

Although I hear Zimbra was bit fucked up after they were bought by VMware, I only tried ZCS 7 (1st VMware release) as demo and it looked solid, but I haven't seen it in production.

Re:Familiarity

[BitZtream]

Switching from old school Office to the horror that is the Ribbon, is as much of a step as going to LibreOffice is

No, not even close, your projecting what you have issues with and what you want to happen onto others.

I've seen plenty of people (mom & grandpa types) switch with no training and no issues.

Thats only because you are choosing to redefine 'training' and 'issues'. There are most certainly issues and a person who transitions from one to the other (regardless of direction) is going to have issues.

Pretending there are no issues just shows you're inability to have a valid discussion.

depends on your application.

[Anonymous Coward]

Centralized user login, and two-factor authentication, you're pretty much going to be stuck with either Red Hat Directory Server, or MS Active Directory server. RHDS is going to run you about $15,000. The same MS AD install will be significantly less. This is only one example. I would say that things like Sharepoint and Exchange are pretty outrageously priced. But if you keep it simple, MS can be fairly cost-effective.

On the other hand - the logistics of managing Windows licenses is pretty insane, compared to open source system deployments.

Re:depends on your application.

[Jack Griffin]

Last MS Exchange deployment I did (years ago) ran about $4k for the server license and about $100 per user (from memory). And that server could run up to 1000 mailboxes. Expected life of an Exchange Server (software) can be well over 5 years, so you're talking peanuts per year. It isn't even worth arguing the license cost. The biggest benefit is Exchange Admins are a dime a dozen, and if they go away I can get a guy from any of the millions of IT support companies to walk in off the street and maintain it with no issue. Good luck having that same business continuity with your home-brew flavour-of-the-day Linux distro that some neck beard has setup his own unique config that needs an equally ugly neck beard to try and decipher if he happens to leave the business. Never mind arguing the user interface issues from some flaky email client that doesn't do the half the stuff Outlook does seamlessly, and doesn't plug-in to all the cool cloud stuff everyone has these days (Salesforce, dropbox etc). Say what you want about everything else MS, but Exchange and Outlook are a best of breed product (ignoring your single use case and taking into account how real businesses use email/collab apps)

Re:depends on your application.

[Buzer]

Centralized login to what? To Windows there's also at least Novell OES + eDirectory + Novell Client. To Linux you can use PAM with RADIUS for example.

Re:depends on your application.

[Anonymous Coward]

what this "home brew flavour of the day" crap? Off the top of my head I can think of only 4 linux companies for
enterprise; Red Hat, OpenSuSE, Canonical and Oracle. Its not like you're going to download an old version of say PCLOS and go with it.

Re:depends on your application.

[Anonymous Coward]

1000 mailboxes? whoa. The internet is shaking in awe.

Re:depends on your application.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Say what you want about everything else MS, but Exchange and Outlook are a best of breed product"

Im calling bullshit on this. I administer an Exchange environment with over a 1000 users and there is no way we can provide the amount of storage, backup, clustering and high availability as say Gmail can for less cost. It's not even close money wise. Open Outlook and "search current mailbox" and then open Gmail and search for something. Again, it's not even close.

Mathematics

[johnsie]

The cost of a Windows and Office license is quite high. Doing a few Google searches to find out how to use Linux & Open Office is alot cheaper than that. Yes, there are some cases where a user will need special apps that aren't free, but most desk jockeys spend most of thier time in Word, Excel and faecesbook. Windows isn't necessary in most cases.

Re:Mathematics

[guacamole]

The cost of a Windows and Office license is quite high.

Just as many others, you haven't gotten yet the main point of the article. The cost of the software license is often a relatively small part of the cost of using software. Training the users is also part of these costs.

And by the way, the effective cost of Windows and Office licenses to businesses, government, and universities is much lower than the listed MSRP. When I worked in IT, the license prices was the last thing that worried us. The guy who did installations and setup probably charged more than what the software actually cost to buy.

Re:Mathematics

[Billly Gates]

Yeah AD with 25 inherited GPOs and legacy IE crap was more expensive than desktop apps just to give these horrible sites to run. I am not talking about IE 6 era sites even.

Complexity is a killer.

However without a stable ABI and API I can not say Linux is better either. Drivers break way too much as a result of the extreme ideology of forcing opensource and killing blobs. This makes NVidia only support later kernels or ignore older hardare and screw users.

Re:Mathematics

[AudioEfex]

Oh, don't go using logic here when it comes to open source vs. Windows with this crowd. If you listen to some folks here, even your Grandma should be using Linux.

There is a good reason that Linux has what, a 2% install base? It's because to start you have to "pick" a distro, to begin with. Windows is Windows. There may be varying grades of the same product, but it's all...Windows. It all seems so simple and straight-forward to the "open source or die" crowd - hey, if one doesn't work for you, try another - and they completely miss the point that it's the very issue, to begin with.

Of course, it goes far beyond that - compatibility with devices, user friendliness, ability to get support (I guess Grandma can join the local Senior's Linux User Group?). When it comes to business, those concerns multiply - the fact that there are so far fewer Linux IT professionals than Windows IT professionals exist. And because Linux is inherently so customizable and requires so much tinkering, you lose the wrong employee and you have to bring someone new in, it may be a nearly impossible task for them to get up to speed on what already exists, much less fix issues, unless the employee that has gone has extensively documented what has been done before.

It's not like Linux is the little engine that could, just chugging along waiting for everyone to discover it. It's not a diamond in the rough. It is the rough. I certainly have a lot of issues with Windows, but for the vast majority of users and businesses it just works - and that's for very good reasons. As much as we criticize everything being run by MS, that's also why it works - it has one governing body, unlike Linux, where you are basically out there in the wilderness when it comes to getting support.

At this point, even after so long, it's a niche - and even the tiny gains it has here and there for certain applications is never going change that - and it's going to remain a niche, for folks who like to tinker. Most people use computers as a tool, and don't want to spend just as much tinkering with the tool as just using it. All Linux would change for the majority of users in a practical sense is less compatibility and more headaches. I get the principle of open-source software, and it's noble - but ask anyone, nobility really doesn't win in the end, most of the time - it's great for folks that want to use it, but to expect the rest of the world to do so is simply a fantasy because for how most folks use a computer, it's more trouble than it's worth.

Re:Mathematics

[cmurf]

It really depends on the software. Windows itself, negligible. Office, not much more. Specific software for an industry though, easily it's the salary for two or more engineers that could have been hired to work on the open source equivalent for your industry. They can make the overall code base better, thereby increasing the viability for everyone, and they can also add specific features just for your company. The various Service Level Agreements the IT department has, to support things they don't know enough about, are also expensive. And there isn't just one SLA. Even governments have SLA with NetApp for something basic like storage, which is rather ridiculous they don't have such on-going specialized need available in-house.

The cost of archiving if you're a government is probably significant also. I think it's malfeasance for governments to use proprietary document formats for anything. The vast majority of their internal documents, which are not public facing, are in proprietary Word, Excel, and Powerpoint formats. Anyone who wants to read them must have that software. How is this going to be read in 10 years? Government archivists are probably printing this shit out, medium term archiving the paper, and long term if deemed important enough it probably still goes on f'n microfische because asshats like this CIO insist on using software that stores data in proprietary formats.

The real issue isn't cost of licensing. It's cost of freedom to access your data at any time in the future, and do whatever you want with the software. You own your copy of open source software. You don't own Microsoft Office. It's licensed. And for Office 365, it's not perpetual. If you stop paying, you lose access.

Re: Mathematics

[TomBarders]

If you're using the nvidia drivers in an enterprise setting, I really hope you're doing graphics intensive work. If not, nouveau drivers work perfectly fine and support older hardware.

Re:Mathematics

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is your buying the wrong hardware. It's no wonder it isn't working. If you buy a Mac why would you buy MS Windows-only hardware? It makes no sense. It's the biggest failure to understand free software I see among GNU/Linux users. Those non-free components cause just as much headache on Microsoft Windows. They hold back adoption of new operating systems, software, an efficiencies. There are countries which have actually deployed GNU/Linux on the desktop in massive numbers and not run into near the problems spouted by these guys (and really the FUD Microsoft is spreading via fake TCO studies) .

It's not just the licensing that is the problem. Microsoft hasn't maintained a consistent user interface either. And if there is any argument that GNU/Linux is harder to adopt then the next version of Microsoft Windows I'm going argue that Microsoft Windows and it's line up of software is significantly harder to adopt than any version of desktop GNU/Linux.

Re:Mathematics

[Anonymous Coward]

The cost to train users is overblown, IMO. We're an all Mac shop of 150 workers. Customer service and office types make up the bulk of our staff (100ish alone). The rest is technical staff. I knew fuck all about Mac desktop computing and had little issue getting into it. Granted I'm a nerd that will dive in. But over half the staff is predictably more experienced with Windows and we've had zero folks that are fed up with or loath Mac OS X. They just learn how to do feature X that they need and move on.

It's something I've actually discussed with other folks that have switched to Linux or Mac in their offices of the same size. It was bumpy at first perhaps, but it didn't seem to nosedive productivity. Folks kept on iterating and producing.

That training costs and loss of productivity are that bad seems more like a myth and a scare tactic.

Re: Mathematics

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you mean costs like teaching XP users how to use Windows 8?

You could install Linux boxes and just run Windows in a VM with some reservation logic so that the number of license seats isn't over reserved. No training needed, less licenses needed as not everyone would need to run Windows.

The training costs... How big do you think they are? Hint: they are one-time costs and negligible to the TCO involving upgrades and new computers required by the upgrades, the IT guy to patch the systems all the time.

The article is just a rehash of the old "get the facts" garbage from Microsoft.

Microsoft is slowly dying out and will be irrelevant in 5 years.

Re:Mathematics

[vux984]

It really depends on the software. Windows itself, negligible.

Yeah, provided you are buying PCs with it installed OEM, and you time your migration to the hardware refresh cycle its not even something to think about.

Office, not much more.

See... I find Office VLAs stupidly expensive for what it is: Word/Excel/Powerpoint/Outlook; Software Assurance is bonkers on top of that, and I hate dealing with VARs instead of directly with MS (or just doing it via the bloody website) on top of that. And now Office 365... I HATE subscription access.

Re:Mathematics

[mark-t]

One of the biggest problems with Open Office that I've noticed is that familiarity or even fluency with it generally isn't considered a marketable skill if one is actually trying to get an office job. Companies want to see Office... Excel... Powerpoint. Open Office will just leave them going "meh". And to be honest, I've seen plenty of evidence that fluency using open office isn't particularly transferrable to using Office and its tools.

Re:Mathematics

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're sending your staff off for training on how to use MS Word for the 2-3 minutes a day mentioned in another post, then you're just ripping yourself off.

If you have staff who, having used OpenOffice a few times, are still asking you where the button for 'Bold' is, then those staff are fucking you around.

Re:Mathematics

[Anonymous Coward]

And the costs required with complying with those licenses? Get one more user with FOSS, and they're off to the races within an hour. Have to buy another license? Oooo, that could take days, once the purchasing department gets involved.

Furthermore, what does it cost when the BSA comes calling for an audit? Hmm?

AC

Re:Mathematics

[Anonymous Coward]

a single hour of training cost is generally MORE than the total licensing costs when you are talking about enterprise desktops. I am positive it took you more than an hour to pick up everything in Mac OS X, so unless you value time at Zero in your organisation then their is considerable cost for even basic training.

Re:Mathematics

[louic]

Training users to type a text in an office application and save it? I think it is time to start firing some people and hiring new ones, seriously.

Re:Mathematics

[feedayeen]

Windows 7 is about $100 and Office 2010 is $200, total cost $300. An office worker making near minimum wage costs $10/h. If that office worker loses 30 hours of labor, it becomes worth while to buy the software. A reduction of productivity by just 2% over the course of a year amounts to 40 hours of labor lost.

A non-productive worker actually costs much more than their hourly wage though, benefits, employer taxes, facility costs also which roughly double that cost to $20/h. We can safely assume that it'll take a few hours to get acquainted with new software, after words your productivity returns to it's previous value, but if that learning curve costs just 2 work days they've come out behind with a cost of 20*8*2=$320.

Re:Mathematics

[Anonymous Coward]

TFA is about UK public sector, firing is practically impossible, and would cost way more than all the MS licence costs for any user right through to retirement.

Even outside public sector, firing someone for failing to be able to use a tool without training opportunity probably breaches all sorts of employment laws. In the public sector the users will _not_ be able to use the new tools without at least two-weeks offsite training expenses-paid (and some of them won't be able to even after that) - attempting to deviate from that reality (as employer _or_ as an employee) will get you into big trouble with the unions. Big _expensive_ trouble with the unions if you are the employer.

   

Re:Mathematics

[asylumx]

Go figure the parent got modded "Troll." How disappointing.

Re:Mathematics

[Anonymous Coward]

Reminds me of the time I had an XP Pro validation problem. Microsoft leaped right up to the table and told me "Tough shit, reinstall it. We don't care about the issue, we know about it and aren't going to fix it. We don't care that you've paid for support."

Yeah, that Linux activation is a real cunt compared with this kind of professional support, isn't it?

Re:Mathematics

[mikechant]

TFA is about UK public sector, firing is practically impossible,

Yes, it's so impossible that only 631,000 public sector jobs have gone since 2010. With about another 400,000 currently scheduled.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/u...

Yes, it's a left-wing paper. The 631,000 figure is correct and undisputed though.

Re:Mathematics

[ausekilis]

To say nothing of the training between MS Office versions. Office 2k3 and Libre/OpenOffice are very close analogues of one another. When MS Office 2k7 came along with it's "ribbon" interface, my work had a hayday with getting all the users used to 2k3 up to speed with how to do their job in 2k7. Hell, it even took some of the more savvy folks months to remember where things had moved to and involved a lot of clicking around the ribbon and scanning for whatever it was they were looking for. It's arguable that instead of 2k7 they could have moved to LibreOffice and done away with the training, and saved ~$100 per seat. When you have some thousand users, that savings would add up.

Re:Mathematics

[cmurf]

Yes I'm assuming PC's with OEM installed Windows and that's also an option for Office, but maybe not for VLAs. Expensive for what it is? Well, yeah but that's only because with the VLA you're paying a lot extra for a lot less insane license key management compared to the retail version. They've made license key management for retail copies essentially impossible, it's that impractical and why people pay more per unit for a VLA.

OpenOffice and LibreOffice, there's no license key to manage, let alone a license cost. Either we're talking about irrational decision making by companies who persist in using software with the deck stacked against their interests. Or the Microsoft Office has necessary functionality that OpenOffice or LibreOffice do not, like maybe macros. And no one wants to deal with the user revolt with a forced change.

And yes the subscription access I think is untenable because cloud. Why should any medium or large business in the U.S., let alone outside of it, have their documents on someone else's infrastructure? And why is IT management swallowing this bitter pill even though it's not in their best interest to be on a monthly/annual fee based platform? If they were ever to want to move down the road to a new platform, they couldn't quite cold turkey. They'd have to keep on paying possibly for years longer than necessary because, oops, no more persistent license.

Re:Mathematics

[vux984]

Well, yeah but that's only because with the VLA you're paying a lot extra for a lot less insane license key management compared to the retail version. They've made license key management for retail copies essentially impossible, it's that impractical and why people pay more per unit for a VLA.

This.

And that's I think why I find it SO offensive. I'm paying extra, like close to double, for the same damned thing simply to avoid 'license key management' grief.

But I'm buying in volume; its a VLA; and usually buying in volume gives you a price break, but in the case of Microsoft Office -- not so.

If I'm looking to buy 100 users of MS Office in a VLA for a small/medium office it should not cost twice as much as buying 100 boxes of MS Office Home and Business at BestBuy. Yes, I benefit from the VLA key and ease of license management, but I shouldn't be paying twice as much for that, if anything it should be CHEAPER, especially when I'm looking to hand you tens of thousands in licensing in one transaction.

Re:Mathematics

[cmurf]

I'm not terribly sympathetic because it's basically a company saying "Oh you want ____? OK well ___ my _____".

But instead of responding with, "Umm, yeah so there's this phrase coming to mind and it's something like, please go ____ yourself, I'm not doing that." Instead it's, "Wow that really does suck, so just exactly how wide should I open... "

So tell me why some companies are being such complete wusses about this. Why do some of them still they think the arrangement they're agreeing to is supposed to be fair? And when they think it's not fair, why do they still agree to the arrangement? They don't do this with their primary business transactions, so why are they tolerating it with software?

Looks like Collabora charges $10 a pop for an SLA. If you wanted you could also contribute something to the Document Foundation which doesn't just operate LibreOffice but also supports the Document Liberation Project (no matter what, we're all going to need to take advantage of document conversion eventually), or hedge your bets and contribute something to the Apache Foundation (OpenOffice).

Linux developer arrogance

[Eravnrekaree]

I am a supporter of Linux and open source and truly want it to be a success. I admit, however, that sometimes the arrogance of Linux developers is holding Linux back from acceptance. Such as refusal to have a compatability layer for binary driver compatability between kernel versions and the refusal to allow users to use binary drivers. For instance, I have heard that many Linux developers wanted to drop support for floppy disks, "because few Linux developers have floppy drives", despite there being tons of floppies around that users may need to access. THat says it all about the mentality of some Linux developers, they dont care about users, are arrogant, live in a bubble, are elitist and sort of think of Linux as their private club and sort of want it to be hard to use, because it makes them feel special since they are able to endure the pain of using it.

Re:Linux developer arrogance

[Anonymous Coward]

Case in point from an earlier comment:

"The thing is, Linux engineers would have no problem learning Windows stuff, while the opposite is more seldom."

Re:Linux developer arrogance

[Anonymous Coward]

For instance, I have heard that many Linux developers wanted to drop support for floppy disks, "because few Linux developers have floppy drives", despite there being tons of floppies around that users may need to access.

Well, if you know about how things work in the linux world, you should also know that drivers have to be maintained, no? Who is, then, maintaining the driver for your floppy? Are you? Are you paying for it?
You know there is a lack of workforce for linux, right? There is a (obvious) lack of resources.
As this post says, try installing drivers for Windows XP in Windows 8... How about installing XP in a Win8 system? Or vice-versa?

THat says it all about the mentality of some Linux developers, they dont care about users, are arrogant, live in a bubble, are elitist and sort of think of Linux as their private club and sort of want it to be hard to use, because it makes them feel special since they are able to endure the pain of using it.

Some are elitists, but I think most wish they could do better to keep making linux the best OS out there.

Re:Linux developer arrogance

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a supporter of Linux and open source and truly want it to be a success. I admit, however, that sometimes the arrogance of Linux developers is holding Linux back from acceptance.

Perhaps because not all Linux developers are seeking for Linux to gain acceptance? That may be because of arrogance. Or it could be that they, you know, are developing Linux for people who use Linux. They're not marketers trying to comb the crowd on how best to mold Linux to lure people in. They're not businessmen trying to gain market share. They're just people who have a system they use and want to make it work best for them and like minded people--aka, other developers who are willing to put the time and energy into it.

Such as refusal to have a compatability layer for binary driver compatability between kernel versions and the refusal to allow users to use binary drivers.

For the former, that comes in many flavors from the fact that there's a desire to have as much source code as possible to tinker with--they're developers after all--to the fact that the Linux kernel is consistently being rewritten in massive scales that, left with a compatibility layer, would leave anarchistic messes all over the place--plenty of developers are troubled enough keeping the user space ABI going. For the latter, users can do whatever the fuck they want. That's the beauty of open source. Now, if a user *does* use a binary driver and then has a problem, sure, the developers will likely refuse to help because (1) they very well might not be able to help given they don't have said drivers, (2) trying to disassemble said drivers is a major hassle, and (3) the above does nothing to work towards improving whatever open source equivalents they may exist and ends up being a very particular distraction from their efforts to further develop the system.

I mean, sure, it can be a fun little game of psychic detective trying to guess why, yet again, the binary ATI driver black screens at this specific time with this specific app under these specific circumstances. But odds are good only AMD can do anything about it to really fix the issue anyways, as they have the source. Meanwhile in Windows land, you're in the same boat of trying to file a bug report or post on a forum somewhere and crossing your fingers that an AMD engineer reads it or someone else with a similar problem knows of some magic fix.

For instance, I have heard that many Linux developers wanted to drop support for floppy disks, "because few Linux developers have floppy drives", despite there being tons of floppies around that users may need to access. THat says it all about the mentality of some Linux developers, ...

Heard from whom? And even if it's true, so what? Just because "many Linux developers" want something doesn't inherently mean much of anything. Linus has final say on what gets dropped from the main tree. Now, if Linus were discussing it, then it'd be an issue. And to that end, I do agree it's annoying at times when features get dropped. But even in that circumstance, you have the real possibility of using an older tree if features get dropped, just like how Windows can drop features and you can use an older version there. Or are we to pretend there aren't people who still want to keep using their Drivespace drives?

... they dont care about users, are arrogant, live in a bubble, are elitist and sort of think of Linux as their private club and sort of want it to be hard to use, because it makes them feel special since they are able to endure the pain of using it.

No doubt true for some. But all of what you said basically describes basically all developers to some extent. They care about their users, but they don't necessarily kiss ever users ass when it comes to fulfilling feature requests. There's a sort of arrogance to "well, just write it yourself if you want it so

Re:Linux developer arrogance

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously? You are going to sit here and deride folks for not providing free software that works the way you expect? For not taking the opinion of folks that don't speak up and express their view into consideration?

IMO, the problem is less with the Linux and open source community and more of a cultural one. In the US especially, convenience is king. So long as shit works the way I've been trained to expect it, the better. Nevermind that I've not contributed in a meaningful way. Won't stop me from grousing about how my unspoken opinion on the matter wasn't taken into consideration at the relevant moment.

Re:Linux developer arrogance

[linuxrocks123]

Got a link for that? Linux supports oodles of ridiculously obscure hardware, and support is rarely removed. Yes, they dropped 386 (not 32-bit x86 ... literal Intel 80386 as opposed to 80486) support some months ago; that was a special case because the weirdness of that architecture was permeating the kernel ... but a standard floppy disk drive? I can't imagine they'd be dropping support for that. That support most likely lives in some driver file somewhere and takes approximately zero developer time to keep up to date.

Re:Linux developer arrogance

[Microlith]

Such as refusal to have a compatability layer for binary driver compatability between kernel versions and the refusal to allow users to use binary drivers.

This isn't arrogance. It's acknowledging that things that belong in the kernel should be in the kernel. In the case of Linux, it's drivers. The only thing that binary drivers get you are hard to debug crashes, vendor dependence, and driver interfaces that must now be maintained ad infinitum. It won't save you from anything in the long run.

I have heard that many Linux developers wanted to drop support for floppy disks, "because few Linux developers have floppy drives", despite there being tons of floppies around that users may need to access.

You have, huh? Given how many "Linux developers" (since we're being vague) conduct all of their discussions in public, can you track this down to some reliable source or is this merely hearsay?

have heard that many Linux developers wanted to drop support for floppy disks, "because few Linux developers have floppy drives", despite there being tons of floppies around that users may need to access.

Sounds more like you're out to beat up strawmen.

Re:Linux developer arrogance

[louic]

This may be partly true, but the main issue IMHO is that there are two types of "user friendiness":
- the "windows" type of user friendliness makes easy things easy and everything else hard or impossible. The software decides what is best for you.
- the "linux" type of user friendliness makes easy things a little bit harder and everything else possible. You decide what is best for you and your computer follows your instructions exactly if you talk to it in the right language

Compare this to a coffee machine:
- Machine 1 has a single button and makes reasonable espresso when you push it. EASY! But it is not possible to adjust the water temperature and the grain size
- Machine 2 has the potential to make excellent espresso, but it obviously requires more maintenance: someone needs to set the grain size of the coffee, the water temperature, etc. Most people will get their settings wrong and blame the machine. Is it arrogant of developers to think that these people are incompetent? No, it's the truth (they may be good at other things not related to coffee but that is besides the point here).

So what is the point? Linux and Windows are different and have a different purpose. Linux can behave like windows (Ubuntu comes close, which is why I do not use it) but Windows can not behave like Linux and it does not want to. There is no need to compare because it is not a competition. Each of them suits its purpose and the article above states that for this particular purpose Windows is more suitable. Great.

Re:Linux developer arrogance

[Kirth]

"because no windows developers have 'this kind of hardware anymore'.

The reality is, Linux supports much more older hardware than windows does. Because drivers are vendor-produced, they don't tend to upgrade them when new versions are out (and their product isn't on sale any more). So you end up with tons of scanners, drives, printers, and what have you, which can't be made to work on newer windows versions. Which run just fine on even the newest linux versions.

Re:Linux developer arrogance

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it is easy to assert that anybody who does not cater to your specific needs is arrogant. But the same can be than said about yourself.
I say 'specific' needs, because I work in IT more than 20 years and I have not seen anybody use floppy disk for at least last 10 years.
(The only exception when trying to install windows on raid array, then you are really SOL without a floppy, when we are talking arrogance already)

Re:Linux developer arrogance

[lippydude]

"I am a supporter of Linux and open source and truly want it to be a success. I admit, however, that sometimes the arrogance of Linux developers is holding Linux back from acceptance. Such as refusal to have a compatability layer for binary driver compatability between kernel versions and the refusal to allow users to use binary drivers

Linux developers don't disallow binary drivers, they just don't include them in a distro as this would violate the Open Source license. There's nothing preventing you from downloading and installing such drivers.

Re:Linux developer arrogance

[TheDarkMaster]

This. I have a very hard time developing for Linux because of things like that. On Linux I can not count on a stable API, practically every month something changes in such a way that makes my application crashing or behave erratically, and when I can make the necessary changes some bastard changes everything again. Is a no-win scenario, on Windows things just work (i have a stable API) and they hardly make any change that makes my application crashing.

Re:Linux developer arrogance

[swm]

I heard an interview with Torvalds where they asked him why there was no kernel ABI.
He explained that the reason people want ABIs is so they can link object code into the kernel w/o releasing the sources,
and then that code breaks, and he ends up having to debug kernels with incomplete sources.
And he doesn't want to do that.
So no kernel ABI.

I don't know that I'd call that arrogant. Selfish, maybe...

The good news is that because the Linux kernel has no ABIs,
the sources are all necessarily available,
which means that you can get the sources, and fork them, and add ABIs, and create a binary driver compatibility layer,
so that people can link in drivers w/o sources,
and then you'll be running a kernel with incomplete sources,
and then....ummm....wait....what was the good news again?

Re:Linux developer arrogance

[higuita]

Why do you want a binary level compatibility? what are you missing? the last big missing part is the 3D drivers, but open source ones are getting better fast, thanks to the work of intel and amd... even nvidia is reusing their work. With that compatibility layer, i'm sure that the open drivers would never show up... and wel all win if the drive is open instead of closed

Many people in LKML say many things, but the floppy is still there... not everyone agree with those "cleaning tasks" and linux still supports very old hardware. Most of the time it is only removed if is already broken for a long time or is "blocking" something new

Re:Linux developer arrogance

[hackus]

I think you are confused.

Binary drivers are what windows is.

If you want that sort of reliability, you are free to use Windows.

As for caring about users, care means the users listen to the engineers and basically do what they are told, in exchange for that obediance, you get a more secure and more bug free experience whlle working.

Excuse me, but isn't caring for users suppose to be that?

In contrast with Microsoft who unilaterally holds you for ransom and discontinues it's products and ORDERS YOU to empty your wallet.

Re:Linux developer arrogance

[Anonymous Coward]

Your coffee machine analogy is great. We have been using more and more Linux here in my office. I recently tried to setup VNC on a CentOS box. I am a competent software developer, but still a novice when it come to Linux, but I thought I would give it a try. I have learned that this is not a simple process, you need to install packages, then edit config files, all the while praying that the instructions you are following on the web are good/close enough for your flavor of Linux. After all that is done, there are firewall ports to be edited by hand, and you need to setup individual users, by name, and they get a fixed resolution when they do finally connect. If you need to add more users, you need to configure those files again. It took me an hour to get it running the first time, and still takes 15-20 mins to configure on new machines. To setup Windows RDP, you click a few options, and create a group for the users that need the access. We added those options to the domain group policies, so they are automatically configured when a new machine joins the domain.

Re:Linux developer arrogance

[Anonymous Coward]

In contrast with Microsoft who unilaterally holds you for ransom and discontinues it's products and ORDERS YOU to empty your wallet.

Do you say that because you just want to feel persecuted? You are never "held for ransom", that's just bullshit, you can move to Linux or FreeBSD or OS X whenever you want and you know it. All companies discontinue their products, in fact the majority of open source applications on github and source forge are abandoned too. Also they never ORDER YOU to empty your wallet so clearly you aren't talking to Microsoft, you are just easily fooled and are a very weak-willed individual content to knuckle-under no matter who may ask it of you. You could switch away from Microsoft anytime you want to, we all know this .. but you don't want to, you want to feel persecuted and victimized so you keep using Microsoft and buy anything they offer for sale under the guise that you were somehow forced to do so.

Re:Linux developer arrogance

[Anonymous Coward]

Floppy - source? Udisk dropped support, but not the kernel. Binary drivers are just plain wrong, if you want once play nice and get it to work with user-space + a stub.

translation:

[Anonymous Coward]

commenter would rather make a conspiracy theory to explain away inconvenient evidence.

Sounds like they put an PHB in charge of IT

[Anonymous Coward]

He abuses the same buzzwords that liberal arts managers love to use to sound important. He sounds like he's been sold by MS-sales' song and dance.

Re:Sounds like they put an PHB in charge of IT

[SalafranceUnderhill]

He'll have been invited to some nice conferences; given an all-expenses-paid trip; stayed at a nice business convention venue where he's had the chance to shag some other random corporate/government flunky.

XP Patch

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that why Microsoft just released an XP patch after it had ended support, because Linux had a bug?

Re:XP Patch

[Anonymous Coward]

You host web sites on Windows XP?

Re:XP Patch

[goarilla]

According to this https://technet.microsoft.com/... only the server core versions
of the server products (2008,2012) did not have a vulnerable IE version included by default.

Re:Mod parent up

[Billly Gates]

This is why myself and Hairfeet no longer support Linux for average users.

I do admit I was more of a FreeBSD bigot but after 5 and 6 were so bad and I stayed with 4.x all the way to 4.12 I kind of gave up :-(

I do not care about RMS extreme ideology about freaking drivers. I WANT THEM TO JUST WORK. Why can't apps just work between versions like MacOSX, Solaris, FreeBSD with the compat libs, and even Windows?

I can click on a setup.exe from the XP era and unless it is a horribly written business app requiring local admin (more like win98 style written) it will run on Windows 8 no problem.

Why do ATI drivers from 2 years ago not run on Linux? ABI and API compatibilities as Linux developers feel that is evil and encourages binary blobs! Funny no other platform has this problem with them.

Socialist ideology about everyone that is closed source is harmful I know lets purposedly not include a stable ABi so things break when I do an apt-get update to force ATI and NVidia will just work. That is the ticket.

These companies are still struggling to make win 7 compatible apps and only care about the latest versions. My ATI drivers from 2011 will not work on a modern distro., Therefore I am choosing Windows and sticking to Linux for a VM. I might piss some some Slashdot moderators but I speak the truth. Why can't a stable ABI and API exist so one thing can just work? It is freaking 2014?

No such thing

[Pro923]

As an efficient worker with Linux. Most people spend all of their time dicking around with things that should be seamless and simple. Sure, they did all kinds of "work" that day, but people pay for products - not the 50% of the time that the developer spends screwing with something as complex and do-it-yourself as git.

Re:No such thing

[dltaylor]

Not counting the pointless hours I've spent trying to find ANYTHING in Visual Studio, and that is even IF it can do what I need done. It is always faster to look it up on the 'net than use Microsoft's useless "help".

Re:No such thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Eh? It's quite simple.

If it involves using loads of shittily-designed APIs with massive bloat, odd-duck conventions and that pervert the idioms/simplicity of whatever they are being called from , you'll get that right from auto-complete..

If it needs anything in C past C89 - forget it (OK, VS 2013 is better).

Anything POSIX is likely to be half-assed. Program #ifdef on your keyboard.

Re:Windows Linux for small business

[markdavis]

How the above post could possibly be modded up for any metric is beyond me.

Possibly.

[khasim]

"Microsoft gave us a 98% discount in exchange for this article."

Possibly. But there's enough weasel-room to reach his claims without that.

1. Lock-in: If his systems are already running MS software (which they probably are) is the cost of data migration counted against MS or is it counted against any alternative?

2. Hiring/Training: Is his office paying for training and certification OR is his office REQUIRING that anyone applying ALREADY have certification.

3. Discounts: Once you have 1 & 2, is Microsoft offering discounts just big enough to come in under the cost of migration?

Re:Possibly.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Microsoft gave us a 98% discount in exchange for this article."

Possibly. But there's enough weasel-room to reach his claims without that.

1. Lock-in: If his systems are already running MS software (which they probably are) is the cost of data migration counted against MS or is it counted against any alternative?

2. Hiring/Training: Is his office paying for training and certification OR is his office REQUIRING that anyone applying ALREADY have certification.

3. Discounts: Once you have 1 & 2, is Microsoft offering discounts just big enough to come in under the cost of migration?

All good and dandy, but how much is it going to cost them over the long haul? You talking continual fees from MS, plus depending on what MS does with their OS you will have to upgrade or install the newer versions.. You compare that to the cost of migrating to Linux, which should be a one time deal, and the money you save in the long run.

Is MS going to start cutting deals with government ran offices so they can hang on to their monopoly and then pass on the price difference to Jane/John public?

You make good points...

Re:Possibly.

[tylikcat]

More helpful doesn't seem that unlikely, especially since it's not made explicit who exactly Microsoft is more helpful than. There's also always the question of what numbers he's using. Microsoft has been claiming to be more inexpensive for some time. They have numbers. There are certainly business who have moved over to OSS and had very different experiences. I don't even know that it's not true for organizations where the primary computer use is a desktop / laptop environment and users aren't particularly technical.

I'd like to think not - anyone have case studies? But that's the environment I understand the least. I moved most of my less technical family members onto Ubuntu years ago, and they're much happier with it - and my sister, who still describes herself as not a geek, is cheerfully working at the command line and modifying config files and hacking scripts. But they're my family. (Also, Synaptic is about the best thing ever for them.) But then, I still have a lot of friends who will tell me at length about how much better MacOS is, and I find it profoundly irritating to use. And Windows irritated the ever living crap out of me even when I was working for Windows. So there's clearly something I'm not getting.

Re:Possibly.

[Anonymous Coward]

The lock-in for desktop systems tends to be with users, not vendors. I'd rather have a few thousand front-end users be productive using Windows and Office than have to dump an OS alternative in front of them and retrain them. That's where the big cost is, and I don't mean the training either, I mean that the users will simply be less productive using tools they are less familiar with. And what's the long term benefit there? Principles? Being Anti-CS? being Pro-OS? It's not the right tool for the job.
 
Plus many OS alternatives are only 'as good as' their CS alternatives, sometimes inferior, rarely superior and when it comes down to that, it becomes a futile argument in big business, unless your requirements are in a vertical sector using custom software, or exceedingly simple using OTS packages.

Re:Possibly.

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Not only that but...

"'The point is that the true cost is in the total cost of ownership and exploitation, not just the license cost ."

This has been Apple's position on the Mac line for 30 years -- that, when you factor in needing a lot less training for Apple products, Apple is a lot cheaper than the "cheaper" PC.

Re:Possibly.

[Anonymous Coward]

" I moved most of my less technical family members onto Ubuntu years ago, and they're much happier with it - and my sister, who still describes herself as not a geek, is cheerfully working at the command line and modifying config files and hacking scripts"

Cool story bro... Do you have any horseshit tales to share about your grandmother using Lynx to shop on-line?

Re:Possibly.

[smash]

I could give my less technical relatives a tablet and they'd be perfectly happy. Being suitable for browsing the internet and maybe doing internet banking is nothing to brag about. I'm guessing you've used MacOS for a few minutes at a time with a hatred of apple from the outset. If you actually try and get things done with it, and look beyond "oh i can't customize the fuck out of this UI", there's a lot to like. It took a couple of weeks for OS X to "click" for me (and I was a Linux user between 1994 and 2006 - exclusively for personal use between 94 and 03). Going back to Linux now feels like stepping back in time 30 years.

Re:Possibly.

[tylikcat]

Well, no. At one point years ago my mother was trying to Lynx from a terminal window on her rather ancient Mac, and it ended poorly. (I never really did figure out what happened. She said the sysadmin told her she accidentally released a wild lynx on the server. I can only say what I was told.) She then went on to use Windows for some years (mostly because she could get me to get her software from the company store) and about seven years ago, when I was in town and showing her my new Lenovo tablet with an Ubuntu install got as far as Synaptic and said "I want that OS. I want it right now." So I posted a note to LJ, and within a few hours a friend produced an install CD, and the rest is history.

Re:Possibly.

[tylikcat]

More than a few minutes. The head of our lab is an Apple fan, so many of the lab machines are Macs and I end up doing a fair bit of server admin stuff. So, for some weeks at a time I'll be using them so several hours a few times a week... and then I'll go for months without. Of course, the less painful part of that is done remotely, which barely counts. (My first mini was a 512K Mac when they first came out. So I have fond memories*, and certainly maintained a preference for Macs through my Microsoft days, though I'll admit not being thrilled by many part of the business model.) And, of course, there are a lot of programming and analysis tools that we end up using on Macs - not even to mention helping my research students set of Python or whatever environments on their own machines - though they do tend to be open source tools and set up often seems cumbersome compared to working in a Linux environment.

What I haven't done is used them heavily as my main boxen for an extended period of time. And it's possible that might clinch it for me. Though one of my closest friends in the department made the experiment and ended up installing linux on her apple laptop after some months of trying to learn to love OSX, and we tend to have similar aesthetic tastes.

* Admittedly of things like my father convincing me to learn Modula 2 from German documentation because he thought it would be the next big thing and then I could teach him.

Re:Possibly.

[tylikcat]

Oh, and so not a "bro".

Re:Windows Linux for small business

[lsllll]

Seriously? I admit there are some thing that are just easier done in Windows than Linux, like my Galaxy S3's photo's being transferred to my PC. I don't evern recall not being able to open a MS Word document in Libre Office, no matter what the version of MS Word the document was saved in was. I also do not agree that the UI on Linux is behind Win XP, let alone 2K. I use XFCE on all my Linux boxes and have never had a problem doing anything graphically, although I'm more of a command guy to begin with. Both my daughters have been using Linux on notebooks (yes, notebooks, no issues with wireless or anything) for a very long time (4-5 years). The only time they had issues was when they used to save presentations when they were in high school (a few years ago) and had to make things work in Powerpoint.

At the end, it's not the few hundred bucks you're saving. It's rising against tyranny when it comes to the PC O/S. I hated buying Dell notebooks and having to pay for Windows. Even though those copies of Windows were already paid for, I elected for my daughters to use Linux on the same notebooks. I always thought of it as using a different language at home. They'd know Linux, but they'd learn Windows through their friends anyway and at the end would know both, which they do.

The ONLY thing Linux couldn't do well was gaming. One of my daughters wasn't into gaming at all. For the other one, she had a desktop that ran Windows so that she could play games, knowing that I would never help her with a Windows problem if she strayed and started to use the Windows machine as her main machine. She never did. She confined it to gaming, and I was happy, because I knew if she used it as her main machine she'd end up with tons of malware. She got the best of both worlds.

Re:Mod parent up

[armanox]

I'm going to have to agree with your idea on this one - the GNU ideology is the problem. I don't care about all the politics that RMS does - I want stuff to work. I like a lot of things about Linux, but when it comes down to it, Solaris, BSD, and IRIX are all just as nice for what I'm after.

Which has lead me to advocate against desktop/laptop Linux, and I've even moved away from it on some of my personal servers (work is all still RHEL and Windows, which I can at least count on RHEL 6 to work for quite a while.

Wrong side of history

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish this guy was the CIO of some company whose stock I could short.

Re:Mod parent up

[Billly Gates]

It could be complexity too.

It is hard when you have many apis and libraries all changing all the time.

I think CentOS/Redhat offer something like this, but not for the average Slashdot geek. I like the idea of an equilivant of the SXS in Windows. You have dynamic loading of apis and .so's and the linker links the right one at run time. Today Linux requires each one to work and will segfault or crash otherwise if you have the wrong .so or dependency.

This will make storage larger but you wouldn't have issues like wanting to use the latest gimp, but still run Gnome 2. hmm problem here etc.

Re:Mod parent up

[phantomfive]

Why do ATI drivers from 2 years ago not run on Linux? ABI and API compatibilities as Linux developers feel that is evil and encourages binary blobs! Funny no other platform has this problem with them.

Man, I'd be happy if we could get a commitment to source-level backwards compatibility; let alone binary compatibility. Some of those library developers are vicious in culling old programs.

Help Wanted Linux Medical Assistant/Secretary

[Anonymous Coward]

General office work & clerical duties such as answer phones, typing, faxing, copying, scanning, data entry, drafting correspondence, sorting mail, etc.
45 word per min.
Must know Linux/Ubuntu and have Working knowledge of Open Office: Writer, Calc and Thunderbird.

How much more would this Linux secretary cost vs a windows secretary.
A new $700 computer with windows and a $400 copy of MS office cost $1100. If you upgrade every 3 years thats less than $400 per year.

By my math if the Linux secretary cost $0.20+ per hour more than the windows you wont be saving any money.
Most Software/hardware is cheap compare to the cost of employees.

Re:Help Wanted Linux Medical Assistant/Secretary

[MightyMartian]

I'm not clear here, does Linux use some different keyboard and file system paradigm than Windows?

Re:Help Wanted Linux Medical Assistant/Secretary

[ruir]

I have seen a whole company switch to Linux, and the secretaries seem to manage it all right...

Re:Help Wanted Linux Medical Assistant/Secretary

[vandamme]

If you put the XP background on it, they probably wouldn't notice it wasn't Windows. Interestingly, the Tails distro has a "XP" mode that copies the whole desktop, icons, start button and all. That would be a great prank...

Re:Mod parent up

[exomondo]

I do not care about RMS extreme ideology about freaking drivers.

The reality is most people do not even know about that ideology and ultimately the attempts to sell the idea are on the basis of it being cheap: gratis, not libre.

I know there is this whole "locked in" deal but who really feels that way? I haven't had any problems working across multiple operating systems and devices. The vast majority of the web is obviously platform agnostic, pictures, movies and music are all easily moved back and forth across platforms and even sending documents is no problem. Sending a word doc to somebody who doesn't have MS Word? Well there's functionality in word to send it as a PDF or you can upload to something like Google docs which does a pretty good job at importing for most things. For regular users where is the lock in? The only time I've ever found the issue of platform lock in was switching phone platforms and not being able to move my SMS messages to the new phone.

Re:Windows Linux for small business

[Anonymous Coward]

First time I installed Linux was about 15 years ago. Last time I installed Linux on a machine was 5 months ago. It never lasts.

Sorry to hear that, but then I have the same feeling. Using Windows for any length of time in any serious way is pretty torturous. Windows 7's dock/grouping is an inane joke at best. File copying is a mess--mostly due to a combination of hidden copy dialogs and the way in which they lock one or the other underlying Explorer window. Trying to actually get things organized in the Start Menu is closer to a bad game, of which I *still* don't get the logic of trying to organize it all with the intermix of system wide vs user vs default. *shrug*

Every Linux UI I have ever used is behind Windows XP and even Windows 2K.

*cough*IceWM*cough* Seriously, Windows 8 is worth than Windows 7 is worse than Windows XP is worse than Windows 2k. And Windows 2k is no stellar example of a UI. It's just at about the tipping point where it got worse.

Yes, there are some with pretty graphics but from updates to software names to installation, Linux is just a pain in the ass to use.

Windows updates? A joke at best. A cacophony of per-program update tools--Microsoft Update is just great...if you only ever use Microsoft programs, which you probably don't. Software names? Yep. Microsoft Word is...what does that even mean? Installation? Well, did it come as a .zip or an .exe or an .msi? Will it demand installing DirectX yet again? Hey, is it even safe to run two installs at the same time--hint, most Linux package managers won't allow you to attempt it if you're using the main distro installer which, like the mentioned file copying locking thing, is simultaneous a point against Linux disto since it should be able to handle the scenario more graciously than a "lock held" message. Overall, it doesn't take much to find all sorts of "pain in the ass" in Windows. It's about the same as Linux. Pick your poison.

If all I did was browse the web, it would be fine. However, I need Word. Word, not Libre Office (which is about as good as AppleWorks). So what? I'm going to install WINE?

Well, then why are you trying to run Libre Office or AppleWorks if you need Word? Are you stupid or something?

I don't think I have the patience for all the hoops just to avoid shelling out a hundred bucks. Or a few hundred for the Apple tax.

A good rule of thumb. You shouldn't use Windows instead of Llinux or Mac OS X or Linux instead of Windows or Mac OS X or Mac OS X instead of Windows or Linux to save money. That's about the least motivational reason to do anything. The only real exception is if you're the sort of person who gets such pleasure out of saving money, no matter what. If you are, go with Linux or FreeBSD or OpenBSD or a variety of other free options. Otherwise, start first with what you need and go from there. I mean, your post is as stupid as if I were to bitch that Windows doesn't run the Linux version of Firefox well, if at all.

Right now, I have one machine not working. It runs Nas4Free. Yay open source!

Just one? You must be a young'n. Hardware faults abound to cause all sorts of issues on many old systems--bad hard drives, bad power supplies, and sometimes bad GPUs. I don't think I've ever blamed Windows or the various proprietary firmware for my woes. BTW, Nas4Free is based on FreeBSD. So, besides the "open source" tangent...not really Linux related like the rest of your post.

Re:Mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

My ATI drivers from 2011 will not work on a modern distro., Therefore I am choosing Windows and sticking to Linux for a VM.

WTF?? Sorry, why do you want to use your ATI drivers from 2011? Sentimental reasons?
What am I missing here?

Meanwhile, on the technician frontlines

[Kremmy]

Over the past month or so I've run into a number of cases of "slow internet" which turned out to be compromised XP machines. Not just a simple case of malware or botnet action, but cases where people have went so far as to replace their ISPs to mitigate their "slow internet" when the reality is that the malware is just hammering it THAT hard. This is just not cool, some of these people have spent more money on Microsoft than I care to think about, and I can't in good conscience ever honestly recommend a Microsoft solution again after seeing how bad some of these cases are. The great thing is that for the portion of my customers who went with the upgrade cycle, they're getting the full glory of Windows 8 and my god how many just want 7 back. It really is XP/Vista all over again...

Re:Meanwhile, on the technician frontlines

[Boronx]

Only box I ever had with a rooted was a linux box. Some a-hole turned into a spam server.

Re:Meanwhile, on the technician frontlines

[Anonymous Coward]

Your argument is flawed.
 
I think you'll find the people benefitting there are the ISPs, not Microsoft. I mean, those people haven't exactly "spent more money on Microsoft than I care to think about" at all, they haven't spent any money with Microsoft for at least 13 years... and at the end of the day, regardless of who makes something and what it is - badly configured Linux install, faulty car, dodgy plane, if you don't maintain it, or understand how it works, problems occur.
 

Re:Meanwhile, on the technician frontlines

[the eric conspiracy]

anecdote != data

Re:Meanwhile, on the technician frontlines

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a people problem, not a tech problem. If the same people ran linux, they'd find a way for their machine to get infected.

Re:Meanwhile, on the technician frontlines

[Kremmy]

Your response is flawed.
These people are not solely running Windows XP machines that they bought in 2001. That's incredibly ridiculous, if that's an honest thought that might be where the perceptive issue we have here comes from. You could buy a new machine with Windows XP from OEMs in 2009. Many people, even up until the beginning of this year, were explicitly requesting Windows XP rather than Windows 7... which is still entirely possible to give them by putting compatible hardware from the same major vendors in a box. It's just not worth it from the support perspective anymore. XP isn't just some ancient relic, it's an actively deployed and mission critical system and the migration work is severe. The shops I'm talking about have Windows 7 machines because they expanded their network, not because they replaced perfectly functional hardware. They have Windows 8 machines, again, because they've EXPANDED their system, not replaced functional components. OH HEY, WHAT ABOUT THE WINDOWS 8 UPDATE FIASCO. WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO TELL A CUSTOMER WHO INVESTED IN MICROSOFT IF THEY WERE HIT WITH THIS CRAP?
Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair is a universal truth, it doesn't matter what system the user is using because the user WILL screw it up, but Microsoft's systems are houses of cards and they're starting to fall down around people. Hard. This can't last.

Re:Mod parent up

[ruir]

You cant be serious. I dont give a single care to GNU whatever, and also use Mac in the desktop, however linux in the server side is strong and excellent.

Re: Mod parent up

[TomBarders]

Try installing an ati driver for Windows xp in Windows 8. How about your printer driver, will that work? Your old webcam? Scanner? Sound card? Floppy disk drive? Zip drive? I recently was helping fix a friends computer (no browser Internet access. It's using Windows 7 and I verified it's a software problem, not hardware). During the process, I plugged in your basic flash drive with a few portable apps so I could scan her whole drive. Windows failed to find a driver the first time and took at least ten minutes the second. I booted her machine into a live Linux environment (puppy Linux), and it immediately found the flash drive. Sure, Windows drivers are better. /s

Sure...

[edibobb]

Sure, if you consider the bribes, campaign contributions, lobbying gifts, and other payouts.

Re:Sure...

[MightyMartian]

Not to mention the software and licensing fee hikes that small and medium sized businesses have endures so Microsoft can sell heavily discounted licenses to large organizations to bring that magic TCO down.

Re: Windows Linux for small business

[TomBarders]

Maybe you could explain why you "need word"? I've worked for companies which " need word " before. I could open their files just as easily (more quickly as well) in libreoffice. If you have a special case, i'm sure we'd all love to hear about it.

Re:Mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't work because you continue to purchase crappy hardware. It's that simple. If companies won't release the f'ing code don't buy there hardware. I've never had such a hard time on GNU/Linux as I've had on MS Windows. Those proprietary drivers are just as much of a PITA on MS Windows as they are on GNU/Linux. I shouldn't have to throw out my printer because Lexmark doesn't support the most recent version of MS Windows. That's absolutely ridicules. I get GNU/Linux's development model and I'm far from the most up-to-date as far as OS releases, but I DO upgrade more than once per computer. Release good code often and you don't want a stable ABI. It just promotes really bad practices. If you get that and you get that the ABI can't remain consistent then you'll buy better supported hardware and have a better user expierence. Stop blaming GNU/Linux for your shitty purchasing choices already.

Re:Mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

It has nothing to do with GNU (and your probably talking more about the FSF anyway, not the GNU project). But anyway. It's not an open source vs free software issue. It has everything to do with the fact people don't f'ing get what the real problem is. If you buy shitty hardware that's not cooperating with the projects maintaining the OS your going to get shitty support for your hardware. Buy hardware from vendors that actually work with the OS maintainers and you'll get completely different results. The GNU/Linux developers can't support your shitty proprietary hardware because they don't have access to the code, and I damm well know the hardware vendors you buy from won't. They don't support it in Microsoft Windows so what makes you think they'll do a better job in GNU/Linux when GNU/Linux desktop distributions are more bleeding edge?

Re: Mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought of writing a reply to refute all your points but on second thought that would be a waste of time since you are paid sock puppet shills.

Re:Windows Linux for small business

[Boronx]

My experience is exactly the same. If I had a nickel for every time a linux box has been killed by an update, I'd have about half a dollar. Do I still need to re-compile the kernel to get 3-D acceleration to work?

Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing is, Linux engineers would have no problem learning Windows stuff, while the opposite is more seldom.

Oh please. Like half of the "linux engineers" I know flat out refuse to even touch windows. Hence they can't use it. Yes, the same applies on the windows side. Hire people who don't give a crap about operating systems, they will happily learn anything. Don't hire people who are interested in open source, or people who are interested in avoiding open source. Hire smart people who a capable of learning, and who don't have any ridiculous preference for open or closed source, and you can always use the best solution, not the one some linux (or windows, or any other) zealot insists on.

Linux is not hard to learn, neither is windows. Things work a bit differently, but not that much. The end result is usually the same. The underlaying hardware is often the same. It's a piece of software that is basically only used to start other pieces of software.

Re:Mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do ATI drivers from 2 years ago not run on Linux? ABI and API compatibilities as Linux developers feel that is evil and encourages binary blobs! Funny no other platform has this problem with them.

Who do drivers for Windows 7 not work on Vista?? I can't even get my printer to be recognized that works perfectly in Linux. That's what I want to know. I've never had that problem on any other platform!!!

That's why I am choosing Linux and sticking to Windows in a VM. I might pis off some Slashdot moderators, but I speak the truth. Why can't a stable ABI and API exist so one thing can just work?? IT is freaking 2014.

Re:Windows Linux for small business

[TheMiddleRoad]

Happened to me about 6 months ago. I was stunned. Notice I've been left as flamebait. What has Slashdot become? Home of the Linux weenies.

Re:Windows Linux for small business

[TheMiddleRoad]

Tyranny? Try iOS or Android. They constantly track everything I do. It all gets reported back to Google. There's a lot more control with a Windows box than there is in Android. Hell, you can't even use the Android command line to control the DNS settings for 3g and 4g. I have to use an app, and it has to constantly redo the DNS settings. No, Windows isn't the tyranny.

I'm sure if I were a lover of the command line, I could be happy with Linux. However, I think the command line is a royal pain in the ass. Always have felt that way. Linux designers are all command line guys. There's no adult in the room to tell them to build the GUI so well that the command line is unnecessary.

As for gaming, that's a market issue. I cannot blame the OS for that.

Re: Windows Linux for small business

[TheMiddleRoad]

1. Track changes is 10 times easier in Word.
2. Auto correct works infinitely better in Word.
3. Formatting doesn't translate well. Sure, if you've got plain text, you're fine. Add some formatting, though, and you'll have page breaks in all sorts of odd places.

Then there's Excel, which is far, far easier to use than the Libre version. Sometimes it's the little things, like hitting enter and having the selected box move not just down a line but back to the left when you're entering multiple columns and rows of data. Sometimes it's the ease of sorting. Libre Office is pitiful in comparison. Oh, and Libre Office has terrible xls and xlsx compatibility. Basic files had ruined formatting.

Libre Office is ready for prime time for people who don't actually get work done with Office. I'm sure your religious dragging of people away from Office has ended with more than a couple people silently cursing your name every second they do work. But hey, what's an extra thousand clicks a day, right? Every day, for years.

Re:Windows Linux for small business

[mark-t]

I don't ever recall not being able to open a MS Word document in Libre Office, no matter what the version of MS Word the document was saved in was

Really... I don't ever recall being able to open ANY MS word document in LO or OO correctly, when the document contained absolutely any kind of special formatting and was more than just simple text. Sure, it will open just fine in the editor, but the formatting, especially for any embedded content such as images, will always be fucked up.

Re:Windows Linux for small business

[TheMiddleRoad]

Sorry, is it against your religion?

Re: Windows Linux for small business

[mark-t]

Open them sure... but they'd look like shit. Any special formatting that may have been done is shot all to hell if you want to open any remotely complicated word document in LO.

Re:Not really

[Anonymous Coward]

> Git had gone down recently I think, more than once

What

I blame Oracle

[Neo-Rio-101]

I think what most people are missing from the debate is not that Linux is cheaper or more expensive or anything.
The question about TCO really comes down to the applications you want to run, and the aftermarket support you get from that.

Now, as far as network/system engineering is concerned, or for basic word processing, Linux - by itself - is much better than Windows.
Linux is great for your LAMP stack and web-based solutions, not to mention basic network services like DNS, NTP, LDAP, RADIUS. No problems there.

However, most businesses run enterprise applications. Microsoft has better Office integration software, which precludes most business desktops being installed with Windows to get their Exchange and Sharepoint stuff working. As for what runs on their servers, in most cases it will be a toss up between some Windows server based application, or an Oracle on Linux application.

The kicker is that Oracle software on Linux is a complete cow to get up and working, and their support sucks.
Microsoft, for all their faults, actually is much easier to manage in comparison. Installs go easily and their support is miles ahead.

In many cases it's just much easier to run the application on Windows, and then hedge against failure with virtual environments and routine snapshots.
I've seen clients ditch their Linux servers for Windows because of Oracle products not living up to expectations - and the competition running their app on Windows.

You can't drown if you're a fish

[Anonymous Coward]

they've all been linux

For good reason.

Are you suggesting there was an exploit in the kernel or are you referring to the openssl package which, for my distro, was updated even *before* the exploit was public knowledge?

Re:You can't drown if you're a fish

[rioki]

Yes, like commercial software is such a bastion of good quality software with no vulnerabilities at all.

Re:You can't drown if you're a fish

[jones_supa]

That's a bit unfair. Almost no software running on a PC has been completely perfect with no vulnerabilities at all.

Re:You can't drown if you're a fish

[cooperaaaron]

Actually, this is true.. I have gotten 2 updates with the first one on April 7th, which was way before the public started talking about the exploit...

Re:You can't drown if you're a fish

[MikeBabcock]

If the current state of FOSS is what you call failure, what do we call things that aren't ubiquitous and successful?

Re:You can't drown if you're a fish

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it isn't true. Every distro patched and sent out updates freetard. Get over it.

Re:You can't drown if you're a fish

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not, and anyone who suggests otherwise is a fool. But problems are often fixed relatively quickly.

Re:Not really

[pahles]

Git had gone down recently I think, more than once.

????

trash

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshite dear henry Bullshite .

How much did M$ Corp bung you for that little (large) Lie ..

...and that costs?

[Sycraft-fu]

It seriously amazes me how little thought many geeks give the "it's open so anyone can support it!" argument. Seriously? You think that anyone can just sit down, read the source of a complex project, and fix and maintain it? It is just that easy?

Of course not. You need not just a programmer, but a good team and they can't be idiots. Maintaining something as large as an OS is a big job. So if the primary developers aren't doing it any more, you have to hire someone else to do it. So what's that cost? You can't ignore that, pretend like it isn't a real business cost just like software licenses.

Also there's the overall cost of sticking with something really old. This bitching about XP upgrades is silly because, by and large, the systems that need the upgrade are extremely old (I'm an IT support guy by profession). So if you took the route of paying to maintain this extremely old software on extremely old hardware it could end up costing you a lot in the long run in terms of productivity, as well as support.

Heck we've seen this in large scale systems like mainframes. IBM will generally support a mainframe as long as you like... for a price. You get companies running shit so old it is exceedingly expensive for the maintenance contract, and it is inflexible and has trouble dealing with their current business needs because it was designed 30 years ago. An upgrade would be a much better use of resources.

We even have a situation like that at work. We have an old Netapp FAS that we are still paying support on. 250GB SATA drives, no upgrade path. The support contract is multiple thousands a year, and getting higher. Netapp is happy to take our money and keep ti running but it can't run the new OnTap, can't take larger disks, etc, etc. The right answer, the one we are doing soon (hopefully) is to replace it with a new unit, migrate the data, and stand it down. Ya it is a bit of work, but it will be cheaper AND better in the long run.

Maintenance, upgrades, lifecycles, these are things you deal with for anything, software included. If you really think it is a feasible idea to just maintain a version of Linux forever, you are kidding yourself.

Also if you are wondering what long term maintenance of Linux costs, check out RHEL sometime. See what a support contract for a heavily supported, stable, Linux runs you. Then consider that MS has the same lifecycle on their OSes.

Re:...and that costs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then consider that Microsoft does NOT give support by default. The cost of Windows is not the cost of the license plus the cost of training staff. You also need support, which is separate.

Re:...and that costs?

[Anonymous Coward]

It costs money to support legacy but otherwise working systems? Who'd have thought of that?

Re:...and that costs?

[Anonymous Coward]

It seriously amazes me how little thought many geeks give the "it's open so anyone can support it!" argument. Seriously? You think that anyone can just sit down, read the source of a complex project, and fix and maintain it? It is just that easy?

Of course not. You need not just a programmer, but a good team and they can't be idiots. Maintaining something as large as an OS is a big job. So if the primary developers aren't doing it any more, you have to hire someone else to do it. So what's that cost? You can't ignore that, pretend like it isn't a real business cost just like software licenses.

You don't often need to fix things yourself. Reporting the bug is often sufficient to get a fix. Applying a fix isn't difficult even for a non programmers. Currently with Ubuntu LTS releases you get 5 years of updates and no cost whatsoever. Not to mention most of the RHEL/CentOS releases are supported for ~10 years. If that isn't enough for you I don't know what is.

I didn't bother reading the rest.

Re:...and that costs?

[colinrichardday]

But however much it costs, it's still easier to get support if more than one company can look at the source code.

Re:...and that costs?

[mpe]

You don't often need to fix things yourself. Reporting the bug is often sufficient to get a fix.

The option to fix things yourself (including hiring someone to do the job) always exists for OSS. Even if you get the response "it's a feature not a bug".
There also tend to be fewer "middlemen" between users/systadmins and developers. There's a very good chance that "support" with OSS is an actual developer. It's not uncommon when dealing with "support" for proprietary software for people to come away with an impression of "I know more about how this thing works than he/she does".

IME OSS support tends to be more amenable to email, web froums and other forms of communication which allow for an "asynchronous dialoge".
Where as proprietary support tends to prefer telephone (possibly "web chat") often including being put "on hold" or "transfered". (Rarely with any option to put them "on hold" though.)

Re:Windows Linux for small business

[TheMiddleRoad]

Yeah, how do I mod you up?

helpful??

[udippel]

"most staff are already familiar with Microsoft products"

this is very much true, and the main reason for Microsoft's grip on the market. People intuitively reject change, new interfaces, etc.

"and [that] Microsoft has been flexible and more helpful"

kind of invalidates the good person's arguments. Firstly, it actually is not the case (at least not for organisations as large as Hampshire County Council); and then a prostitute tends to be more helpful to a man's sexual needs than the wife/partner; otherwise the client's visit at her place of work would be superfluous.

Wrong project

[dbIII]

I do not care about RMS extreme ideology about freaking drivers. I WANT THEM TO JUST WORK.

We are referring to linux which has things such as the NVIDIA binary blobs that RMS would never allow. Linus also refused to use the new GPL that RMS was pushing. Here's a suggestion - outside of the nasty side of politics if you don't know something about a topic it's better to be quiet than make things up.

Also the cost of administration

[Sycraft-fu]

For example I work in a mixed environment, Windows and Linux desktops and servers. It is a research university so we do a lot of custom setup and deployments. Need a good system for all that, and for maintaining 50,000 user accounts and all that. We do it, but Linux takes a lot more faffing about. Our Linux admin spends a lot of time fighting with scripts, puppet, dependencies, etc to get systems working and deploying. It works, don't get me wrong, but it takes me a shitload less time to do it on Windows.

Well, our time costs money too. So if support takes a lot more staff time, then you need more staff and that costs more.

I think too many geeks who think Linux is just as easy have set it up on their home network. They have like 3 computers, all using local accounts, and everything is great. Ya well, try it in a large environment. Try good user, group, and policy management with the tools it has (we don't, we use AD for everything and have it auth against that). What you do at home isn't the same as what you do when you have thousands of systems.

Also having the right applications can be a big deal. Some things, you can get for Linux no problem. Some you can get, but they aren't up to par with the Windows variants and can make your workflow much slower. Others you just can't get. So that can make a big difference in the feasibility.

Like say video editing. Yes, technically you CAN do it in Linux. I'm sure given enough time, you could do anything you needed to, if nothing else by exporting the frames as images, hand editing, and reimporting. However it is way slower and much more difficult than on Windows or a Mac. The tools are just not very good. Free, but not very good. Ya well, that $500 for Sony Vegas and $150 for Windows doesn't matter much against the time you pay editors, cameramen, and so on. You don't need it to be much faster, workflow wise, to make that up and more.

Re:Also the cost of administration

[JaredOfEuropa]

I've no experience in administering Linux desktop environments (I did do some "faffing about" with it on my home machine), but my experience is the opposite when it comes to the server side. Windows, Office and Exchange required far more people to run on large installations compared to DEC All-in-1, for instance. And don't get me started on Sharepoint. One client is replacing a mix of proprietary / FOSS software providing Wiki, Team site, document management, discussion board and content management, with Sharepoint. Dear god. The administration of the old packages was done by tiny teams doing support and maintenance. Sharepoint? Lift a floor tile in a datacenter and you'll see 3 SP consultants scuttle off. A *massive* implementation effort, far, far more staff to support the thing, more training of end users (the software is horribly unintuitive), even version upgrades are a chore. They are now letting MS manage the SP farm, and they still have far more staff involved than with the old software. And functionality-wise, SP doesn't offer basic functionality that the old software already had 15 years ago.

Re:Also the cost of administration

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you talking about???
It seems to me you are an expert in administering Windows and have only superficial knowledge of administering Linux and you find Linux intimidating.
As an example let's take video editing. Let's keep away from my personal experience with video editing (which I have done a lot of) as I am an amateur.
Are you aware that a shitload of movies (including Avatar) are done with Linux?
Finally, I am not sure what kind of administration you do but the Windows workstations in my company always suffer from some update problem and something breaks. Not to mention the frequent reboots. Our Linux workstations are updated with very few interruption (if any).
To summarize- if you use Windows tools and have mainly windows expertise- of course Linux will be hard and painful. Until you learn it.

Re:Also the cost of administration

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd mod you up a thousand times if I could.

Microsoft cheaper?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously? Seriously? Slashdot should be more selective what their choice of articles.

Re:Mod parent up

[Microlith]

Hairyfeet just likes to spew venom and his own ignorance.

Why can't apps just work between versions like MacOSX, Solaris, FreeBSD with the compat libs, and even Windows?

They do. Every once in a while you find something that breaks, just like on all of those other platforms.

I can click on a setup.exe from the XP era and unless it is a horribly written business app requiring local admin (more like win98 style written) it will run on Windows 8 no problem.

Rather, it'll install (maybe) and run (maybe.)

Why do ATI drivers from 2 years ago not run on Linux?

Because the kernel has moved on and AMD refuses to keep pace.

ABI and API compatibilities as Linux developers feel that is evil and encourages binary blobs!

That will waste their time as they try to track down a bug only to find it's in a binary module that they can't look into.

Funny no other platform has this problem with them.

So you're taking up Hairyfeet's penchant for blatant lying?

Socialist ideology about everyone that is closed source is harmful I know lets purposedly not include a stable ABi so things break when I do an apt-get update to force ATI and NVidia will just work. That is the ticket.

And now it's just balls to the wall nutty rambling.

I might piss some some Slashdot moderators but I speak the truth.

Your opinion isn't the truth, and cut out the passive agressive garbage.

Why can't a stable ABI and API exist so one thing can just work? It is freaking 2014?

Because, again, the internel kernel APIs and ABIs do not need to be stable if you push your driver upstream. If you do, they keep it up to date for you and can debug issues for you. Otherwise you're just demanding that they assume the duty of maintaining backwards compatibility so that you may reap the rewards of the work done by them without aiding them in any way.

Re:Mod parent up

[Microlith]

the GNU ideology is the problem

I know, right? Freedom sucks ass. It's so much easier when you just use a proprietary platform that may suddenly cease to be supported (IRIX.)

Re: Windows Linux for small business

[colinrichardday]

Then there's Excel, which is far, far easier to use than the Libre version.

Not for everything. How do you get a function to return an array in Excel? In LibreOffice, you click a checkbox. In Excel, it's F2, then control-shift-enter.

Apples and oranges

[Anonymous Coward]

He's comparing, (assuming he isn't being paid to say this, which he likely is,) tech support from Microsoft to asking random assholes on the internet for help configuring something. This ignores a very real and perfectly good alternative of using FREE (libre) OSS, and paying someone like RedHat for support. I think that's actually why that company exists, I think (without admittedly checking,) that it's probably cheaper on balance to buy a support package from a Linux Customer Service company and get the OS for free, than to have to PAY for the OS, and get the support for free. With the FLOSS model, if one day you don't need the support anymore, because you've learned how to use the software, you can stop paying. With the M$ model... you will pay for the same thing over, and over, and over, while the company you pay makes deliberately and intentionally un-secure products as an anti-piracy measure designed to force users to register their software to avoid getting malware. In other words, M$ sacrifices YOUR security for THEIR betterment. Why would anyone in his right mind use ANYTHING from M$?!?

Even if I'm wrong on that point, being free from the tyranny of crappy software like what comes from Redmond is worth every... shilling... turd... lump... whatever those limey bastards call their goofy money.

Re:Apples and oranges

[smash]

Have you priced up redhat support? It's not cheap.

Re:Not really

[Anonymous Coward]

GitHub is Git.
In a similar manner as "AOL is the Internet".

Has it become dumber?

[Anonymous Coward]

'Microsoft has been flexible and helpful in the way we apply their products to improve the operation of our frontline services, and this helps to de-risk ongoing cost,'

Is it just me or has corporate-speak become dumb-speak lately. It used to sound, at least, literate and complex enough to appear as Zeus speaking from Mount Olympus. This sounds more like Billy Madison trying to sound smart on Jeopardy.

Re: Windows Linux for small business

[TheMiddleRoad]

Heh, well, in whatever I've done, Excel is better.

The known outage is better

[Anonymous Coward]

I can imagine the panic a MsUser will get into, when seeing a kernel panic instead of a friendlier BSOD. Do stay away from Linux, it's known to cause severe brain trauma: it makes you think and be productive.

ministry of silly walks

[Anonymous Coward]

"Microsoft gave us a 98% discount in exchange for this article."

Not to mention the bonus from the Ministry of Silly Walks. John Clease I salute you. I mean John Cheese.

Re:Windows Linux for small business

[HuguesT]

Nas4free is about as low maintenance as you can get. Put the embedded version on some USB stick, boot, setup through the web server, and pretty much forget. Use ZFS on all the disks.

Re:Not really

[rioki]

Github went down? Did not notice that. I checked the status and yes, they had a few hiccups in the last months. But in each case the issue was resolved in under an hour and in most cases it was only a minor glitch. I don't know what is less "enterprise ready" that this type of reliability.

Also in the case of git, when the central public repository is down, that does not mean you can't work. Compare that to Exchange or Team Foundation Server, the entire company grinds to a halt when these systems go down and I have seen my fair share of downtime.

Idiot

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody got fired (yet) for buying Micro$oft, but one day soon...

Re: Windows Linux for small business

[Andtalath]

You mean, you've learned one workflow and you are dissapointed when a separate one works differently.

Not at all strange, just that it's not the same.

I have similar problems going from libreoffice calc to excel since I know libreoffice calc better.

Hampshire Council!?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the county council that carried fire insurance coverage for businesses, except they assumed full responsibility with nothing underwritten. A few years ago there was a fire, a building burnt down, Hampshire CC were sued for the loss, they had no insurance for this themselves so it came out of the local tax payers' collections and rates went up to cover future losses. Hampshire in the UK is very rural with only a few small towns and a city the size of a regular town.

This isn't the first time Microsoft have had favourable comments in the trade rags from this county.

All UK county councils and town councils use proprietary and bespoke systems, either from software houses or written in house, yet they all adhere to the same national laws and could actually pool their resources to control their own software needs saving the tax payer over £1 billion per year.

Re:Mod parent up

[serviscope_minor]

Linux developers feel that is evil and encourages binary blobs!

The linux developers feel that having a stable API would have to make them compromise features in the kernel because they'd be unable to change the internals when needed.

Funny no other platform has this problem with them.

Funny how Linux is the most high performance kernel out there. It's no coincidence that it runs everything from your dinky little home router through your phone, internet srevers and up to the top supercomputer in the world.

I'd say they clearly made the right choice.

As another handy feature since almost all drivers are in tree, this means that old hardware is usually supported on new kernels just fine. Unlike Windows: I've used perfectly functional sheet feed scanners abandoned by their owners because they don't have drivers for Windows 7 or 8.

Some of those library developers are vicious in culling old programs.

Are you talking about the Linux kernel or applications?

Re: Windows Linux for small business

[serviscope_minor]

1. Track changes is 10 times easier in Word.

This sort of statement is hilarious to a programmer. It's like claiming that it's 10 times easier to bang in a nail using a small rock than it is using an old shoe. Sure, it may be technically correct but from the point of view of someone who can use a hammer or nailgun (i..e any remotely sane VCS) neither seems like a good idea.

Also, I've foind the two to be largely equivalent. Both rich in suckitude but not substantially worse than the other. Now google docs supports hange tracking. In terms of suckitude, well, that's like beating a nail in using your forehead by comparison and about as painful.

Re:Windows Linux for small business

[serviscope_minor]

What has Slashdot become? Home of the Linux weenies.

Are you new here? Slashdot has *always* been the home of us Linux weenies. It was a good place to argue the relative merits of Widows and Linux back in the 90s.

Re: Windows Linux for small business

[wertigon]

If that is your only argument - Office2007 isn't compatible with Office2003/2000 either. So not a very good one.

The reason why LibreOffice sometimes "messes up" your layout is that it uses the "document structure" workflow instead of the "visual" workflow as seen with Word. Once you find out "Wait, I don't have to care about how this looks until I've finished with the report, and then I just change a few parameters", it's amazing how much Writer throws itself to be out of your way as much as possible.

With word I have to constantly mind what format I need to use. "Wait, should I use 12pt or 16pt text here? And was it Verdana or Times New Roman?" In LO - no need for that. "That's a headline, that one is a paragraph, that one is a bullet list, and there we have a quote." Mark text accordingly, insert emphasis where needed, done, no need to bother about looks at all, and it's easy as pie to, for instance, a table of contents. That's why I find LO superior.

Oh and now you might say "But word has that too!" - yes, and LO has the visual styles too. But in LO everything is designed through the document structure paradigm. In Word it's just a half-assed mess.

Finally, yes, LO Writer is quite a bit limited when designing, say, a pamphlet - but why on earth would you use a word processor to make a pamphlet? Get indesign or Scribus for that!

"De-risk ongoing cost"

[Chris Mattern]

I want this person arrested for aggravated assault on the English language, immediately.

Re:"De-risk ongoing cost"

[Anonymous Coward]

I want this person arrested for aggravated assault on the English language, immediately.

Here, here.

Re:"De-risk ongoing cost"

[Anonymous Coward]

Weirdly enough what he's talking about is actually a thing. Low variability of costs can often be more important than a low mean cost in a business context.

Re:Mod parent up

[Bogtha]

Why are you ranting about Stallman's ideology preventing a stable API? Stallman's got no say over the Linux kernel. Torvalds decided on the Linux API policy, and it was for pragmatic reasons not ideological ones.

MS shop finds that MS has a lower TCO? News@11!!

[Stolpskott]

Hampshire CC is at least a partially Microsoft environment, as their SAP ERP system is hosted on SQL Server (M$ have a case study from 2012 on the migration from Oracle/Unix), so their IT admins probably already have significant experience with the administration of MS packages.
http://www.microsoft.com/cases...

Based on the wording of their "Hantsweb" site detailing their software standards, the standard desktop OS is Windows 7, with Vista/XP being phased out or supported on a "best effort" basis and other operating systems not allowed to connect to the domain, so with the exception of any Unix admins left who used to look after their old database servers for the SAP environment, they are an exclusively MS shop possibly with some iOS expertise so that they can look after iPhones and iPads. They do not even support non-IE web browsers, having standardised on IE8...
http://www3.hants.gov.uk/itsch...

On that basis, the cost of user training and admin training for non-MS systems plus the added complexity of a platform change within the organisation is going to make the TCO of future MS solutions lower than an open-source alternative, especially if they get a good discount in return for another positive case-study.

The open source options may well be a better technical fit, once the pain of a platform migration is out of the way, though.

MS slaves

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not what Germany's Frankfurt City or France's Gendarmerie are saying.. if you like MS good for you.

Re: Windows Linux for small business

[Anonymous Coward]

To this day I have not had any reason to use any fancy formatting. The way I see it is that eventually, no one will print shit. You can already enjoy life without papers, only arcane people keep using papers. Pages as a concept will die and we will have flowing forms and text for the rest of time without any need to trouble ourselves with formatting.

Microsoft cheaper on the very short run

[Anonymous Coward]

My experience is that working with Microsoft products lets you reduce cost only if you are a small organization. You can download ton of sotware from MSDN and effectively reduce development time (if there are very few developers working on the same piece of code)

But when you have to make the big switch or go online (so you cannot use msdn software without further licensing) you find yourself paying 50% of monthly cost just in licensing. And that does not stop there. Unless you are a gold partner Microsoft will not give much help the day your infrastructure goes wild and breaks.

If you work with web or mobile, and you are developing with Microsoft products you are always a step behind the market because all the development tools and best practices are designed by a corporation which, like any other, acts primarily in its own interest with the smoking gun of the stakeholders who want to see liquid profits and dividends.

The problem with Linux is that most of the skilled professionals out there they are still self trained geeks with an addiction for IT in general (or at least this is my personal experience) so you find yourself to be bound to one employee managing the whole infrastructure and holding all the knowledge about it which in small realities can be acceptable but when the company scales it can become a major source of headache for the management.

Morale is: you work with Microsoft? Easy to solve easy problems, difficult to solve difficult problems without engaging a MSCD and not sustainable in the long run.
Linux: lot of barrier for entering but it's free, secure because of all the hardening from the server world and with properly trained staff you can do just almost anything you want

Re:Microsoft cheaper on the very short run

[Carcass666]

I dunno... I think since the Server 2008 days, Microsoft server OSs and application stack, such as IIS Microsoft SQL, plays pretty nicely in the SMB space, and are reliable and decently priced. You can throw up the servers and sites pretty quickly, and as long as you aren't talking about thousands of current transactions you're going to have good success, even without huge amounts of specific training. We run both Microsoft (mostly custom applications) and Oracle (mostly e-Business Suite) and when I compare the difficulty of managing the two from a server and updates point-of-view, I am shocked that Oracle gets away with what they do. Even Oracle's database, arguably their best technology, takes constant tweaking and tuning to perform fewer transactions than Microsoft databases. Granted, a lot of this is due to the poor coding of Oracle's EBS, but still...

It's when you have to scale the Microsoft stack out (when you get big enough to think about words like "enterprise") where it all sort of starts going downhill. Your standard server and SQL licenses have to be upgraded to their enterprise brethren to get real load balancing and fault tolerance, and it's not an incremental cost update, it's balance sheet altering. Your in-house team likely aren't going to have the expertise to stand up clusters and such, so your consulting and/or training budgets go way up. And eventually somebody gets convinced that Sharepoint is a must-have, and then your days of smooth sailing are forever over, and you start wondering if open source really would have been much worse.

religion

[Anonymous Coward]

could you please explain to me how your speculative reasoning and ad hoc, vaguely conspiratorial rationalization is in any way functionally different than apologetics in defense of religious belief?

Learning curves

[Anonymous Coward]

The learning curve for going from MS Office to LibreOffice is much smaller for the older versions of the MS product than going from MS Office (old) to MS Office (>200?).

Lock-in?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

In the price of every Microsoft Word license you have to include the potential that it forces you to invest in an entire set of SharePoint servers and an outsourced support company.

How exactly would that happen? I don't think I've ever seen a SP server actually deployed in any organisation I've worked in, from a tiny local business to one of the largest corps in the world. Most of them were Microsoft customers, though.

I did, however, spend about 20 minutes yesterday trying to figure out how to do some simple data manipulation in LibreOffice Calc at an organisation that didn't use MS Office. It turns out that the on-line help in Calc is so good that if you search for the name of a function it doesn't find it. Also, it actually is on-line, meaning if your Internet connection is slow or down, your basic "productivity" software is broken.

It's not a popular sentiment around here, but I suspect the CIO is right about going with Microsoft even without any undisclosed deal, at least in major sectors like office software. The organisation where I was working yesterday picked LibreOffice on cost grounds, but the money lost to silly inefficiencies like the terrible on-line help system I mentioned above would pay for a copy of MS Office within weeks, if not days or hours.

You're right to express concern about proprietary data formats like the MS Office file formats, but the reality is that right now MS Office is widely used and you often have to be compatible with their formats anyway to communicate effectively. So either your alternative software can read MS formats, in which case the lock-in problem doesn't exist, or you can't, in which case your alternative comes with a serious limitation before you even start.

Re:Lock-in?

[higuita]

Have you open a bug in libreoffice about the online-help problem? If they aren't informed about the problems, for sure no one will fix it.

Re:Lock-in?

[Nemesisghost]

But that's just it. For an organization to have to report that something is broken means it's not worth the cost, even if that cost is free. In addition, bug reporting is fine when you are a technical person. But think about those who actually make the decisions, they usually aren't technical and will be unwilling to report that something is broken beyond the guy who convinced them to use a broken product. And that phone call/meeting will end up with the decision maker demanding that they spend the money so at least he can have something that works, if not the entire organization.

Re:Lock-in?

[MightyYar]

It turns out that the on-line help in Calc is so good that if you search for the name of a function it doesn't find it. Also, it actually is on-line, meaning if your Internet connection is slow or down, your basic "productivity" software is broken.

What a coincidence! I've had the same experience with MS Office! Help is by default set to "online" and the search function is so poor that I usually don't bother and instead just Google it.

In all fairness, MS Office is so popular that Google usually has the solution. Why write a decent help system when you have whole sites dedicated to sorting out how to use your software?

Re:Lock-in?

[rastos1]

Have you open a bug ...

To be honest the bug title would have to be "write user documentation". What is published at https://help.libreoffice.org/ is a bad joke. Just yesterday I was looking up how to set font size of equation and arrived to this page that starts with helpful "Use this dialog to specify the âfont sizes for your formula. ". I have to admit that there is *some* useful information however it is missing the crucial details such as screenshot of the dialog, or any description how to arrive to that dialog.

So what I'm saying is that it's not a occasional glitch that needs fixing. I'm saying that this part of the product is mostly not there. That also rules out an individual scratching the itch because the whole thing would lack any consistency.

Re:Lock-in?

[CastrTroy]

I'm not the parent poster, but if they can't find and resolve bugs like "can't find function in help system by typing in function name" then they aren't doing enough QA on their own. I can understand reporting weird errors that only happen in obscure situations, but glaringly obvious bugs are not something the end users should have to deal with. I user OpenOffice at home, but I understand why very few would want to use it in a business setting. I've tried both OpenOffice and LibreOffice, and both crash quite often on many different computers. I can't remember the last time I had Office crash on my work computer.

Re:Lock-in?

[bkr1_2k]

So people don't ever have to report bugs to Microsoft? I think you and I live in different worlds because we report them routinely, to all of our vendors, whether we paid for the software or it was free.

Re:Lock-in?

[bkr1_2k]

Whether or not the help is installed locally or just refers to an online help is usually an install option, in my experience. I haven't installed libreoffice in a long time because I don't like it, personally, but I think it's probably still an option. Maybe not.

If you don't factor in re-training costs, it's never a fair comparison. Training, however, doesn't take millions or even hundreds of thousands, of dollars and once your workforce is trained, new employees can always ask existing employees how to do something. There's a minor productivity hit until people are suitably comfortable/trained but that happens every time a new version of any existing software (MS or other) comes out anyway. It's the cost of doing business.

I think in the long-term, I think open source still wins but you have to roll it out properly and not just expect people to figure it out for themselves. That said, I've seen MS be very supportive and also seen the exact opposite from them. It all depends upon who you have on the other end of your issue and sometimes how much money it means to them.

Re:Lock-in?

[StuartHankins]

The OO/LO help is a separate download. Once installed it does not require online access for help to function. The link for this download is adjacent to the regular Windows download link. http://www.libreoffice.org/dow...

Re:Lock-in?

[MikeBabcock]

So you didn't bother downloading the offline http://www.libreoffice.org/get... documentation?

I don't feel that bad for you ... obviously you're the type of person Microsoft is targeting.

Re:Lock-in?

[crtreece]

Did you read the very next line?

Choose Format - Font Size

Re:Lock-in?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

What would you have me write in that bug report? This isn't a minor bug, it's a complete failure of the help system to do its job, based on a complete lack of basic usability. And it's representative of a general problem throughout LibreOffice, not just an isolated case for one specific function in Calc that we were looking for at the time. The bug report would be along the lines of "On-line help doesn't", which isn't exactly constructive.

Re:Lock-in?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I generally agree with you about training, but I don't think that's all there is to the comparison. These are complicated software applications we're talking about, and realistically any training is only going to be provided for some brief initial period to get users familiar with how things generally work.

The ongoing ease of use, and how polished the software is when you get into the details, will continue to matter long after any training is over. This is where a lot of FOSS fails compared to established but proprietary and commercial alternatives, because without the commercial incentive to put that polish on and take care of the boring stuff, often no-one does.

Re:Lock-in?

[higuita]

Developers usually don't use the help, mostly because they developed it or just look at the source ... so no, this is not a obvious bug.

and again, if it crashes and you can reproduce the crash, you should report it... if it crashes for you, then it will for sure not crash on the developers, or else it was already fixed. Sometimes small tips on crashes make a big hidden bug go away.

Re:Lock-in?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

So you didn't bother downloading the offline http://www.libreoffice.org/get... documentation?

Apparently they didn't, presumably because they use Ninite to install their standard software bundle. LibreOffice has a track record of not working well with Ninite, so this isn't a huge surprise.

In any case, would that have fixed the main problem, which was that the search feature didn't actually find something as basic as a spreadsheet function that was requested by its exact name?

I don't feel that bad for you ... obviously you're the type of person Microsoft is targeting.

I don't know whether that was meant as some sort of insult, but if you'd read my post carefully you might have realised that it was a different organisation's computer I was working with at the time, so any feeble ad hominems aimed at me are way off target.

Then again, maybe if you're the kind of person who doesn't pay attention to getting details right, you're the type of person the LibreOffice project is targeting? :-)

Re:Lock-in?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Thanks for the link. I think the guys in question install via Ninite, so that's probably why they didn't have the downloaded version.

Does that fix the main problem of not finding obvious topics in the search, though?

Re:Lock-in?

[higuita]

you can write: search on the online help fails to find simple cacl functions names

if is enough to flag the problem to some developers and admins... if it will be fixed fast or not, that is another question :)

Re:Lock-in?

[Anonymous Coward]

Title: "Online help isn't useful." Summary: list reasons why.
How is that not constructive?

Re:Lock-in?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Developers usually don't use the help, mostly because they developed it or just look at the source ... so no, this is not a obvious bug.

Yes, it really is. It's blindingly obvious to anyone who is going to actually use the software and not just develop it. And if you want to be taken seriously in the office software market, catering to normal users instead of geeks is step #1.

Microsoft spend vast amounts of time and money doing user testing and QA and usability polishing and all that stuff. FOSS projects like LibreOffice apparently don't, or at least not effectively. And that's the difference that makes buying MS Office almost an automatic decision for a lot of customers.

Re:Lock-in?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I don't think it's a big secret that LibreOffice's help is awful, so wouldn't filing some generic issue to that effect be closer to mockery than constructive assistance?

If this had an isolated case that was overlooked, sure, maybe it's worth flagging. But the complete lack of any useful organisation across the entire help system, the complete failure of its search facility to find even the most basic topics, and the reliance on finding minor links somewhere in the middle of a page or hidden right at the end to navigate to any related topics or even anything resembling an index, these aren't just individual cases. The entire system isn't up to the necessary standards to compete with the likes of MS Office, and making it so would be a massive undertaking that I'm sure the LO devs are well aware is in need of doing without any passive aggressive bug reports from people like me.

Re:Lock-in?

[Eunuchswear]

I did, however, spend about 20 minutes yesterday trying to figure out how to do some simple data manipulation in LibreOffice Calc at an organisation that didn't use MS Office. It turns out that the on-line help in Calc is so good that if you search for the name of a function it doesn't find it. Also, it actually is on-line, meaning if your Internet connection is slow or down, your basic "productivity" software is broken.

Did you forget to install the libreoffice-help-en-us package?

Re:Lock-in?

[Eunuchswear]

I dunno. Tell me what you think is an obvious topic.

Re:Lock-in?

[Bite The Pillow]

The point of this article is that Microsoft does not need a bug filed and hope someone fixes it, and meanwhile wait. Microsoft's documentation is keyword complete, so you don't wind up like this in the first place.

I've been in large companies and had Microsoft support on the phone fixing SQL server, and had a ticket in for visual studio. It was our configuration both times, or Oracle bugs in another, but we had support.

That is cost of ownership, and they got us going again. I know the common refrain is, how many times do we actually hold Microsoft responsible for its bugs? Well, we never have to because big company support fixes the issue quickly.

If libre office wants to compete with Microsoft, it has to be easier to self support, and documentation has to magically just work, or else TCO goes up.

I'm sure you weren't arguing any of this, but file a bug only helps so far in the context of TCO. I would think the code should be generating its own help docs, maybe with a secondary tool that spits out a shell page, and if you check in and there is a help file not in source control, it is missing and someone files a bug to have it written. That's basic QA, and I expect at least that much effort.

This is no different from having a command line lookup table that is different from running "app -h" which doesn't happen because they are generated from the same data. This was a solved problem 20 years ago and should not be an issue.

Re:Lock-in?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've tried to use Microsoft Office help. Its unuseable. With both products, I resort to google searches for help.

Re:Lock-in?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, fuck off. Sell me a product that works in the first place. My time isn't so cheap that I consider "report bug that Help is completely broken then put up with it until it's fixed" to be a more cost-effective use of my employees' time than "buy a product where Help isn't completely broken".

And have you ever actually tried to report a bug to any open source product as a non-technical user? "CLOSED - NOT ENOUGH INFORMATION - [possible childish assertion that the user is a retard because he/she's not also an experienced software developer]." Get out.

Honestly, THIS is the kind of shit where the "Free" software movement has failed to get a quarter clue even after nearly three decades. If you so clearly haven't any testing with real users, your product is entirely inadequate.

To repeat: I don't give a fuck if I save a couple of hundred dollars per workstation. In business terms, that is NOTHING compared to the loss of productivity from using a "free" alternative year after year.

Re:Lock-in?

[StuartHankins]

Glad to help. And mostly, yes. For instance, a search of "VLOOKUP" shows 3 topics (Handling of Empty Cells, Options, and Spreadsheet Functions), and the topic "Spreadsheet Functions" does include help for VLOOKUP, yet it doesn't take you to an anchor within the topic. So you have to search within that link for the actual VLOOKUP wording (which as you'd expect is also listed under LOOKUP, also on the same page).

As a result, the topics tend to be longer than necessary for a specific keyword / function.

Re:Lock-in?

[smash]

My confidence in OOo went out the window when i decided to try it out on an Ubuntu box a while ago. I loaded up base, created a new database. Create new table, create my first field, in a clean database. A primary key. CRASH. Enterprise ready bro.

Re:Lock-in?

[smash]

Like it or not, microsoft's shit works well enough to actually get work done. It is by no means bug free. But it is "good enough" at the things that matter to ordinary people. Ordinary office drones don't give a flying fuck if a program is open source if it can't do what they want it to do.

Re:Lock-in?

[jedidiah]

> Microsoft spend vast amounts of time and money doing user testing and QA and usability polishing

Yet they still managed to subject everyone to Ribbon and Metro and sent a lot of long time users running for the hills.

This idea that "payment translates into quality" is certainly bogus for Microsoft. They haven't had to "sing for their dinner" for a very long time. They can just happily take advantage of entrenched market dominance that may just be older than you are.

If there is in fact a "flagship brand" that has someone else nipping at their heels you might have a point. Although more likely than not, any such "flagship brand" inspires the same mindless loyalty you're showing here.

Re:Lock-in?

[smash]

Whether or not developers use the help or not, this is a symptom of the core problem. There IS no fucking QA in open source as a general rule. "The end users can test it" is all well and good for a hobby project. Maybe they need a separate team of volunteers for QA testing, like a half-decent commercial product will go through. Getting your developer to test shit is a waste of time, as demonstrated.

Re:Lock-in?

[smash]

Did the program complain about missing help, or suggest to install it?

Re:Lock-in?

[Eunuchswear]

No, it doesn't. And it should.

Re:Lock-in?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Yet they still managed to subject everyone to Ribbon and Metro and sent a lot of long time users running for the hills.

Ribbon was driven directly by monitoring how actual users were using the software. There's a fascinating series of blog posts about where it came from and how it developed. And although my initial reaction as a "power user" was similarly sceptical, the fact for me is that most people I know who've tried it came around to preferring it after a short time.

Metro is clearly a mess, but let's not pretend that was driven by the usability guys rather than the marketing/management types who thought everything had to be touch-friendly for no logical reason.

This idea that "payment translates into quality" is certainly bogus for Microsoft. They haven't had to "sing for their dinner" for a very long time.

Then why are they still dominant? It's not as if the FOSS community lacks the resources to create a rival office suite or consumer operating system of a similar scale. They've done both, multiple times.

Although more likely than not, any such "flagship brand" inspires the same mindless loyalty you're showing here.

There's no need for pointless ad hominem attacks, and loyalty has nothing to do with my views anyway. I choose which tools to use based on what gets the job done best at the time, and as someone who has on several occasions in recent years had to contrast MS Office and Open/LibreOffice, it hasn't even been close on any of those occasions.

In business terms, the cost of even a full price MS Office licence is usually negligible compared to the ongoing support costs and and efficiency savings/losses for either product, and the ongoing costs and inefficiencies for Open/LibreOffice are much higher than for MS Office. You can complain about why they're higher and how if everyone just switched to open file formats or didn't get brought up with Microsoft products it wouldn't matter, but the fact is that those things do matter, so unless you can convince most of the people that these businesses work with to agree with you and make the switch, your argument is not a strong one.

Re:Lock-in?

[Anonymous Coward]

fuck business software.

it's just a big circle jerk between organizations' middle management.

nobody I've met in the 145 plus IQ range has ever "wowed" me with their office slideshow, spreadsheets or text documents. you won't find dynamic people dinking around in business software.

that shit is for sheep.

Re:Lock-in?

[LWATCDR]

It should not have to be reported. This is a QA level of failure.
You should test each function of the code you write before you release to testing.
Testing should test all functions in the release candidate and the common tasks the program used for.
The testing needs to test the documentation as well as the functions to make sure they match.
Only then should it be released.
It is not perfect of course but this is how it should work.
The end user docs for OO and OL often lag the software by at least one version if not more. Writing docs is not fun and it just does not often get done on FOSS projects. The docs when written are often not end user documentation.
Of course you could always pay for good docs to be written and contribute that to the FOSS project but then you are not getting the software for free as in beer and you could just pay for a well documented program instead of paying to document a program.
I love FOSS but if the community refuses to see the limitations they can not overcome them.

Re:Lock-in?

[slack_justyb]

You all use the help function? What company do you work for? Typically, if a user can't figure it out by just looking at it, then its a help desk issue. You can only imagine what it was like going from 2003 to 2007. Can I come work for you, it seems your users actually want to seek out help before jumping ship. Mine just tend to call my seven digits non-stop. Also, the MS Office help is on-line as well. So slow connection would be a problem there too.

Re:Lock-in?

[Richy_T]

Perhaps it could be done in the form of a Wiki. Or maybe Haiku. One or the other.

Re:Lock-in?

[Richy_T]

Warm fuzzies mostly. Which is actually important for adoption.

Re:Lock-in?

[MightyYar]

If anyone gets warm fuzzies from MS or OO help, they need psychiatric attention. :) Both are terrible - especially the search. But Google (or Bing if you must) have tons more help available for MS than for OO. Macro programming in OO can be especially trying.

Re:Lock-in?

[Richy_T]

Actually, I agree. The last few times I've used MS Office help, typically for the Excel functions, the results have been pretty facepalm-worthy. It used to be pretty good though.

Re:Lock-in?

[Anonymous Coward]

The benefit of using free software or open source doesn't come to some worker drone. The main benefit is the freedom which comes to the company. If you have chosen ODF format and LibreOffice and you suddenly find you need more support, you can trivially move over to IBM and get everything your wallet can apy for. If you chose RedHat and find the license costs are killing you in low cost countries where the customers don't care about stability then you can use CentOS instead.

Think of it like the need to have a strong password at work. For the individual worker it's just a hassle. If his account gets broken into he just asks IT to do a restore. At worst he loses his job and a few thousands of euros a month. For the company, on the other hand, if their plans get stolen or they end up leaking customer data they can be in in for a whole load of hurt and millions of euros of losses.

At a company level you would never allow people to use weak passwords needlessly where they might pose a danger. In the same way, you should never allow people to use proprietary software in ways that endanger the companies freedom to decide. Just as you fire people who use weak passwords repeatedly after warnings, you should fire people who bring in proprietary software repeatedly after warnings

Re:Lock-in?

[quitte]

Have you ever opened a bug for openoffice? Don't know about libreoffice, but for openoffice it sure didn't help.
I'd be surprised if rotating and cropping images in a Writer document finally worked, however.

(I didn't open it. It already existed when I came across that YEARS AGO)

Re:Lock-in?

[bingoUV]

It's an MS office knockoff, what do you expect?

Re:Lock-in?

[aaronb1138]

Distinctively, this is a huge issue with using FOSS software. The whole "libre" and "open" philosophies breed organizations that just let everyone do their own thing. Nobody wants to grind at the mundane crap like documentation or unified interfaces and such. And that is when there is an organization like Apache pushing the project. How much worse are small dev team projects getting work on a personal free time basis or all the extensions for various FOSS projects that get crap maintenance.

Every few years we get a trickle of horror stories about working at Microsoft, but the reality is that those horrors exist at most companies, because someone has to buckle down and do the shit work.

Re:Lock-in?

[Crayz9000]

Ribbon was driven directly by monitoring how actual users were using the software. There's a fascinating series of blog posts about where it came from and how it developed. And although my initial reaction as a "power user" was similarly sceptical, the fact for me is that most people I know who've tried it came around to preferring it after a short time.

The fact of the matter remains that while the Ribbon is clearly superior to toolbar buttons for organizing shortcuts, it should have never completely replaced the menu system. For the 20% of the time you need to find the one function that isn't immediately obvious on the Ribbon, you spend about 80% of your time hunting fruitlessly for it. If they had simply hidden the original menus with the Alt key -- the same way they did for Internet Explorer and everything else in Windows 7 -- it would have made Office more tolerable.

I won't even get into Word's continued inability to manage any sort of list, or its propensity for fucking up formatting that LibreOffice manages to handle just fine. I have refused to touch Office since 2003, and would rather switch jobs than be forced to use that horrible monstrosity of an office suite.

Re:Lock-in?

[Anonymous Coward]

LibreOffice help
It is helpless to find calc
Maybe a wiki

Re:Lock-in?

[davydagger]

microsoft spents vast amount of time on PR to harrass critics.

Its only been recently did QA ever factor in.

I remember the 1990s. they were terrible. if microsoft spends lots on either market research, or QA, they are getting ripped the fuck off. Their products have been consistantly terrible, and got away with it, with little or no competition.

No one really chooses microsoft, the company sells to vendors, not the public. This is how they *appear* proffesional. Everyone is using it, it can't be wrong. Microsoft is a very successful at business strategy, and company execs who have purchasing power like microsoft.

When people who actually use computers have a choice in what they buy, its generally something other than microsoft.

Microsoft is a minority in the server room. Running a windows server generally signals your too stupid to run UNIX, and too cheap to hire an Admin. Windows server is for low end sites that are run by the non-technical.

Then we get to platforms where there is viable competition, as in side by side, in box stores. People avoid windows phone like the plauge. Is this because its a terrible design? no, its because the windows brand name is fucking poison.

In all my years, outside microsofties, I never heard anyone say that actually like using windows. PC fanatics generally like the fact they get the same hardware at a cheaper price. Most non-techies want, but can't afford a mac, and Apple doesn't give a damn, because the people who can make them the most profitable company on earth. They position themselves as a premium product at a premium price. But no one really wants windows.

Re:Lock-in?

[davydagger]

>Metro is clearly a mess, but let's not pretend that was driven by the usability guys

it was, it came two years after Unity and Gnome-shell on UNIX, and the follows their new paradigm of a dashboard instead of a desktop. The gnome people brought in the UI people.

What microsoft should have noted, is how no one in the UNIX community liked either.

Re:Lock-in?

[countach]

In my experience, MS shit doesn't work any better at getting stuff done than stuff like LibreOffice. In fact, its often worse. But if you think that, you're entitled to your opinion.

Re:Lock-in?

[Anonymous Coward]

The only people that complain about the ribbon are sperglords on slashdot that still think it's 1999.

Re:Lock-in?

[Anonymous Coward]

More accurately, Microsoft charges users to be beta testers and releases absolute crap in terms of UI. Ribbon anyone? Metro?

A missing function in the documentation is absolutely NOT an obvious bug. It would never be discovered until someone searched for the EXACT function, and then reported it. But apparently that's too much effort for the moocher above....

Re: Lock-in?

[kenh]

Help is a major feature, that you think it's OK to release software into production without testing a major feature, then you and I are operating with different definitions of 'production-ready'...

Would you accept flawed/ non-functional printing in an office application because the programmers 'don't actually print documents, they look at the output online'?

Re:Lock-in?

[higuita]

i can crop and rotate just fine in LibreOffice...

the rotate is 90 jumps, not free rotate, but for a word processor i think that is OK
Crop, you have to go to the picture properties and choose what how much and where to crop. It's also not a free-on-the-fly crop, but then again, write is not a picture editing tool

Re:Lock-in?

[quitte]

I'm happy to stand corrected. This issue was the reason that I couldn't in good conscious recommend openoffice for years.

Re:Lock-in?

[JakeBurn]

This is why I have little regard for 'free' or open source software. If somehow ego could be removed, these programs might have a chance of one day being usable. The issue I see is that too many of these developers start out with 'fuck ms' I can easily make a free version of this. What their arrogance always misses is that MS didn't become MS by releasing half-assed programs. They put more time and money into help systems than most of these open source programs put into their entire projects. And its always the small things that they decide aren't a priority in their quest to change the software landscape that ends up making nearly everyone but fanboys run from their products. Its funny that people are actually trying to argue with you about this. The cornerstone of every successful program is whether or not enough people who want to use your product actually can use it. Without a basic help system you can throw that software into the garbage. If the help system is junk AND there isn't a single person in that entire organization working to fix it, the entire organization is garbage. People saying its widely known that the help is junk is even more reason to stay away from anything coming from that group of developers.

Re:Lock-in?

[josquin9]

People don't HAVE to report bugs. Many of them do, using the automated system in Microsoft's products without even asking themselves about the potential security risk of the feature. Company bosses rarely think about the fact that their workers are being trained to to hit "SEND" whenever a pop-up window tells them it's a way to be "helpful".

Re:Lock-in?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Exactly. Only on a forum like Slashdot would "Have you filed a bug report?" be considered a credible (or at least +5, Insightful) reaction to reporting a wide-ranging problem that should never have existed, in the middle of a debate about why in the real world a lot of people still consider MS software to have a lower TCO than FOSS.

Re:Lock-in?

[josquin9]

I disagree. I believe that Microsoft's size insulates it from a lot of criticism, and that their products will never be great unless they are pushed by competition. I am willing to endure the inconvenience of FOSS software in order to change the environment in which Microsoft functions in the long run. I don't find the headaches of LibreOffice significantly worse than the ones of working with Microsoft. I believe that the productive hours I lost to relearning how to use their Office products, in which I already had close to a decade of training and practice, at least equal the productive losses due to bugs in FOSS alternatives.

What's more, Microsoft's ribbon move was primarily about marketing, not usability. Usability may have been enhanced slightly for new users, but the vast majority of people aren't new users anymore. Microsoft could have let users toggle between the interfaces if they actually cared about the user experience. They were going for lock-in by differentiating their program in a way that was detrimental to established users, but that they knew they could sell to the people who authorize the software upgrades, because those people don't have to be productive with "productivity" software. This also allowed them to hit those companies up for new training materials, videos, etc. for existing office staff, by invalidating I would imagine hundreds of millions worth of existing training tools sitting in the corporate libraries of companies around the world. People may not be complaining now. People will become comfortable with a program they use every day within a few months and eventually the anger over the inconvenience, expense, and lost time subsides. However, if you were to aggregate all of the productive hours lost to unnecessary re-training that Microsoft imposed upon corporate America in order to further their own marketing agenda, I suspect it would cause a lot of people to rethink the purported savings of going with the industry standard.

Re:Lock-in?

[josquin9]

Imagine if one year, all new cars were designed so that you control the accelerator with your forehead and you steer by twisting your chest. This wouldn't be because people were clamouring for a better way to steer, but just because a few people in the industry decided it would be good for the rest of us, and it would give them some convenient new marketing slogans, and force people to go to dealers for servicing for a while, since they would be the only ones trained in the new systems. You could argue that this was a superior way of maneuvering because it makes driving more like walking, where you lean into the direction of your intended motion, but the early adopters' spouses and children might not take kindly to the convenience you've imposed upon them that left the breadwinner in a wheelchair or worse. It would be like making every driver on the road a sixteen year old newbie again.

Re:Lock-in?

[Anonymous Coward]

In the price of every Microsoft Word license you have to include the potential that it forces you to invest in an entire set of SharePoint servers and an outsourced support company.

How exactly would that happen? I don't think I've ever seen a SP server actually deployed in any organisation I've worked in, from a tiny local business to one of the largest corps in the world. Most of them were Microsoft customers, though.

I did, however, spend about 20 minutes yesterday trying to figure out how to do some simple data manipulation in LibreOffice Calc at an organisation that didn't use MS Office. It turns out that the on-line help in Calc is so good that if you search for the name of a function it doesn't find it. Also, it actually is on-line, meaning if your Internet connection is slow or down, your basic "productivity" software is broken.

It's not a popular sentiment around here, but I suspect the CIO is right about going with Microsoft even without any undisclosed deal, at least in major sectors like office software. The organisation where I was working yesterday picked LibreOffice on cost grounds, but the money lost to silly inefficiencies like the terrible on-line help system I mentioned above would pay for a copy of MS Office within weeks, if not days or hours.

You're right to express concern about proprietary data formats like the MS Office file formats, but the reality is that right now MS Office is widely used and you often have to be compatible with their formats anyway to communicate effectively. So either your alternative software can read MS formats, in which case the lock-in problem doesn't exist, or you can't, in which case your alternative comes with a serious limitation before you even start.

the second link in this page is to download offline help for libreoffice
i typed libre office offline help in google.com

http://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-fresh/

Re:Lock-in?

[Anonymous Coward]

It will be useful for the Hampshire County CIO to visit his colleage(s) in the Bayern (Germany) town of Muenchen (Munich) where local government, step wise since 2001,have migrated 15000 desktops to Limux (an Ubuntu related Linux version) . He then will also be able to discuss the financial consequences of the migration .
Before travelling to Germany he would first wish to read an article in Linux Voice 002 (May 2014) : The Big Switch (pages 52 - 55).

While in Munich he no doubt will sample excellent local beer as well.

Re:Lock-in?

[bro2]

Did you not know that "letting the end users test it" has been Microsoft's approach for many years for their OSes?

Re:Lock-in?

[cwsumner]

Developers usually don't use the help, mostly because they developed it or just look at the source ... so no, this is not a obvious bug. ...

There must be testing by people who are -not- the developers. Developers get "blind spots" and don't know about stuff that they don't use, like help files. There is plenty of need, in open source, for volunteers who are not technical. See "naive tester".

Re:Lock-in?

[higuita]

Agree, that is why i think people should report bugs when they find then and not simply complain and wait that they are fixed magically.
Even if the project don't seem to fix/care about the bugs, it can help other developers to see that is a common bug and fix it anyway.

Re:Lock-in?

[cwsumner]

... Even if the project don't seem to fix/care about the bugs, it can help other developers to see that is a common bug and fix it anyway.

Yes. And even if they ignore most bug reports, they might not ignore the one in question. Sending the bug report at least gives it a chance.

Same ol', same ol'...

[pinsard]

I don't know why people bother to comment such things. It's being like this since aways...

Open discussions

[tommeke100]

You think they are arrogant because their discussions are public. It's all happening on public boards and mailing lists.
Microsoft's internal kitchen is private, so you won't hear their developers speaking out publicly as often.

populations

[Anonymous Coward]

You really don't have the slightest clue about what a council does or how big it's operations are do you?

Would it not depend on the size of the city and the council?

Places of population 20,000 have councils and places of population 200,000 and 2,000,000 have councils.

Re:populations

[Xest]

I don't think there are really many small councils left, most have been merged into larger ones. The one I worked for wasn't exactly a major one, it was on the smaller end of the scale.

Also, perhaps somewhat perversely, you tend to find the smaller areas have a higher proportion of public sector workers anyway. In some places the councils are effectively used to create jobs to try and reduce unemployment in the area with the government implicitly backing in (because reduced unemployment, no matter how artificially is apparently good for getting re-elected as it also reduces crime etc.).

Whilst a council area of population 1 million might have 80,000 staff, you'll find an area of population 100,000 may still have about 20,000 staff. These numbers are pulled from thin air of course, but you get the idea. I know at least that the percentage of workers in some smaller population areas is drastically disproportionate to the population compared to other areas of the country.

Creese went on to say?

[Anonymous Coward]

Parrots don't say things. They mimic them. The "total cost of ownership" line is something heard from his owner so much he just repeats it.

Re:Mod parent up

[TheDarkMaster]

Exact. How you will do some serious (and complex) application on Linux if the system libraries you need keep changing and completely ignoring the compatibility with previous versions?

What long term? Around here that means three weeks

[Archtech]

It certainly is true that many people have a nodding acquaintance with Microsoft products - although surprisingly few have mastered, say, 10% of their features. (Largely because so many of those features were added only so as to win tick-in-the-box sales contests). So, in the short term, there is some advantage in continuing with them. Just as there is some advantage in never training staff, just hoping to hire people with existing experience.

In the medium term, let alone the long term, such policies are very risky. The changes in UI between consecutive releases of Microsoft Office can be greater than those between an earlier version and an open-source alternative. As we have seen, many people baulked at the huge difference in UI between Windows 7 and Windows 8. And of course, if no one ever trains staff, eventually there will not be enough people with the necessary experience to go round.

Unfortunately our implementation of capitalism encourages extreme short-termism. Why not slash and burn while you are in a given job, as long as you can be fairly sure of getting promoted before the harm is noticed? Better still, your successor will look really bad, thus improving your image (relatively). And of course, if you accept the principle of never adopting any software that everyone isn't familiar with, by and by you will find that all your software is obsolete. As is your staff's experience.

Re:Mod parent up

[TheDarkMaster]

"The linux developers feel that having a stable API would have to make them compromise features in the kernel because they'd be unable to change the internals when needed."

Welcome to the real world. And I can guarantee you that I live with compatibility issues both in the kernel and in applications. The problem is not the kernel X function in Y hardware, the problem is you write software for the kernel X and on the next month you having to redo everything again because the kernel X.1 is not compatible with the previous one.

It's true for our company

[DogDude]

We're in the process of moving to MS for our point of sale, inventory control, and financials. They offer a much better solution for mid-sized businesses in the retail space than any open source vendor.

Re:Mod parent over rated

[just_another_sean]

You just compared a setup program (in your words, not poorly written and/or requiring admin permissions) to a graphics driver. Would said driver that you used on XP work on Windows 7? Oh, no? You just got a new driver from ATI for your 2011 card? That's nice for you that ATI pays so much attention to keeping up with changes in Windows.

I get your "us BSD folks do freedom right" stance, I've seen it a lot on /. and I don't always disagree. I tend to be more of a rms/gnu/linux fanboy* myself. There are lots of things to pick on in open source. There are also a shit ton to pick on with proprietary software. Comparing simple apps to driver support though doesn't seem to be a very constructive part of the discussion.

* yes I called myself a fanboy. I was doing it for trek/star wars/the grateful dead long before I got into computers so I have no problem recognizing how obsessed I can get with whatever I find interesting.

Re:Mod parent up

[TheDarkMaster]

Well well well... Here is our favorite asshole again :-) Just think a bit: If you were the owner of a large and busy hardware company, you would be spending money on developers to be forever making corrections to your drivers, patches necessary only because some "hotshot" developer changes the kernel API all the time without worrying about maintaining compatibility with what was previously done? Developer time costs money, dude! Only "pet projects" can stay changing their APIs all the time without having to worry about the consequences, and Linux can not be developed like a pet project.

Re: Mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

You are an idiot.

It is

[Anonymous Coward]

hiccoughs you iNsensitive clod!

(WHOOSH! Hiccoughs is the real word but spellchecker does not recognise it.)

Re:It is

[MightyYar]

OED says that hiccup and it's variants came firs, hiccough coming from a mistake:

hiccup (n.) 1570s, hickop, earlier hicket, hyckock, "a word meant to imitate the sound produced by the convulsion of the diaphragm" [Abram Smythe Farmer, "Folk-Etymology," London, 1882]. Cf. Fr. hoquet, Dan. hikke, etc. Modern spelling first recorded 1788; An Old English word for it was ælfsogoða, so called because hiccups were thought to be caused by elves.

hiccough 1620s, variant of hiccup (q.v.) by mistaken association with cough.

Antivirus, anti-malware, anti...

[Danathar]

Did they factor in all the additional basic software into their TCO when buying windows? Most organizations don't.

Re:Antivirus, anti-malware, anti...

[DogDude]

Most organizations don't.

Because Microsoft provides it for free

But FOSS deverlopers don’t focus on usabilit

[Theovon]

Actually, it’s still true that FOSS developers don’t really focus on usability. However, there has been a very gradual pace of evolution, and FOSS has more room to try out new (albeit mostly bad) ideas. Slowly but surely, the good ideas rise to the top. Meanwhile, Microsoft has mostly stood still (cosmetics and METRO don’t count), and as a result, an Ubuntu desktop with LibreOffice is at least as usable as Windows for any cases where you don’t need to install special software (e.g. Photoshop). Where I work (a university), all the computer labs in the CS department run Debian, and nobody has any complaints (that I know of).

Personally, I’d rather use a Mac over either Linux or Windows, but Apple doesn’t address the low end very well, making it probably more expensive to outfit a whole organization. Sure, for a given Mac, an equivalent PC has about the same features and cost, but you can get even cheaper PCs, which are adequate for light office use. I’m not sure that MacOS’s usability superiority (which is a subjective thing anyway) is quite enough to offset other costs.

Re: Windows Linux for small business

[Anonymous Coward]

That is likely to happen but will still require a couple of decades.

stable abi

[Anonymous Coward]

the linux kernel has (and always had) a stable userspace abi:if you have staticly compiled program from `91 it will still run today

it's the kernel-internal api thats constantly changing, and it's the ability to refactor that internel api as needed that's responsible for the fact that the linux kernel is much much more able then the windows one.

Re:Windows Linux for small business

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you stupid or something?

Never call stupid the person you are arguing with, that's a bad manner.

Translation can be "Please give us more business"

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

Some years ago I worked for a company almost nobody here would have ever heard of. We struggled quite a bit in North America, but sales in other parts of the world were fairly good. Microsoft was one of our customers. In fact, I used to have to go to our data center from time to time and we had equipment for them in a special rack. We put out a paper exactly like the one discussed here, where my company "proved" that open source software had all these "secret" costs that made Microsoft a better deal. It was quite amusing because actually a rather significant chunk of our business depended on Linux and the services we actually ran under Windows were unreliable. To those of us who worked there, it was a pretty transparent attempt to keep the small business Microsoft sent our way and to maybe try to get them to send us more. The industry completely ignored our paper and I left the company some months later. I have no idea what the end result was, but I would be really surprised if Microsoft still uses my former employer for anything.

What an insult to British-American

[Anonymous Coward]

Are British people in Britian/UK really that stupid.
British descended people in the USA surely aren't.
I guess our British ancestors were smart enough to leave and left the stupid ones behind.

My experience (and other British-Americans that I talk with) have been that OpenSource is cheaper, user-friendlier and, overall, a much, much better experience.
(For Scottish-Americans, OpenSource is a gift from heaven--laptops last longer with OpenSource/Linux, save money since productivity software is "free" and entertainment software is "free". Our frugal little hearts jump up and down at the great savings of OpenSource.)

How much do the frequent reboots for "updates"

[mark_reh]

impact productivity?

Why does Windows require rebooting almost every time it does an update?
Why does linux only rarely need to reboot after an update?

Re:How much do the frequent reboots for "updates"

[Junta]

Why does Windows require rebooting almost every time it does an update?

Because their filehandle model is extremely stupid (cannot unlink an in-use file and replace with a new file and have the old filehandle available for old processes and new file content for new processes). However, in a way, it could be considered a blessing....

Why does linux only rarely need to reboot after an update?

On the one hand, this is a nice feature of the system, open filehandles are disassociated from the filenames they were opened as, allowing replacement of content without disrupting running processes. The downside is that you must track all the processes using a 'bad library' and restart them if you want to be assured that any security fix that might have been in there is applied. In practice, this is more and more becoming 'just reboot the system to be safe'. So Linux can scale up to multi-application environments with competent management better than Windows. However, if not carefully managed, then not rebooting after an update could just mean risk. Reboots have gotten cheaper and cheaper over time for most environments (reboots being faster and important services not being tied to just one OS instance), so this pride in uptime on a specific host is becoming more unreasonable.

Re:Mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do ATI drivers from 2 years ago not run on Linux?

Because the source is not available. Are you claiming that ATI drivers from 2 years ago run on Windows then? ;)

It really depends on how your business works.

[jellomizer]

Sometimes Open Source is the better value, sometimes Microsoft is the better value.
It really depends on how your organization operates.

Unix/Linux systems are really good at automated processes. This is for businesses that have few employees and performs services that can be done automatically.

Windows is better for businesses that are more people orientated. Where there is more free form information and less automation. Where having a computer that is more familiar to work with, is much more beneficial.

Now both systems can be configured to do each other jobs, however there will be a lot more tinkering and customization to get them to do that job. And the further you get past the basic install the greater total cost. Sure you can Have Linux with Open Office, to do the job of Windows and Office... But you will always be fighting to try to stay at the same standard that Windows and Office, meaning Free Software+4-8 hours of training+1-2 hour of config time per PC. Vs. License fee, and no training and config time. per feature set.

Each generation rediscovers the Zawinski principle

[c0d3g33k]

"[...] Linux is only free if your time has no value [...]"

http://www.jwz.org/doc/linux.h...

Re:But FOSS deverlopers don’t focus on usabi

[Junta]

FOSS developers usually focus on usability for themselves and people with similar sensibilities. This is one reason why it is so polarizing from a user experience stance. If your sensibilities are aligned with a critical mass of FOSS developers, then you are grateful to finally find a group of people that think like you making applications. However if you are not in that boat, you find the sensibilities bizarre. The commercial players base their stuff on usability studies and explicitly make calls to favor majority over niche.

This is of course not universal and an oversimplification, but it is a pretty common distinction.

sendmail by several orders of magnitude

[raymorris]

How many phone calls, how many hours (or months), and how much money might be required to fix an outage caused by an Exchange bug?
Solving a sendmail problem requires zero phone calls, zero dollars, and no more than a couple of hours - turn on verbose debugging and the logs show me exactly what's happening. If it's caused by a bug in the software, those verbose logs show me exactly where in the source to look for the bug. I check the bugzilla, find the solution there, and deploy it. it's a brand new bug noone has seen before, I fix it and we're up.

Maybe your organization doesn't have anyone who knows how to use Google to find the solution which is posted in the bug tracker. In that case, you can call or email any of the THOUSANDS of companies who do have people who grok the sendmail source. With MS, there is only one company who has seen the source, and you're not going to get Microsoft's programmers on the phone.

Re:sendmail by several orders of magnitude

[Anonymous Coward]

I can fix Exchange outages within minutes to an hour. I don't need the source, because there are no bugs that cause complete outages. It's always a misconfiguration or a problem with the infrastructure it's running on. If bugs in sendmail can cause complete outages requiring you to debug the source, I think I'll stick with Exchange.

Re:sendmail by several orders of magnitude

[raymorris]

> there are no bugs that cause complete outages.

You may wish to subscribe to a sysadmin news list of some type. Any of them will be better than none, you'll at least hear about some of the worst issues.

Same for 'studies' from 'independent' institutions

[Anonymous Coward]

Once upon a time I was paid to be Linux admin participating in a study about Windows versus Linux. The name of the game was to measure time to diagnose and resolve problems they injected. Windows and Linux admins would be graded and the result would be whoever was faster was better as a platform.

In analyzing the data in the report that proved Windows was a faster platform, I dug in and they did give in the raw data the data points that were thrown out to 'improve the statistical quality of the data'. They picked a very peculiar number of fastest and slowest outliers to throw out for both sets (there were more 'outliers' that were too fast than there were slow 'outliers'). I ran the math and basically it was the only number of results to throw out that would make the paper work out in microsoft's favor. Linux had more drastically fast participants so throwing out those didn't hurt the Microsoft participants, and they had two really dense Windows admins, so throwing out the two slowest from both sets really only helped Windows.

Of course, they had a sample size of about *6* at the end to try to make a judgement call about a gigantic industry, so there was no possible justifiable way to say it could indicate anything at all.

Everyone here is aware...

[hackus]

that the political establishment in the UK is bought and paid for by Microsoft.

I mean, the bias here borders on the edge of insanity, even after billions of dollars of costs involved in completing what was suppose to validate the Microsoft OS and its .Net API, that is was superior to POSIX threading, UNIX principles in general...etc.

Basically invalidating large portions of Knuth's work, including principles of code/data seperation using Microsft's new design principles, which I have never been able to figure out. The project was to replace UNIX on all of the worlds exchanges with easy to use Windows.

Starting with THE LONDON EXCHANGE.

ANYWAY...with a ton of PhD's, Microsoft began work on one of the largest and complex site implementations of Windows EVER in late 2008.

It was a complete and total success....for LINUX, after suffering through major outages at THE LONDON EXCHANGE, which one outage cost about 10 times the original project cost, was already over budget they simply....

The PhD's, simply GAVE UP.

Which says alot about Donald Knuth's original work, the state of Computer Science today (we STILL haven't really progressed passed 1978) and the engineers who built the ideas around LINUX at AT&T. (Not PhD's and neighther was LINUS.)

Nobody in their right mind uses Office anymore in new projects unless you are stuck in the 1990's and there is no alternative.

But, no way is Microsoft products designed to be cheaper, it never happens that way in my experience if you start a new project today.

Re:Everyone here is aware...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well... the London Stock Exchange is not comparable to normal office productivity software/environment. It can make sense to run on Linux or whatever else in a stock exchange since all the software that will run on it will be built from the ground up.

On the other hand, on a office PC you probably do not need to squeeze the machine to the last clock cycle since the main use is to type documents and fill some excel files. Giving to the users an environment that they already know and that they are productive with is probably your main objective. Moreover, probably the agreement with MS to buy the software comes with on-site support, trainings, etc. all things that you would have needed to look for yourself when moving to Linux+LibleOffice+other stuff.

For a very long time I have been a huge fan of Linux on the desktop but now I really use Windows (+Emacs, ...) on my main machine and I have Linux just running inside a virtual box to perform compilation and testing. It is way more "practical" and "easy" since you do not have to appeal to the Gods in order to have the graphic card working, etc., I can read and write documents that the 99% of the people will be able to read, I can even install and remove software in a way more practical way without waiting for the Linux distro to update unless I want to recompile the stuff myself (thing that I used to do in the past with the kernel itself, gcc, perl/python interpreters, emacs, ...) and I can have multiple virtual machines emulating in all the details the different production servers in use (this last one I could have had on Linux as well though).

Do I need to reboot every now and then because I did a software update? Fair enough... time for a cigarette then :-)

In 4+ years since I moved from Linux to Win for my workstation I had only one single BSOD and that was because the hard-disk was having a physical failure... I do not expect Linux to behave any better in such a situations. In all these years, my machine never crapped out due to viruses or other system instabilities just because I take care of it in the same way as I used to take care of my Linux box.

PS: My Linux box still exists, it is there and every now and then I switch it on just to check some stuff and or to have a bit of fun... nothing special, I have the same kind of "emotional bonding" with my old Ultra60 as well that I used ages ago when I was a Solaris fan-boy.

Re:Mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

The linux developers feel that having a stable API would have to make them compromise features in the kernel because they'd be unable to change the internals when needed.

Maybe if the linux kernel developers properly designed their APIs in the first place, they wouldn't have to change them later. I can fully understand why binary compatibility is not in the cards for the Linux kernel, but source code compatibility should be a given.

As another handy feature since almost all drivers are in tree, this means that old hardware is usually supported on new kernels just fine. Unlike Windows: I've used perfectly functional sheet feed scanners abandoned by their owners because they don't have drivers for Windows 7 or 8.

Only if it is a popular device that any of the kernel developers still have. Just having your driver in the tree does not guarantee it will be maintained. I fully understand why I can't expect anyone to maintain drivers for hardware they don't even have for free - but if we had stable APIs, then working drivers wouldn't need to be maintained. They'd simply keep working.

Re:Mod parent up

[higuita]

Ok, i will bit the troll...

All this post is FUD... at very least is from someone that don't understand how a *nix work.

Why can't apps just work between versions like MacOSX, Solaris, FreeBSD with the compat libs, and even Windows?

Bullsh*t!
What apps stop working because versions of linux, that will not also happen in *bsd? when a app stop working is because the libs are different (ABI if compiled or API if source), sources assumes a compiler behaviour or missing dependencies. If you still have the right dependencies, your app will work... if something fails, a recompile is usually enough. Broken code is still broken code and need to be fixed (or downgrade... a windows 3.1 program will almost for sure not compile in a windows 8 without some changes)

The last big change in linux that turned the old apps incompatible was the a.out to elf migration.
Linus is very strict about never break userlevel API. Kernel level API do change and is up to the company to either open the drivers and collaborate or do the update work herself.
In windows is the same, the kernel drive API can change and is up the companies to supply updated drivers. yes, in windows kernel the kernel drivers API change fewer times, mostly because they release a lot less kernel versions than linux.

I can click on a setup.exe from the XP era and unless it is a horribly written business app requiring local admin (more like win98 style written) it will run on Windows 8 no problem.

just grab the source and recompile... or, like windows, grab a static (or libs included) binary and you can do exactly the same

Why do ATI drivers from 2 years ago not run on Linux? ABI and API compatibilities as Linux developers feel that is evil and encourages binary blobs! Funny no other platform has this problem with them.

they run on linux... just grab a 2 years ago linux version... ohh, you want to use the more current linux version? sure, use the CURRENT binary driver!
why the hell you want to use old drivers on a recent kernel? can you use the windows XP drivers on a windows 8 kernel? most of then it's not possible! if the installer don't have a windows 8 driver, you will hit a brick wall. Binary drivers are always a brick wall when they go unsupported... ALWAYS!

better yet, for a 2 year ago ATI/AMD card, you can just use the open driver and never again look at binary drivers.. that is the power that RMS gave to us all

Socialist ideology about everyone that is closed source is harmful
run, run, the communist will eat our children!! RUN!!
Closed drivers are bad because you never know that when you update your kernel, if those drivers can work... or if they have some bug, you are unable to fix then.
Just look to the android phone market. most older phones can be upgrades to newer versions, not because the linux kernel, but because there are missing drivers for the newer kernels, making it impossible to have a usable phone without support from the manufacturer/chip builder.

Apples and Oranges

[westlake]

Microsoft Works is still in use by people. Your memory is pretty selective if you're only considering Microsoft Office.

When was the last time anyone here has needed to open a document in a Works file format in the professional/small business/enterprise environment?

Re:Mod parent up

[serviscope_minor]

Welcome to the real world.

er huh? I'm not sure what you mean by that. Linux is certainly used in the real world and is the modt performant real-world kernel in existence.

the problem is you write software for the kernel X and on the next month you having to redo everything again because the kernel X.1 is not compatible with the previous one.

Not for userland code. For userland code, the kernel has a very stable ABI, osmething I believe there's a good Linus rant on. Some of the library developers are terrible, though glibc and libstdc++ are pretty good.

Did you know, if you disable the kernel security feature that randomizes addresses you can still run libc5 based programs on a modern kernel, provided you can find a copy of libc5?

And frankly, I doubt your claim. Unless you've selected some woefully unstable libraries (your fault, and nothing to do with Linux per-se) then it's nothing like as hard as you make out for out of kernel stuff.

Re:Mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

Because, again, the internel kernel APIs and ABIs do not need to be stable if you push your driver upstream. If you do, they keep it up to date for you and can debug issues for you. Otherwise you're just demanding that they assume the duty of maintaining backwards compatibility so that you may reap the rewards of the work done by them without aiding them in any way.

Now you are the one "blatantly lying". Just having a driver in the upstream does not guarantee it will be maintained - if no kernel developer cares for it or has the hardware, it's going to be left to bitrot until it is removed.

Re:Mod parent up

[higuita]

better yet:
freedom do really sucks... is much easier to have some random dictator tell us what to do, instead of making decisions ourself... is much harder to THINK! :)

"It depends"

[Gumbercules!!]

I guess it depends on what you're doing, doesn't it? If you're trying to provide Microsoft Sharepoint access to Microsoft Office documents to users or Microsoft Exchange email access, then, yes, it probably is cheaper and quicker to do it with Microsoft stuff. It's a pretty ludicrous claim to say that the TCO of Linux is higher than Microsoft unless you are also clear about what your company expects your IT to do... If you're just trying to use Linux to emulate Windows, then of course that's probably a waste of time and resources.

FOSS solutions could not be bothered to be compati

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft is the one that uses proprietary formats. "Proprietary," means that they don't provide the formats to the rest of the world. Backward engineering a file format can be time consuming and open you to litigation. Secondly, when Microsoft introduced a "standard" file format, even they failed to adhere to the standard.

Finally, there is an accepted standard for file formats out there. Once again, Microsoft is the one who can't be bothered to adhere to them.

Gotta think long term

[walterbyrd]

If you are a msft shop, then, I suspect, in the short term it really is less expensive to stay with msft.

In the long term, it's far more expensive, and will get worse. In the long term, you are vendor locked. In the long term, you are a slave to msft. You have to buy whatever msft tells you to buy, when msft tells you to buy it, and pay whatever msft tells you to pay.

You lose all of your freedom, and flexibility. Find some technology you really like? If msft hates it, you won't be able to use it.

Desktop Linux is getting much better. Wayland has a lot of potential. Msft desktop is getting worse. Win8 is a disaster.

Re:Mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

Open-source platforms become unsupported much more quickly, if they were supported at all in the first place.

MacOS? OSX or iOS? Why?

[raymorris]

> But then, I still have a lot of friends who will tell me at length about how much better MacOS is, and I find it profoundly irritating to use.

I'm guessing that by "MacOS" you mean OSX, not the classic Mac OS that's been deprecated for a decade? I used Linux rexclusively for over over ten years. Based on my experience with iOS, I expected OSX to be really annoying. When I sat down to use it anyway, I was surprised to find it's a very nice Unix, with a pretty GUI that I don't care about. (For me, the GUI is nothing more than a convenient way to have both a web browser and all my terminals on the various monitors).

I'm curious what any fan of Linux would find so irritating about OSX, especially if you're comfortable with the CLI. It's the same CLI as Linux for daily work. System admin has differences, but for daily work it's the same. All the FOSS software runs on OSX just as it does on Linux, plus it has ready-to-run packages from proprietary vendors like Adobe. All on a very reliable, stable platform. What's not to like, other than the price?*

* Even the price can be $29 or so if you don't choose Mac hardware.

Re:MacOS? OSX or iOS? Why?

[jbolden]

Ray. I've been an OSX user regularly since 10.1. The advantage of Linux over OSX for open source is pretty large.

OSX is very nonstandard. Basic Unix features like passwords don't work consistently. Things like cp can require modification and overwrites can be tricky because the HFS+ filesystem has some different properties than typical Unix filesystems like ext4. The result is you hit way way more bugs with many open source applications via. Darwinports or Fink than you do with Linux distributions. Not shockingly Linux is far and away the best way to run Linux software.

I feel like with OSX I get a good Unix combined with good productivity software. Also quite excellent design even for applications. Windows has better productivity software and Linux is a better Unix.

Re:MacOS? OSX or iOS? Why?

[smash]

Most *Nix users (and these days means kids in their early 20s mostly) look at the UI, say "that's boring, and all i can customize is a couple of colours and move the dock" and write it off as simplistic.

The true power of OS X lies in services, system-wide automation support (folder actions for example), the keyboard shortcut consistency, etc.

Sure you can (legally dubiously) get OS X on PC hardware for $29. But their hardware is actually nice. And it is nice to have a single source of support. Machine does somethign wierd, you aren't chasing down 3 different hardware vendors' or trawling the internet for driver updates. If you've got support, you take it to apple, say "it's fucked" get a new box and restore your time machine backup.

Re:MacOS? OSX or iOS? Why?

[smash]

OS X is very non-standard. Coming from a Linux proponent :D

LOL. Old unix users will get it.

Re:MacOS? OSX or iOS? Why?

[tylikcat]

Well, yes, I did mean OSX, though in fact it's been true for both. (OTOH, in MacOS days, I was something of a Mac fan. It's a relative thing. I grew up on UNIX in an academic enviornment, and tended to favor Macs if the alternative was Windows.)

The command line is of course the least irritating part (almost non irritating, but often installation of common open source packages is somewhat more cumbersome that what I'm used to - it's gotten a lot better, though.) But it's the GUI that people tend to rhapsodize over... and I just don't get it.

Re:MacOS? OSX or iOS? Why?

[jbolden]

I started on NeXT then AIX then SunOS then Solaris... But times change at this point Linux is the standard.

Re:MacOS? OSX or iOS? Why?

[smash]

No, Linux is popular. The userland tools are incompatible with everything else. OS X is more popular than Linux and actually unix certified. Linux is non-standard.

Re:MacOS? OSX or iOS? Why?

[jbolden]

OSX may be Unix certified in the sense that Darwin is fairly standard. But OSX itself is highly non standard as I mentioned above. Because of HFS things like cp don't work the way they normally do. User management isn't tied to /etc/passwd....

Re:Windows Linux for small business

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I realized that when I asked the question. The problem, though, was the OP was being absurd. Of course if the requirement is "use Word on Windows" or at least "use Word without the hassle of using WINE or equivalent", then nothing less than that will suffice. The rest of the little rant becomes very irrelevant once that's taken into account. So, it's hard not to question whether the person is either stupid or "something" like intentionally bias. It'd be a lot different if said comments were in response to an article about "Linux can do [almost] everything" and "no one has a use for Windows". But clearly that's not the context of the discussion--where if anything it's "Windows is [almost] always cheaper than Linux". The rest is just framing it under presumptions or implications of some fanatics of Windows or Linux which is, honestly, rather pointless.

ps, check the kernel changelog before flaming

[raymorris]

Ps whenever I post positive comments about OSX, some idiot flames me, saying "you don't use open source, you obviously hate open source", etc. My name is at the top of my post. Look at it, then look at the changelog for the Linux kernel.

Re: Windows Linux for small business

[mark-t]

Nope.... documents laid out in LO Writer won't always open correctly in Word either. As I said... this is most heavily felt when the document has a lot of layout and formatting requirements.

As for why a person would use Word for anything when there are suitable software packages for building the desired effect (such as Scribus, as you mentioned) .... it's because Word and Office are almost ubiquitous. Employers will, for example, often expect resumes to be submitted in Word format... Although often this is merely so that the employer can use automated screening tools on the resume submissions, when one is trying to make a good first impression, presentation still matters. A lot. And for that matter, a person's fluency with LO's Calc or any other free spreadsheet program isn't going to impress anyone when they are looking for an Excel guru. I've seen people who are very fluent in one struggle with using the other... most if not all of the functionality may be there, but the procedures for doing things can sometimes differ enough that it won't be at all intuitive to a lot of people.

As for newer versions of Office not being fully compatible with old ones, that's a misleading counterexample to the incompatibility that exists between LO and Office, since both products are examples of *current* software.

Re:Not really

[Grishnakh]

Also in the case of git, when the central public repository is down, that does not mean you can't work. Compare that to Exchange or Team Foundation Server, the entire company grinds to a halt when these systems go down and I have seen my fair share of downtime.

Don't compare GIT to Exchange or Team Foundation Server, as those are not version-control systems. Compare GIT instead to IBM Rational ClearCase, which IS a competing version control system.

When your ClearCase central repository goes down, you can't work any more, or at least not much. You can't make any checkins, you can't do diffs with any other versions to see what you've changed, in short you can't do anything that involves version control in any way. And if you're using dynamic views you can't work at all, because you have to be in constant communication with the server for that feature to work.

With GIT, you only need access to the central repository (or rather, "remote repository", as GIT is decentralized) when you want to sync with it. GIT maintains a full copy of the repo on your local machine so you can do everything locally, and only syncing with the remote server when necessary.

On top of all that, ClearCase costs an insane amount of money, and requires a full-time administrator to keep it running, who's dedicated to administering that machine and doing nothing else.

Re: Mod parent down

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because they switched driver models in Vista. But with few exceptions could use a Vista driver in 8 as long the architecture matched.

How does he know? Did he try open source?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Microsoft Cheaper To Use Than Open Source Software, UK CIO Says" So did he try an alternative? I'd be interested to know how he "knows Microsoft is cheaper"?

Re: Windows Linux for small business

[CronoCloud]

prove it, link us up with a complex word document and have some of us LO users open it up and post screenshots.

What else would you expect him to say?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, we got fleeced by MS.

Hell no. This guy is going to back his choice that he made LONG ago regardless of facts.

Re:Mod parent up

[CronoCloud]

My ATI drivers from 2011 will not work on a modern distro.,

Why are you trying to run 2011 drivers on a 2014 distro, why not u se the drivers included in the modern distro.

!? what are you talking about?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you nuts? I roll my own packages and I'm a 1 person IT department for 30 staff... It's not a huge deal at all.

Re:Mod parent up

[Microlith]

Here is our favorite asshole again

I try to be polite but straightforward, and this is what I get?

If you were the owner of a large and busy hardware company, you would be spending money on developers to be forever making corrections to your drivers, patches necessary only because some "hotshot" developer changes the kernel API all the time without worrying about maintaining compatibility with what was previously done?

I'm not the owner, but the company I work for does just that. Of course, our driver is also open source so any kernel API changes like that are done for us.

Only "pet projects" can stay changing their APIs all the time without having to worry about the consequences, and Linux can not be developed like a pet project.

Bullshit! People know how the kernel is developed, and if they want access to the user base they should play nicely with the world that was there before them, rather than demand that the kernel developers prop them up so they can have their cake and eat it too.

Re:Mod parent up

[Microlith]

Just having a driver in the upstream does not guarantee it will be maintained - if no kernel developer cares for it or has the hardware, it's going to be left to bitrot until it is removed.

If it fails to build it'll be removed. You are guaranteed that much at a minimum. If you're the kind of company that expects to develop a driver once then move on, then you're a crap company who probably never fixes driver bugs anyway.

Google and facebook changing to microsoft

[Stonefish]

In terms of economics, I'd prefer to trust dollars not mouths. All of the major players in ICT in the last 15 years have a base platform of linux, Google, Facebook etc. They didn't use linux because its more expensive, they did it because it's cheaper. The longer that others stay with high cost platforms the longer their competitive margin remains.
IT staff cost pretty much the same regardless of the base platform unless you're doing something really esoteric, if you use centos or debian and pay for support not licences where you have a choice you have a chance of making savings. One of the problems with MS is that through a series of low risk choices you get herded into a higher cost solution. Think of the way that wild animal are herded down a funnel with weak barriers until the final half mile which turns into a killing field. Only a few animals make the correct decision of breaking away, the other like this goose try to justify a costly platform as cost effective. ps Mr Creese owns a Windows phone too. He thinks its great. ;-)

Re:Google and facebook changing to microsoft

[CountZer0]

To be fair, I'm sure that while their core produce / service is hosted on Linux, the desktop ecology (including supporting servers) is almost certainly Windows.

I know that at every major financial institution in the US it's the same way... There is a large Windows desktop / server platform maintained by a core 'desktop support' IT organization that simply exists to provide employees with desktops and associated tools. Then there is the massive Linux server platform used to actually run whatever services comprise the core business of the firm, (exchange connectivity, algorithmic trading engines, client connectivity, booking systems, compliance systems, etc). So even though the entire financial industry in the US runs on Linux, every single one of those banks, exchanges and hedge funds also has a sizable Windows desktop/server environment as well, strictly to support employee workstations and day-to-day communications, document generation, collaboration tools, etc.

This makes sense, actually. The systems that the company depends on to actually *make money* are Linux. The systems that the employees use to work with each other are Windows.

Re:Google and facebook changing to microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

>Google, Facebook etc.
>They didn't use linux because its more expensive, they did it because it's cheaper.

Yeah, if I had a company staffed with elite CS majors, I'm sure I'd find Linux cheaper too. *rolls eyes*

Re: Windows Linux for small business

[mark-t]

As said documents contain much personal information that isn't necessarily my own, I'm afraid I can't do that.

Really, you don't have to even try very heard to do this... and I'm surprised you would need to see proof of it. Try creating something in Office with images that have been positioned at certain points on a page. Something like a flyer or pamphlet can be especially problematic.

Of course, one might suggest that one ouoght to be using a better tool, such as Scribus for something like that, but the reason people distribute files in Office format is because of its near ubiquity. In fact, it's because of that ubiquity that the ability to open Office documents is even important in LO.

Re:Mod parent up

[TheDarkMaster]

Okay, so let's be polite. If you have developers willing to make the necessary changes in your driver indefinitely and without additional costs, good for you. But most companies can't do this, it costs time and money to stay forever correcting a driver because of constant changes in the kernel API, and you can not always just open the code of your driver (patents, trade secrets, etc.) and leave for a third party fix the code.

Re:Mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

C language vs FOSS
They can not serve two masters...

Re:Mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, handcuffs are great!

I mean when ever did idealism bring humanity forward?
I like the convenience that the society of the middle ages delivered....

Re: Windows Linux for small business

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I like two two five extra clicks in each of my 100 steps. You know exactly what you are talking about. When I switch and get RSI, I will know that an ignorant Internet guy was right.

Re: Windows Linux for small business

[CronoCloud]

As said documents contain much personal information that isn't necessarily my own, I'm afraid I can't do that.

That's fine, I understand that, but can you do some kind of mockup we can use as an actual test?

and I'm surprised you would need to see proof of it.

I need to see proof of it because of:

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/...

How LO lays things out varies depending on the version installed and the typefaces you have installed. Some of the formatting issues are simply typeface issues. (but not all, of course)

Something like a flyer or pamphlet can be especially problematic. Of course, one might suggest that one ouoght to be using a better tool, such as Scribus for something like that,

You should be using Scribus....or Print Shop for something like that. Word is not the right tool for that job.

but the reason people distribute files in Office format is because of its near ubiquity./quote

If people need documents to appear the exact same way on every platform they should be using PDF.

Re: Windows Linux for small business

[mark-t]

In the business world, documents need to not only be formatted the same way, they need to be equally editable by any recipient, so PDF is not workable. You can try to teach absolutely everybody to follow rigid standards but in the end, you are always still going to have to appease the weakest link in the chain, who is in my exprerience often the person paying your salary (or the person(s) that he or she needs to kiss ass for in order to keep the company itself afloat), and you don't really get to say "I want to use LibreOffice because I believe in freedom"... because hey.... you can have all the freedom you want... looking for another job and worrying about being able to continue to eat.

How far has USA fallen?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can always tell how far something falls by some things.

What's gold cost?
What's Gas cost?
What's Diesel cost?
How much in your face lying is there about the facts in light of reality you actually live, forget the Ministry of Propaganda, forget conspiracy theory

County Council, I bet those mother fuckers are Agenda 21 / ICLEE memberships

and if I am right, then what?

Re:Mod parent up

[phantomfive]

The linux developers feel that having a stable API would have to make them compromise features in the kernel because they'd be unable to change the internals when needed.

As compensation, they offer to maintain any drivers that are open source, because they know the problems that come with backwards-incompatibility.

Funny how Linux is the most high performance kernel out there.

Funny how you have no data to back that up.

Are you talking about the Linux kernel or applications?

I didn't think you were dumb until I read this. What do you think I'm talking about?

Or the semi monthly outages

[Anonymous Coward]

My former company switched to hosted Exchange services, we went from having an outage or two a year to an outage roughly every other week, but they were really excited that they wouldn't need an exchange admin anymore...until they need an exchange admin to fix the issues. I guess they never realized that 10000 people being without email for a day cost more than one full time employee running the server.

Re: Windows Linux for small business

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, if those three things are all that's inferior about LibreWriter then I think MS is shitting their pants right now. I'm also not 100% sure that Excel is that much easier to use, as I've had to support lots of people who get very frustrated with what I'd consider "the basics". It's probably more accurate to say that once you're used to Excel's quirks and bugs, it's harder to switch over to LibreCalc. Pivot tables are probably the big reason people don't like LibreCalc.

Re: Windows Linux for small business

[Noah Haders]

the problem is in collaborative environments where many people are bouncing a document around. If you use something that's not Word, then it can corrupt small things and the doc will be messed up going forward. Example, it may mess with the font sizes or footers. why deal with the headache? And why should I have to deal with the messes my coworkers make because they have issues with MS?

Linux de facto standard, OSX follows real standard

[raymorris]

That's interesting. It sounds like on OSX you feel about the same way I feel on FreeBSD.

> OSX is very nonstandard.

It should be noted that OSX follows the UNIX specification, Linux does not. OSX _is_ a UNIX, and certified as one. Linux is not.
That said, most *nix software these days is probably developed on Linux systems, so Linux serves as a sort of de facto standard.

Re:Mod parent up

[serviscope_minor]

Funny how you have no data to back that up.

oh ho ho heee hee hee hahaha lol:

http://www.extremetech.com/com... :chuckle:

open source is partially flawed but fixable

[Anonymous Coward]

when everything fails, when you NEED help nao the last thing you wanna do is find the appropriate forum, ask the question, plow trough insult of your inferior intellect to finally find the beginning of an answer written in a way that you can't really decipher completely and is about a version you don't have using an external library you don't know where to get...

Open source is awesome and all but forks and crowd-sourced support should die. The day open-source developers will find icons, GUI, translation, documentation and help as important as efficient code we'll get somewhere.

Re:Mod parent up

[TheDarkMaster]

Well, so using a recent example. I like to use one application based on GTK/GNOME called Xara Xtreme, who until recently worked correctly. But it crashed when GNOME developers decided to change an somehow important API (god knows why). GNOME developers could have avoided this by simply making a new function and keeping the later (maybe "functionDoSomethingEx()" for the later "functionDoSomething()"), or modified the original function keeping the parameters compatible.

Yep, is a compromise. But it is way better than simply breaking all the compatibility and force users to change programs they may not have the means to change or upgrade.

P.S: Yes, yes, I can try to recompile the application because on this case I can get the source. But this can be very difficult or even impossible (dependency hell) to compile, and IF, and a big IF, if you know what and how to fix on the source.

In the right circumstances, he has a point.

[jimicus]

The problem is less to do with the OS and more to do with the business application. There is no half-decent F/OSS accounting package, no half-decent F/OSS payroll package, no half-decent F/OSS line-of-business application for most specialised industries.

Inevitably, you wind up looking for commercial line of business applications. 99 times out of 100, these run on Windows on the desktop (even when they're nominally web-based - you'd be amazed how many developers heard about the idea of web-based applications and thought to themselves "Great! We'll get right on it! Now, let's see how many ActiveX controls we can require for our application!") and the main platform for the server is Windows-based.

Re:Mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

Solaris has a (very) stable ABI, and frankly kicks Linux to the curb.

Linux may run on some "superbewolfclustershit" but be honest, even Windows does that.

Linux is not the best, its the sad little boy in his mothers basement that has never learnt to play well with others. Kinda like you in that respect.

I'm sure that lots of slaves...

[Anonymous Coward]

..reckoned that it was cheaper to stay on the plantation than make their way in the free world.....

KB and FS differences between Linux and Windows

[tepples]

Yes. For example, entering special characters on Windows uses Alt+numpad codes, while entering special characters on Linux uses Ctrl+Shift+U codes. And file systems on Linux aren't divided into mount points. Finally, good luck changing the volume label of a removable mass storage device (such as a USB flash drive) in some Linux file managers.

No no no. It is not a dog's breakfast ribbon it is

[Anonymous Coward]

If we are such drama queens :)

MS would be helpful to them

[thetoadwarrior]

There have been numerous complaints that the UK gov doesn't know anything about IT, they overspend and end up with rubbish. Of course MS would be very helpful to them. I would not surprise me if MS is milking them for an obscene amount of money.

Re:Mod parent up

[armanox]

It has nothing to do with GNU (and your probably talking more about the FSF anyway, not the GNU project). But anyway. It's not an open source vs free software issue. It has everything to do with the fact people don't f'ing get what the real problem is. If you buy shitty hardware that's not cooperating with the projects maintaining the OS your going to get shitty support for your hardware. Buy hardware from vendors that actually work with the OS maintainers and you'll get completely different results. The GNU/Linux developers can't support your shitty proprietary hardware because they don't have access to the code, and I damm well know the hardware vendors you buy from won't. They don't support it in Microsoft Windows so what makes you think they'll do a better job in GNU/Linux when GNU/Linux desktop distributions are more bleeding edge?

I'd hardly call HP, Apple, Sun, SGI, Lenovo, and Dell 'shitty' hardware. And from the component perspective, nVidia and AMD are far from 'shitty.'

Licensing is what keeps Linux from supporting a lot of hardware. I can install Solaris 11 on my home desktop, and everything works out of box. Everything. My nVidia GPU, sound, wifi adapter; all of it. I don't get complaints about MP3 or Flash being 'dirty' in Solaris.

Re:Mod parent up

[armanox]

Theoretically that isn't that hard to pull off either, when you think about it. I can have multiple versions of all kinds of things installed in Linux without an issue - look at how kernels get saved in /usr/src, for example. And I know I've installed KDE 3 and 4 side by side, with KDE4 being deployed to /opt/KDE4, and being told to look for all of it's libraries there.

Re:Mod parent up

[armanox]

The FSF supports freedom as long as it's their kind of freedom.

True Costs

[KingMotley]

You mean like that change that happened over 7 years ago? You point out one disruptive thing that has happened to the office suite since it was created 24 years ago? One disruptive thing every 24 years I think is highly appropriate.

Reruiting policy

[KingMotley]

The thing is, Linux engineers would have no problem learning Windows stuff, while the opposite is more seldom.

So you admit that the pool of possible candidates is larger and will always remain larger for windows administration, yet somehow expect that the cost will be lower for linux. That's some very odd theories you have, especially considering your assumptions.

Re:Mod parent up

[serviscope_minor]

OK, I think we're talking about two different things here.

One is the Kernel ABI, which is super stable. Thery're very particular about that. On the userland side, things are up to the individual library maintainers. And GNOME is a bit of an offender there.

vYep, is a compromise. But it is way better than simply breaking all the compatibility and force users to change programs they may not have the means to change or upgrade.

Well, within a distro things tend to be stable. If you're using binaries from out of the distro, they are often packaged with all the .so files (often excluding the well maintained system ones like lic and libstdc++).

The little commercial software I've dealt with on Linux is generally quite good in this regard.

Some OSS stuff I've just given up on when versions have drifted too far and no one else has managed to figure out how to get the bloody thing to build. Of course, I could install an old distro in a chroot but they weren't that important.

Re: Windows Linux for small business

[wertigon]

Re messed up docs: Yes, exactly, and those errors come up because Word uses the "visual" workflow, while Writer uses the "structure" workflow which IMO is both easier to understand, less prone to errors and easier to use.

LibreOffice is just as capable as Office, as Munich has proven with it's LiMux migration. Different, but capable. Besides - is it LO being incompatible with MSO or MSO being incompatible with LO? ;)

As for resumes - I always send those as PDFs which are super-easy to create in LO. But whatever.

nope, centralized login can be done for free

[Anonymous Coward]

in centos you can use IdM from Redhat (https://access.redhat.com/site/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Identity_Management_Guide/index.html) which is basically AD for linux (ldap, kerberos, dns, sudo, ....) and yubikeys for two factor authentication (http://www.freeipa.org/page/YubiRadius_integration_with_group-validated_FreeIPA_Users_using_LDAPS).

Licensing costs: $0.

Re: Windows Linux for small business

[Anonymous Coward]

>This sort of statement is hilarious to a programmer.

PROTIP: 99.9% of people aren't programmers and don't give a crap about VCSes.

As a programmer, you should already have been clever enough to know that.

never heard of zimbra?

[Anonymous Coward]

We are migrating from Exchange to Zimbra because Zimbra is four times cheaper (yes, you read that right) than Exchange.

No neck beards in here, by the way. Everything running in Centos linux which is a linux flavour backed by Redhat so you basically can get support everywhere.

one platform - end to end

[ThirdPrize]

I know Visual Studio is clunky but can open source provide anything as powerful? By that i mean you can debug/step through code in the web page, the middle tier and even in managed stored procedures in the database, all from the same IDE. Not having to swap between three different applications, from three different sources. Can OS do anything similar?

That is funny rof funy as every country

[Anonymous Coward]

City municipality that have switched have said the exact opposite thing I wonder why that is.

Fuck beta.

[Anonymous Coward]

Most sane businesses block access to google docs etc.

Fuck beta

[Anonymous Coward]

And I'm sure that if you had booted a live Windows environment (yes it exists, even from Microsoft) the same would have been true and the flash drive would have worked. I'm sure (from experience) that a broken Linux install (due to PEBCAK issues) will fail to load drivers, or a whole lot more, too.

Fuck beta

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but git saves me hours a day over other source control systems I've had to endure (sccs, subversion, Perforce, Clearcase).

Fuck beta.

[Anonymous Coward]

> Most Software/hardware is cheap compare to the cost of employees

I wish more management had that opinion. Sadly, in many companies it is seen as far cheaper for developers to continue to continue to use old 2GHz P4's with 1GB RAM than to give them decent machines. What is good enough for editing a Word document is good enough for coding right? In the words of one member of senior management at a large consultancy, "It's all just typing, right?".

Department of Dishonest Headlines

[Anonymous Coward]

He's not the "UK CIO", he's a "CIO who lives in the UK"! Your headline, which is the only part most people will read, states that this dude is the CIO for the UK national government. Whether you intended it or not, that's what it says. In fact he is the CIO for a local government in a random bit of southern England. Not a very noteworthy person, and not speaking for the UK government.

Re: Mod parent up

[exomondo]

Try installing an ati driver for Windows xp in Windows 8.

Why would you do that? Just install the Windows 8 driver. While Microsoft changed the driver model between XP and 8 throughout the 13 years of XP the ABI did not change so drivers didn't stop working just because of a kernel update like what happens on Linux. Linux does not have a stable ABI which is why you need to recompile your drivers when you update your kernel, the lack of a stable API also means that recompiling might not work and you may have to either patch the driver for the newer kernel or wait until the vendor or somebody else does, obviously it is even worse for binary drivers that you cannot just recompile. It's one of the most prominent arguments against binary blob drivers in Linux.

Not maintaining a stable ABI and API for kernel mode drivers means significantly more flexibility in kernel development but obviously has serious downsides if you want to use devices that only have binary drivers.

Re:Mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

If it fails to build it'll be removed. You are guaranteed that much at a minimum. If you're the kind of company that expects to develop a driver once then move on, then you're a crap company who probably never fixes driver bugs anyway.

Well if the driver was stable on Windows XP then for the lifetime of Windows XP you didn't have to touch it, but even if it's stable on Linux you still have to maintain and update it for every ABI/API change that affects it. That work is in addition to any bug fixes or improvements you might make to it, work that you do not have to do platforms like Windows or OS X until a new major version that changes the driver model comes out, which is infrequently compared to Linux internal ABI/API changes.

The work involved may be trivial or it may be significant, it may be done by kernel maintainers or it may not but ultimately it is an additional burden on developers somewhere along the line.

Re:Linux de facto standard, OSX follows real stand

[jbolden]

Exactly. At this point Linux is many times larger than other Unixes combined. In the server space the only meaningfully large commercial Unix left is AIX and that one is certainly not standard. IMHO 2014 is the standard Unix, regardless of what the Open Group says.

But yes. Darwin + XQuartz (the way to make OSX more standard) is a lot like FreeBSD in fact they pull software and ideas back and forth and are cousins. OSX is a bit less standard than FreeBSD because

a) NeXT was really different
b) FreeBSD aims to be standard
c) FreeBSD due to being part of the free software community gets dragged towards Linux while Apple doesn't

So software in Darwin has the same problems it would have with FreeBSD x3.

Re: Windows Linux for small business

[gonnagetya]

No. Sometimes you have to accept the fact that Microsoft might just know what they're doing and make a better project IN SOME CASES.

Powerpoint for example has little graphical hints that appear when you resize/move elements on a slide to show if edges are lines up with other elements. It ensures you can position things perfectly level with other objects as misalignment will stick out rather obviously on a big display. It's hundred's of these little improvements that seem minor on their own (which they are) that once summed together provide significant benefits over the opposition. You can make do with Impress, but you'll want Powerpoint.

And that's why MS Office still dominates. For those who are used to the little things that make life easier.

Re: Windows Linux for small business

[TrollstonButterbeans]

Calc is missing quite a few "1994" era Excel and Lotus 1-2-3 features. For light spreadsheet usage, Calc gets the job done and is free.

If it gets anything beyond base complexity, Excel is a time saver.

Writer on the other hand is far closer to being a peer of Word until you hit advanced stuff (which I personally almost never use). I will say options are easier to find in Microsoft Office.

Re: Windows Linux for small business

[mark-t]

Most people are accustomed to a visual workflow, however... so documents others make and you need to collaborate with won't open nicely in your copy of LO.

Re:Mod parent up

[phantomfive]

That's not a very good piece of evidence, it shows linux better in some, and windows better in others. There are other types of benchmarks too, like network throughput.

That's beside the point though, I wouldn't use Windows unless it was forced on me. Compared to other good OSes, what data do you have on performance?

Re:Mod parent up

[phantomfive]

Incidentally, I just re-read my post from this morning to you. I've got to start being nicer :/

Re:Mod parent up

[serviscope_minor]

Incidentally, I just re-read my post from this morning to you. I've got to start being nicer :/

Same. I've been acting like a bit of a dick on slashdot recently. I've been grumpy AFK, but no need to bring it online.

Anyway, compared to other OSs. There's not all that many benchmarks, but some crop up now and again. OpenBSD is good but not all that fast (not a design goal). FreeBSD is probably the closest competitor. Other OSs are either too obscure to get useful figures out of (e.g. VM) or specialised for things (e.g. realtime) which generally have a negative effect on general performance.

For some reason for many benchmarks, people take something CPU bound and run it on various OSs. FreeBSD hasn't helped by moving on over to LLVM, since that still loses out to GCC in terms of performance so far.

In practive, Linux has a lot of people beating on it, especially in terms of very high performance hardware.

Anyway here's some more not very good benchmarke :)

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p...

Next Job with Microsoft guaranteed

[rohanld]

I am sure they "Microsoft" must have given him a BIG FAT BONUS for him to say that Microsoft has been more flexible and helpful.

Another Certified CIO?~(

[OldHawk777]

Far too many CIOs lack adequate hands-on experience with technology to be overly qualified for more than a far too big paycheck.

Microsoft products have failed to be innovative and user-friendly. One-fun-one is the USA English thesaurus; try the word “information.”

One-fun-one (I think) is the Asian MS-developer for the USA English dictionary ....

Microsoft products (IMO) have not improved since WinXP and Office98. I now take twice as long to perform task using current (Win7...Office2007) MS-products.

At home, GNU_Linux and Apache_OO

Enterprise tools

[rhyous]

I work for LANDesk, the premier desktop management tool in the world. There is much more to the cost of an operating system than, well, "the operating system". There are very few companies that have 100,000+ open source desktops. But there are many companies that have 100,000+ Windows desktops. Trust me, if it were cheaper to have an open source operating system, these companies would be the ones doing it.

How do you deploy the operating system?
How do you deploy software to the operating system?
How do you re-image the operating system when the user hoses it?
And when you re-image, how do you make sure that all the software that they should have is deployed to them with the new image?
How do many IT support calls do you take on the operating system?
How do you remote control these operating systems?
How do you manage security and patches on all these devices?
What is the cost to train an individual on these operating systems?

Windows is the most cost effective Operating System in all these areas.

It doesn't make sense to avoid the Operating System cost of $200-$300 for an OS license that you may even use for 10 years, but then spend $10,000 extra per PC per year to do all the tasks listed above. You will have to have more staff. Each FTE you add in IT is pretty much 100k after you factor in total cost of your employee (salary plus benefits, equipment, training, etc.). If it is a senior developer, the cost is closer to 150k.

Yes, all the above tasks can be done on Open Source platforms. But it isn't going to be as seamless as it is with Windows.

LANDesk's Management Suite helps IT departments manage desktops (and movile devices now) better than any other company, it is our job and our focus. We manage Open Source desktops better than most but all desktop management companies manage Windows more seamlessly.

And before you pass me off as just a Microsoft fan-boy, you should check out my blog, where you will see I am actually an Open Source fan-boy but I also have no hate for proprietary software like some do. I just love technology. The truth is truth no matter who you are a fan of.

Re:Enterprise tools

[cboslin]

Good post, will add your points to a list to look at when I have more time.

Since you claim to have an open source preference, I will accept that.

I do not believe Windows is cheaper to run than Linux, period. I do believe that people think it is and this false economy is perpetuated by the FUD MS keeps in the news.

At the sites I have been involved with, when Linux scales, they have fewer IT support and Systems Administrators than much smaller Windows sites. Granted Windows salaries are often less than equivalent Linux salaries for the same job.

As a Master Console Operator on IBM mainframes, I experience first hand how they segregated the jobs, creating 'print operators' in order to lower salaries...when I started an operator did it all. So paying less by segregating jobs is nothing new, that started in the late 70s and early 80s. Same with Microsoft Windows today.

I would suggest that the only reason there are not more Linux sites in the range you specify compared to Windows is strictly because of the FUD continuously spread since the 1970s about costs. In the 70s and early 80s we were told you were 'safe' if you picked IBM. Than Novell LANs took the dominant role between PCs and mainframes. In the mid to late 80s, 90s and 00s the FUD was you were 'safe' if you picked Microsoft.

Thanks to the outright hate of Windows 8, perhaps more sites will realize that opensource can be scaled correctly and when it is, ends up being much, much cheaper than the equivalent Windows environment. It will be interesting to watch, though I doubt the FUD concerning Windows will diminish in the least.

I will apply your questions to the last place I worked, though it would be the same for most of the large sites with hardened NOCs where I have worked:

How do you deploy the operating system?
A ghost-like system, where an image exists for each desktop/laptop, etc...

How do you deploy software to the operating system?
Back in the 90s, it was easy. Before Microsoft when nuts with registration per app, I could pkzip everything, except for Powerpoint, and simply download the zipped file, unzip it and be done with it. Powerpoint had to be loaded individually. At my last site, after an image was put on the system, over the network remotely, updates and patches were handled by a team that did nothing else. Each member of the team would patch over 1000 MS Window PCs. To be honest, I do not see a difference here between Windows and Linux.

How do you re-image the operating system when the user hoses it?
Just as you do, wipe it and reload. In some instances a token effort might be made to get out of the problem and/or fix it, but as time went on, seems the only solution that would un-hose a Windows PC/laptop was a wipe and refresh. This does not make Windows look better to me. While this happens by users with Linux, its more widespread with Windows users, perhaps Linux users tend to become more proficient, for me the jury is out here, so am unsure

And when you re-image, how do you make sure that all the software that they should have is deployed to them with the new image?
See you knew we re-imaged, didn't you. Why you test or have them test, though at my last site, they would check a few things and leave it to the user to test the rest.

How do many IT support calls do you take on the operating system?
I don't have an answer to this one, I was providing cloud support to an Agile/Java setting and mosgt of my support was remote...but assume you are focusing that most problems are about apps, not the OS. While I agree with you, with all the hooks (registry) into the OS by the apps, you pretty much insure that you have to wipe and reinstall to fix.

How do you remote control these operating systems?
I was not responsible for the remote control software, just knew it was there, so can not answer this. For support we used a secure VPN tunnel and C

... because java

[aces_of_clubs]

Still easy to develop new applications on visual stidio, and we can use mono on Linux , from front office to back office... I guess London Stock Exchange switch because many java-oracle developers, btw they're close source too ..

If it's so cheap to work with Microsoft products

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the deal with major corps not updating their intranet apps to get away from IE6?

Re: Windows Linux for small business

[vandamme]

So? You can open PDFs in LibreOffice. And for compatibility, I think LO is better for opening Word 2003 docs than the new Word.

Something called "open data" you may have heard of

[AlanMorrison2703]

Yes, there's a bigger picture here that seems to be overlooked. For example: 1) CIOs should be thinking about more than substitutes for Office, Sharepoint, Exchange, and even if you're just focused on that, then the real decision might be between Microsoft and something like Google Apps, not OSS. 2) Is this CIO turning a blind eye to what's happening in his county? The most dynamic part of OSS besides Linux are the Hadoop ecosystem and Node.js--very much cloud-native, data-driven phenomena. Southampton's the biggest city in Hampshire, and the University of Southampton's a huge proponent of open data and open data standards. Southampton in fact seems to be where data.gov.uk really got its start. Tim Berners Lee has a post at the University and collaborates with Nigel Shadbolt, Dame Wendy Hall and the other prominent open data folks from the University. 3) What's the real opportunity cost of ignoring OSS? Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo, Google, LinkedIn and Netflix donate millions of lines of code to communities who fork or at least use the best stuff donated. Github's a giant feedback-response loop that involves not only code but talent. Web companies and the OSS communities at large are monitoring and mining from Github and hoovering up the most talented web developers, and the technologies they're working with are what drives much innovation. Seems like Hampshire County as a place that provides government services ought to be thinking about providing more services online rather than less as a means of reducing labor cost and improving access.

Re:Mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

All the drivers in the kernel source tree just work and they are all up to date. Why in the world would you want to run a two year old driver which if it could run would expose known security flaws? Linux doesn't make money the more people that install it so it does things the right way, that is the way that is clean, easy to maintain, secure, and follows kernel changes. DKMS with rebuild the nvidia and ATI stubs for you when the kernel updates. ATI usually gets broken by changes in the X server.

Re: Windows Linux for small business

[mark-t]

PDF is not generally an editable document format. When you are collaborating with other people who use word, it's important to be using the same tool

Correct

[silent-listener]

Open Source is no plug and pray software. It ask cooperation from the users for migration of specific groups as County Councils. The knowledge of the CIO and his staff or outside company. is mostly orientated on MS, as promoting open source gives no incentives. The cost of the software is mostly not an issue as MS gives discount to 95%. It are the people behind the project who gives the difference. See the City of Munich story about migration to Linux.

Pick your arrogance

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you want "Fuck you, users" for free or "Fuck you, users" for $129.95 plus tax.

And smoking is not harmful to your health

[Anonymous Coward]

And in other news: Smoking is after not harmful to your health

          -- Dr. Marlboro