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Secret EU Open Source Migration Study Leaked
Posted by
kdawson
on Fri May 15, 2009 07:45 AM
from the why-they-stick-with-office dept.
from the why-they-stick-with-office dept.
Elektroschock writes "For 4 years MEP Marco Cappato tried to get access to the EU Council's 2005 open source migration study because he is a member of a responsible IT oversight committee in the European Parliament. His repeated requests for access were denied. Now they have finally been answered because the Council's study has escaped into the wild (PDF in French and English). Here is a quick look. It is embarrassing! Gartner, when asked if there were any mature public Linux installations in Europe, claimed that there were none. Michael Silver said, 'I have not spoken to any sizable deployments of Linux on the desktop and only one or two StarOffice deployments.' Gartner spread patent and TCO FUD. Also, the European Patent Office participated in the project, although it is not an EU institution."
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Your Rights Online: EU Will Not Divulge Microsoft Contracts 219 comments
Elektroschock writes "Marco Cappato, a Liberal member of the European Parliament, wanted to inspect the EU's contracts with Microsoft. His request was denied. '...the [divulging] of [this] information could jeopardize the protection of commercial interest of Microsoft.' Apparently the European Council sees no clear public interest in the release of such contractual material, and so 'the Secretariat general concludes that the protection of Microsoft's commercial interests, being one of the commercial partners of the European institutions, prevails on the [divulging] for the public interest.'"
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Why do we let Gartner Continue? (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone needs to pull a John Stewart/Jim Cramer on Gartner. These guys spread so much BS, yet continue to be considered an authority.
Re:Why do we let Gartner Continue? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Why do we let Gartner Continue? (Score:4, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Stewart owned Cramer because Cramer made the mistake of fucking up in a domain that virtually everybody cares about, and most people know at least a little about.
Stewart owned Cramer because Cramer spilled the beans about how easy it is to manipulate the market and gave examples of things he would do as a hedge fund manager.
It was a video for thestreet.com or something like that. I guess back then he thought the internet was just full of investors and pedophiles and there would be some sort of honor among thieves and they wouldn't rat him out. But once the web was replaced by tubes, people that were afraid of spiders started joining the party.
There's some guy that p
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
But... But... Gartner says they're a useful institution. Gartner!
Gartner helps EU redefine open standards (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Why do we let Gartner Continue? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
is LHC running Windows?
Do they have a large deployment of Linux desktops? Sounds like they're just using it for their grid.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think CERN has ever been big on using Windows on the desktop. After all, it was at CERN that the World Wide Web was created, on a Unix workstation.
Then CERN is not relevant in a story discussing a windows to linux and OSS office suite on the desktop.
High end unix workstations are not the same as typical office worker desktops.
Re:Why do we let Gartner Continue? (Score:4, Informative)
The claim was that there were no examples of people using open alternatives, which was false.
First, that's not what the Gartner guy said and the previous posters comment has to be taken in the context of what the Gartner guy said to be meaningful in this discussion. The summary is even misleading.
I know shooting off without RTFA is the norm around here, but that doesn't make it right. Here's the emails where that question was raised. (emphasis added)
Dear Mr. Silver,
recently I attended a Gartner presentation in Brussels by Nikos Drakon on OSS. I told him that at the European Parliament we would be interested in visiting one or more sites where OSS workstations are implemented on a large scale. He was kind enough to send me your presentation titled "Client OS and Office: is Open Source in Your future?". I find this presentation brilliant, and very useful.
At the European Parliament we often receive questions from Members on "why have we not migrated our workstations to OSS?" and we are examining the possibilities. We definitely do not want to embark in a migration without having verified that others have done it successfully before us, and that the benefits would exceed the disadvantages. In this spirit, we would like to visit 2 or 3 successful sites, if any exist.
We have a base of 11.000 PC's (in the process of migrating from Win NT + Ofiice 97 to Win XP +
Office 2003).
The question is: can you help me obtaining the name and e-mail or adress of a contact person
in some of the main Organizations that have installed, and are working with, OSS workstations ?
I am thinking of the Organizations you quote in your slide:
-city of Munich
-city of Bergen (N)
-Allied Irish Bank
-NSW RTA
and others:
-Bundestag (Germany)
-Ville de Paris
-etc.
Regards
Pietro Bianchessi
And the response the guy from Gartner gave was:
Dear Mr. Bianchessi,
Thank you for your inquiry on desktop Linux and open source office products.
The organizations I mentioned in my presentation are in their infancy, if that, in their open source desktop deployments. I have not spoken to any sizable deployments of Linux on the desktop and only one or two StarOffice deployments. Here is the status of the ones you mentioned.
-City of Munich â" in the planning phase
-City of Bergen (N) â" this organization is not doing Linux desktop. I mentioned these people as an example of the Linux hype. There was an erroneous press report and since then the CIO has been trying to correct it, saying that they are doing servers, not Linux desktops.
-Allied Irish Bank â" Sun and AIB put out a press release last year, but Sun informed me a few months ago that AIB was not doing reference calls. You can ask your Sun representatives to connect you with a reference.
-NSW RTA â" This is another Sun reference, but they are only doing StarOffice, not Sun Java (Linux)
Desktop. Again, Sun should be able to connect you.
I continue to work with my colleague, Andrea DiMaio, to find references at these and other
government organizations. We will keep you in mind as we speak with other organizations that might
be appropriate references and ask their permission to give you their contact information. Unless I hear otherwise, I will assume we are free to give them your information and ask them to contact you.
I would be happy to discuss your Linux desktop plans with you on an ongoing basis if you like and I believe Ms. Heyneman can help you arrange a call with me. I recently spoke with a large bank that
had been seriously considering Linux for a large portion of their users but found that staying with
Windows would be less expensive. There may be other benefits that government organizations have
considered that companies cannot (like economic benefit) and we can discuss that, but I cannot share this organizationâ(TM)s name or contac
Parent
Re:Why do we let Gartner Continue? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes there are. They have been in the news. There have been instances in the UK and France since 2006, there are many schools and educational institutions as well as companies that have made the switch. I know in the Netherlands and Belgium government agencies have been looking into it and if I'm correct a lot of the ex-Soviet countries that are now part of the EU (Hungary, Poland, ...) and the Scandinavians have less advertised but nonetheless important conversions.
Gartner is a sock puppet for Microsoft and everybody in the industry knows that (they made the analysis that Windows XP before SP1 was safer than Linux by comparing it to Red Hat Linux 5.3 (not RHEL, the original 5.3))
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Re:Why do we let Gartner Continue? (Score:5, Informative)
The study was in 2005, so to show it was wrong you need to find examples of widespread Linux deployments in Europe that existed then. Not deployments that started in 2006, or governments that 'have been looking into it'.
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Re:Why do we let Gartner Continue? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Why do we let Gartner Continue? (Score:5, Informative)
Extramdura [europa.eu]. Quoting the paper's abstract:
The fun part is the link that I provide comes from the EU's site! lol
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not saying you're wrong but you haven't refuted the claim regarding large desktop deployments in the EU.
Here's one [desktoplinux.com] that is large but probably hasn't been deployed and isn't in the EU.
Also, since the study is 5 years old, you would need to find references of large desktop deployments in the EU that are at least that old.
Re:Why do we let Gartner Continue? (Score:4, Interesting)
let's see from the top of my head:
- all government and schools in extramadura in spain
- schools in gran canaria
- french police (still migrating)
- munich
and those are just the ones that immediately come to mind, there's undoubtfully more if you dig a bit.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
all government and schools in extramadura in spain
This started in 2006/2007 [theregister.co.uk] so of course the study in 2005 didn't notice it.
schools in gran canaria
I couldn't find details of this on the web, but are you sure it was up and running in 2005?
french police (still migrating)
This was announced in 2008 [google.com].
munich
I believe the migration started in 2006 [heise.de].
I know we all hate the Gartner Group and all that, but seriously, was it such a gross error to say there were no widespread public (that is, govermnent or municipal)
Re:Why do we let Gartner Continue? (Score:5, Informative)
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french police [google.com]
french railway [google.com]
cern [web.cern.ch]
900 pharmacies [ad-hoc-news.de]
Thats 5 minutes of googling (im sure EU offices of google also use linux) if i got paid to do a study, I'm sure i could find more.
Re:Why do we let Gartner Continue? (Score:4, Informative)
* 1000+ in French parliament : http://blogs.computerworld.com/node/4060 [computerworld.com]
* 11000 at German Foreign ministry.
* 14000 in Munich.
* 13000 at The Federal Employment Office of Germany
* 80000+ in Spain 2003: http://lwn.net/Articles/41738/ [lwn.net]
* 90000 at France's national police force in 2007
In education...
* "Germany has announced that 560,000 students in 33 universities will migrate to Linux."
* "Russia announced in October 2007 that all its school computers will run on Linux."
* "9,000 computers to be converted to Linux and OpenOffice.org in school district Geneva, Switzerland by September 2008"
In business...
* "Peugeot, the European car maker, announced plans to deploy up to 20,000 copies of Novell's Linux desktop."
Read more about adoption of Linux at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_adoption [wikipedia.org]
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The company I worked for immediately after I graduated in 2002 had Linux on all desktops in the branches - and it was already mostly rolled out when I started.
That was something like 2-300 branches and about 1500 staff altogether.
Re:Why do we let Gartner Continue? (Score:5, Insightful)
While I dislike Gartner about as much as anyone on this list, we must remember that this report is 5 YEARS OLD. I would be surprised if there WERE any large-scale mature Linux desktop sites back then.
Still, it's a steaming pile of FUD: before companies started rolling out Windows in a big way, how many large-scale Windows sites were there?
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Cern would have been a large scale mature system even back in 2004, and AFAIK most of their desktops run linux, granted it is because they need scientific tools, but if you were paid to do research you could of atleast taken a look at their system.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Gartner is the former DataQuest company, the came company people used to call DataGuess. They're just a place for companies to purchase "Gartner Research" papers using the following form:
1) What is it you want research on?
2) How many pages do you require?
3) What is the target result you're looking for?
4) How quickly do you need the research paper?
5) Price is based on the following formula:
cost= number of pages * $1,000 * needFactor
needFactor = 10 * inverse of #weeks needed
If you want to stop them, advocate
Oh noes! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Oh noes! (Score:5, Insightful)
Mod me down if you want, but Linux needs to go "full retard" in order to reach the masses.
Essentially, a 6 year old and a 96 year old need to be able to use the system. If they can't, start over.
And that is precisely what Ubuntu is trying to do. It is a matter of opinion as the whether they are succeeding, but I believe that they are.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
> precisely what Ubuntu is trying to do. It is a matter of opinion
> as the whether they are succeeding, but I believe that they are.
At the latest when my GF wanted to burn a simple mp3 file and Brasero mumbled something about an "missing gstreamer plugin" she said, that (Ubuntu) Linux is still too complicated for normal users. I couldn't really argue with her, just explain the Why's and How's of proprietary stuff and the legal issues of their use. Installed the restricted stuff (which she'd have had n
Be fair. Same issue with Windows. (Score:4, Interesting)
Windows Media Player does not play MP3 files by default and I believe you don;t have a CD/DVD burner out of the box.
Lets start from the point where the systems are configured equally for the most common tasks and see how systems fare from there.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
A modern 6 year old can move between Windows, Linux and MacOS and not even realize they are different operating sytsems.
Re:Oh noes! (Score:5, Funny)
I am not some bitter FreeBSD user hiding out in his mother's basement.
Goddamnit, for the last time, it's not a basement, it's my command centre.
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Re:Oh noes! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Oh noes! (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, those two demographics are the easiest to convert. While my mom isn't 96 by a long stretch, she uses Ubuntu and has no problems whatsoever. Her computer literacy is close to 0.
The problem users are those we call "power users". People that have used Windows for years and know the ins-and-outs, but do not know them deep enough. They can pretty much be found in the 20-65 demographics, also known as those of working age. My dad falls in the power-user demographic and he still uses WinXP. That said, he is very open to Linux and understands it well enough to use it.
Do note that you said "use". The system still has to be set up by someone who knows what he does.
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Actuall a PC system (http://simpc.nl/) created especially for the elderly is based on Linux (Gentoo to be precise). That little device has a UI that is kept very simple and foolproof. Read only system, just some user files locally and remote (synced)
Same concept can easily be used for six year olds. I believe in this way Linux is even more suited for the 6 and 96 year old.
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My job is an MS only shop. I still use a Linux netbook for presentations. It works just fine, and cost about as much as a non-OEM version of Windows Vista Home Basic alone..
Re:Oh noes! - Grandma hates to compile apps (Score:4, Informative)
Ubuntu? Really? Try clicking the "system" option, then "Synaptic Package Manager". As you would've found had you paid any attention, you click the pretty box for the software you want, and your system installs the precompiled binaries along with any dependencies. No files (not even the equivalent of a .exe or .msi) required.
Your description of installing software on Linux is one way to do it, but it has not been the only way and certainly not the easiest way for a very long time.
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Fraud and conflict of interest (Score:5, Interesting)
Sue Silver for fraud; also he has a conflict of interest because he is a self-declared Windows tool and Linux is the main competition (sorry, Mac users.) Finally, never ask an all-business BA+MBA for technical information. You will only get statistics.
Re:Fraud and conflict of interest (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Fraud and conflict of interest (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Fraud and conflict of interest (Score:5, Funny)
15% of MBA's will get you the correct statistics though.
So all I need 7 MBAs to achieve 100% accurate knowledge of everything. Great!
(Yes, I know that's flawed math, just making a point)
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2005 != 2009 (Score:5, Insightful)
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that was just the technique used to get the "right" results. They'd have to go back more than 5 years today to pull the same stunt and will have to use different techniques. Maybe they'd use info from Microsofts "Get the Facts" campaign where it's not obvious that Microsoft gave sweetheart deals to migrate people from Linux or away from Linux.
People still think it was mostly the OLPCs fault they couldn't close any million unit deals even though they had dozens of MOU's. Little do they know that all those cu
"WinFS Arrives?" (Score:5, Insightful)
I love it! Here's our infamous "Gartner" group in prime form. FTFPDF, we see that they are predicting the arrival of WinFS anywhere from late 2008 to early 2010.
Now, anyone who's been around as long as Gartner knows that Microsoft has been promising this "feature" since Windows codename "Cairo," which was announced in 1991, and publically demo'ed in '93. There was a lot of hope that it would be delivered in NT 4.0. That's roughly 16 years folks. WAY more time than they had to develop Duke Nukem Forever, and it's just a _file system_.
If you want to talk about basing your corporate purchasing decisions on "features" like WinFS, then all this slagging off on Linux as not being "there yet" is directly hyporcritical, now, isn't it?
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It's not "just a _file system_". It's not even a file system in the traditional sense. I would describe it as a very fancy metadata and structured data indexing system [wikipedia.org] built on top of an existing file system and relational database.
I suspect that the system would be too complex if fully implemented considering the benefits it would bring - lots of potentially "cool" features, but not a whole lot of stuff that is truly
gartner myths of linux on the desktop (Score:5, Informative)
* Linux is free.
* There are no forced upgrades.
* Linux will require significantly less labor to manage.
* Linux will have a lower TCO than Windows because of available management tools.
* Applications will be inexpensive or free.
* Hardware can be kept longer if Linux is used, or older hardware can be used.
* Skills are transferable. - Gartner
Re:EU sucks. Fuck that kumbayah shit. (Score:4, Insightful)
Well racist troll or not I feel compelled to point you don't know what you're talking about. I'm native of the UK, currently living in Spain, and I can tell you your cab driver doesn't know shit.
Since it joined the EU Spain has received massive investment from the EU, which it has used to modernise in all sorts of ways and has gone from a stagnant low GDP economy to being one of the leading economies in Europe.
The UK on the other hand has benefited greatly from having to take on a modicum of human rights law from the EU which its leaders (and popular press) have hated but IMHO have been a huge boon to human rights in the country. Of course the UK government is doing its best to trample all over those rights still but are repeatedly slapped down when they over-step the mark.
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Re:As an European who's been using linux desktop.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay, enough bad analogies.
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Re:As an European who's been using linux desktop.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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