Some European Moves Towards Linux

Readers VE3OGG and FFFFHALTFFFF write in with three pieces of a global picture that is emerging of governments and corporations moving away from Microsoft and towards open source. First, France: the French automaker Peugot Citroen has announced that over the next several years they will be integrating up to 20,000 Novell SUSE desktops as well as 2,500 SUSE servers into their facilities. (Let's hope that, in Novell, Peugeot Citroen hasn't bought a lemon.) Next, Sweden: the Swedish Armed Forces has made a decision to migrate its Windows NT servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Finally, Russia. VE3OGG writes: "It would seem that after the recent Russian piracy debacle that could see a school headmaster jailed in a Siberian work camp for purchasing pirated copies of Windows for his school, the Ministry of Education in Russia has decided that the school boards will no longer be purchasing any commercial software."

Interesting

How soon before MS does an about face on "helping" that teacher out?

Threatening to use Open Source is Negotiating Ploy

Although it sounds very grand when whole countries or states or cities make a lot of noise about switching to open source software, if you follow them to the conclusion it always seems to work out the same: they end up sticking with Microsoft. I suspect that Microsoft comes in a makes them a sweet deal (maybe they'll open the source code a little, maybe they'll drop the price) and in the end they stick with Microsoft. As more and more groups do this, I think it's just part of the negotiation.

"We've already established what you are, ma'am. Now we're just haggling over the price."

Re:Threatening to use Open Source is Negotiating P

In Sweden one university was thinking of switching to Linux - a couple of days later it got a sweet deal from Microsoft.

According to rumours they got a 90% rebate on the normal licensing fee for software.

Re:Threatening to use Open Source is Negotiating P

All of these groups didn't stick with MS: http://www.linux.org/info/linux_govt.html [linux.org]

Holy grammar batman!

When do we get to meet this mystery European?

Yes, we get it. But it's still poorly worded

How about "Some moves towards linux by Europe" or "Europe makes some moves towards linux." These capture the essence of the original without being confusing. However, they are still kind of dumb. The concept is that more people or agencies in europe have been using Linux. "Moves towards" isn't the best way of poutting this. "More Agencies in Europe Adopt Linux" or "Linux Usage Rising in Europe" would have been much better.

"Some Lazy Editor Moves Towards Cheetos." Why do I suspect that these guys really just want to sit on their asses all day playing video games while the money pours in and they do as little as possible? I know the submitter probably wrote the headline, but that's what editors are for: editing.

I feel like the editors resent everything they actually have to do, like they are some kind of royalty and we are the peasants whose duty it is to support them. Hmm, I wonder if slashdot editors get Primae Noctis rights?

Re:Holy grammar batman!

Yeah, I know! My friend was talking to me and said "hey, did you read Slashdot recently? Some European is using Linux! Surely this individual will turn the tide on Microsoft's market saturation!"

Now that "some European" is using Linux maybe "some other European" will make the switch as well!

Usage Statistics

Does anyone have any operating system usage statisitcs that are actually reliable. It seems that any pro - windows site (www.microsoft.com) would have you believe that the windows monopoly is as healthy as ever whilst we also hear news like this showing systemic adoption of Linux based operating systems across multiple sovereign nations.

"Some European"?

Which European? He must be pretty important to get a Slashdot frontpage notice.

Call for help to Russian hackers

From one of TFAs:

Teachers are not that happy about it. Apparently not many of them know much about Linux and there are no specialists around to teach them

It would be a shame to waste this opportunity. Is there a LUG in the Perm region that could step in and offer some support?

Some European?

there are how many people in europe? And we get some anonymous European to move to linux?!?

A good move

Let's just hope the Russians don't decide to accept a deal from Microsoft for cheap software, ultimately if they do that they're just setting themselves up for future problems down the line. When funds are tight it is very useful to be able to have software where it's legal and encouraged to copy it. The amount of piracy that goes on with Microsoft products just shows how much that people consider Windows the only option, once they have other choices then more people are going to go for free and legal over free and illegal.

Back when I was a student Linux was a great way to free and easily get all the tools needed to learn Perl and C. The documentation on the internet provided most you'd need but I still bought a few O'Reilly books for reference, I learned a lot more using Linux in the 90's and using Linux gave me the skills to get a better paid job when I left university, people coming out with only Windows skills do not get the same salaries.

Some people say that teaching Linux in schools is a bad thing as the commerical world is all Microsoft on the desktop. That's total rubbish too, people should not be taught 'Word' they should be taught general word processing skills and preferably be exposed to a few alternative apps so they don't think there's only one way to do it. Versions of Microsoft applications change the UI between versions so even if they do end up working at a Microsoft shop they'll adapt better to the changing UI's between versions. Also a better all round education will open up alternatives to businesses, if the staff are better trained then switching to alternatives will be easier, it can save the economy a fortune in the future.

Re:A good move

Some people say that teaching Linux in schools is a bad thing as the commerical world is all Microsoft on the desktop. That's total rubbish too, people should not be taught 'Word' they should be taught general word processing skills and preferably be exposed to a few alternative apps so they don't think there's only one way to do it. Versions of Microsoft applications change the UI between versions so even if they do end up working at a Microsoft shop they'll adapt better to the changing UI's between versions. Also a better all round education will open up alternatives to businesses, if the staff are better trained then switching to alternatives will be easier, it can save the economy a fortune in the future.

I honestly think this is a very good point. The fact of the matter is that the way we instruct computers now is fundamentally flawed. Instead of teaching conceptually how to perform operations with a computer, teachers often instruct students to double-click there and click there, hit F3 and whatever. Computer education should be about education of concept. The ability to adapt from one interface to another is the important ability, not the ability to go through a set of instructions. I had often been worried that if I didn't run Windows I would fall behind in the interface and not be of much use in tech support. The opposite is really true. The more you learn different ways to use different interfaces the more commonality you ultimately see, the better you understand the concepts and the better able you are to diagnose and solve problems of any nature, on any OS.

It's probably harder to teach concepts than it is to teach point here and click that, but I believe it's essential for computer education. Kids nowadays are already getting interface education free of charge, as most cell phones have different interfaces from one another and portable devices tend to differ in interface as well. The fact that not everyone owns one type of portable and one type of cell phone or camera gives them a chance to explore doing the same tasks with different "menu options" meaning the same thing. The older folks who aren't used to using interfaces are quickly finding themselves behind the ball.

Fortunately, I'm young enough to keep up. If you have a general idea how certain devices *should* work and options they *should* have, you can often diagnose problems with the more sophisticated printing equipment, applications, just about any OS or portable device. People need to learn the concepts of how things work instead of just finding a windows keyboard shortcut to launch the control panel.

Wasn't Linux always more popular there?

I thought that Linux was always bigger than MS in Europe already, was I wrong? With SuSE being originally from Germany and many other local distros, MS was fighting more of an uphill battle to get into European nations. Kind of makes me want to move overseas so I can work with a good stable OS and stick it to Bill Gates and the Legion of Doom...er...Microsoft.

Re:Wasn't Linux always more popular there?

I thought that Linux was always bigger than MS in Europe already, was I wrong?

Yes your are (still) wrong. but it depends of the market we are talking about. If you mean the web server market, clearly Linux won. If you mean the desktop PC market, Linux is almost non-existant.

Concerning corporate/administration networks, each migration from Windows to Linux makes headlines (Munich city, French Police/Gendarmerie with Open Office, Swedish army, etc.). So I guess it is still considered as "extraordinary" events. Most are still running Windows. But it may change with the official support for Open standard/format that I've seen in recent call of tenders. Microsoft will clearly lose a big advantage.

The situation in Europe isn't that different from the US, except maybe that the Microsoft lobby is less powerful.

Re:Wasn't Linux always more popular there?

Yes, you were wrong. It's pretty much completely unheard of at home or at work. MS utterly dominates. At work we've got one Linux server now (as in: within the last year), cos I helped push towards use of an OSS CMS (plone as it happens), but apart from that, it's all MS. If I went around the office I doubt more than a couple of people would have even heard of Linux. MS having an uphill battle to get in?!? Absolutely not. (Disclaimer: I don't really know anything about the super big Enterprisey systems. I doubt it's much different to the US tbh - there's Linux adoption but the Linux installs are probably replacing Unix more than anything else.)

backfired

It would seem that Microsoft's campaign against the poor, Russian school teacher backfired miserably. Microsoft has now incurred the wrath of the Russian government and has just locked itself out of a market. That's a real smooth way to do business and has just opened the flood gates for open source software. Bill Gates' tacit denial of Gorbachev's appeal shows an utter lack of foresight and has caused an ultimate loss for Microsoft. And all of this occurred because Bill wanted to make an example of a poor, Russian school teacher whom was using Windows, not for commercial gain, but for education. If Microsoft were wise, they would have provided free, genuine copies because this teacher is educating future Microsoft consumers. Instead, they caused alienation, and, as anyone can tell you, alienation is a bad thing. So now, Red Hat has the chance to build loyal users. Go Red Hat!

Re:backfired

It would seem that Microsoft's campaign against the poor, Russian school teacher backfired miserably.

Allow me to make a slight alteration, please.

It would seem that the RIAA's campaign against the poor, American grandmother backfired miserably.

or
It would seem that Apple's campaign against the poor, blogger backfired miserably. or

It would seem that MPAA's campaign against the poor, (fill in the blank) backfired miserably.

What are we teaching in our MBA programs these days? Really, I'm serious? When did treating your customers, fans, educators, innocent by-standers like the enemy somehow become mainstream thought among U.S. executives?

We've seen this before

Clearly MS hasn't learned its lesson yet. While I don't begrudge MS for trying to protect their copyrights against piracy, they do need to learn about subtlety. Does Ernie Ball come to mind? Ernie Ball had more copies than licenses; they didn't keep up with the licensing like they should have, and they admitted it. They were a good MS customer and would have preferred to work with MS on any licenses problems. But raiding their offices with armed federal marshalls? Now, they're a Linux shop. MS lost a good customer and got bad PR. All for 70 something licenses that Ernie Ball would have glady paid for had it had the chance.

They need the savings

Peugot Citroen can use the savings. They had a bad year and are about to slash jobs. They make brilliant cars though. When the DS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citroen_DS [wikipedia.org] came out in 1955, the rest of the world was stil in the stone-age. Without any of the fancy stuff, my Saxo does 25 km on a liter of diesel, (that is 58 miles to the gallon for you gas-guzzlers!).

Microsoft Winnowing The Herd

I'll never find out, but it would be good to know if the deal between Novell and Microsoft figured strongly into the desktop selection.

The adoptions sound good, but when money is involved there's a "winner takes all" environment which I think Microsoft wants to promote. Later on, they can assimilate or crush them easily.

"Nobody has gone to prison for selecting Linux"

Should work even better than the old successful IBM FUD piece "Nobody has been fired for buying IBM". And like good FUD pieces, it has some truth in it.

Russian Education Ministry?

The summary implies that all schools in Russia will be switching over.

But the linked article only says that schools in the Perm region will switch to Linux.

Err.. maybe this could be phrased better...

Ministry of Education in Russia has decided that the school boards will no longer be purchasing any commercial software."

Isn't that how they got into the problem in the first place?

Having said that, it will be excellent if this incident helps people to look at the alternatives to piracy.

Perm, not all of Russia

The summary says that "the Ministry of Education in Russia has decided that the school boards will no longer be purchasing any commercial software", while the article says: "Schools in the Perm region will soon quit buying software from commercial companies, said the region's Education Minister Nikolay Karpushin." Perm Krai [wikipedia.org] is just one of over 80 federal subjects in the Russian Federation.

Several words about russian mentality

Drink with them, make friendship, du not fully trust them, too many crooks, but many also are nice, make business with them, but never every try to be arrogant against them or bully them. They are very proud people, and the usual american arrogance is not really accepted. (I am not russian and live in central europe btw.)

The russian mentality in many ways is somewhat different to the usual western mentality, you really have to be open to keep friendships with them or generally deal with them and you have to learn their ways to some degree.

Re: Teacher sent to jail for buying Windows

"It would seem that after the recent Russian debacle that could see a school headmaster jailed in a Siberian work camp for purchasing copies of Windows for his school, the Ministry of Education in Russia has decided that the school boards will no longer be purchasing any commercial software."

Excellent! This is exactly the kind of strong government action we need to see more of. Obviously the Russian government sees quite clearly that Windows' DRM, lack of security, and general brokenness presents both an economic and security threat to the state, and is willing to take a stand to prevent this cancer from spreading any further. I think anybody who voluntarily buys a copy of Windows deserves to spend time behind bars, and now it's time for Western governments to step up to the plate and make this a reality.

Lots of lemons in the article ...

When I read a sentence containing the words "Peugeot", "Citroen", "Novell" and "lemon", I don't usually associate the word "lemon" with the word "Novell."

Now "Citroen" and "lemon" have a lot in common.

"Peugeot" and "lemon" have even more in common.

Umm...

Since when is Russia in Europe?

Russian Programmers for the Next Generation

Remember this day, because it's the day that Russia starts breeding a second generation of programmers far, far ahead of anything our broken school sytem can ever produce.

Some European Moves Towards Linux

So some European moves towards linux? Big deal... this is big news but when some Asian or some American moves in a certain direction towards a box of software it's not reported on Slashdot.

Linux in Russia

The artice about the adopting Linux in Russia is not really true. The story with the arresting the school director has got a bit of public attention, so the community of Russian Linux users started an initiative [livejournal.com] (sorry, the blog entry in in Russian, here [google.com] is a google translation) to help teachers getting more knowledge about Linux. Many Russian LUGs are participating, but, really there not that many techers, who are willing to adopt Linux.

Did anyone else misread the headline..?

..Some Europeans Move in with Linus

well, there had to be one

grammar joke...

Airborne!

Teachers are not that happy about it. Apparently not many of them know much about Linux and there are no specialists around to teach them.

Sounds like we need to paradrop some bearded Linux hackers into the Perm region for an emergency education operation. Some of the heavier ones may need two parachutes.

A small aside

"(Let's hope that, in Novell, Peugeot Citroen hasn't bought a lemon.)"

Let's hope that Slashdot contributors stop behaving like crazed fundamentalist idiots at the mere mention of Novell's SuSE Linux (which rocks by the way) because of an agreement to share technology with Microsoft.

Novell has fscked up in lots of ways but SuSE Linux isn't one of them.

Let's hope that, in Novell...

Let's hope that, in Novell, Peugeot Citroen hasn't bought a lemon

If they're buying lemons, shouldn't that be Peugeot Citron?

Why doesn't the security aspect get mentioned?

Surely if I was a former superpower, and still a very large and important country in my own right, my government would also be concerned about the security risk of using a closed source operating system. Who knows what backdoors are inserted in Windows at the behest of the US government?

A country like Russia would have the resources to do something about it.

An investment in OSS by such a large country has a much larger impact than trying to compete with MS with your own government funded closed source outfit. If you succeed in getting your country off the MS teat, you can create a positive feedback loop. Once you succeed, other countries will copy you. Firstly, the security advantage. Secondly, the cost. The desktop computer is largely a solved problem by now. There is no inherent need for a never-ending upgrade cycle; that need is Microsoft's. Planned obsolescence is much more difficult in a product that doesn't rust.

If you succeed, you will also likely destroy what ever advantage the US govt (if any) has in computers all over the world running Windows. (Of course, there is still the google monopoly to contend with. I suppose if you can send a schoolteacher to Siberia, it wouldn't be so hard to simply block google nationwide while you build your own competitor. But that's another story.)

Gulag

[...] but it appears that Russian schools in the area are so scared about being shipped off to a Siberian Gulag, that they are buying Linux gear instead.

I think we've found Linux's new World Domination(tm) strategy.

That's one hell of a motivator...

wow, confusing title

i first interpreted it as "a random guy, of indeterminate european descent, took a step towards linux". in other news, i am thinking about switching to decaf.

huh?

which European and where did Linux go? sorry. next time I should probably RTFSummary.

Oblig

In Soviet Russia, schools use Linux!

Wait... how does that joke work again?

But what is Russky office??

From TFA:

According to Karpushin, schools would start using freely distributed software like the Linux OS, Russky office and Open office desktop apps.

But what _is_ Russky Office???

Re:They are catching on.

don't worry I am sure the mods will mod you down for self referencing yourself.

Oh wait this is slashdot that never happens here.

Re:Let's boycott all IP of all forms!

They don't seem to grasp the concent of "if you want something you have to pay for it". Without funding, it wouldn't exist in the first place.

Please explain where that's Russia's problem.

Re:no longer be purchasing any commercial software

I had no idea Ferengi read Slashdot!

Re:Terrible Pun

Aren't puns by definition supposed to be terrible? With Novell's moves lately, Citroën may very well have bought a lemon, and the visual similarity between the words... the pun's funny on multiple levels. Just because you don't get it...

Re:Terrible Pun

YOu've driven a Peugeot? Owned one for longer than 6 months? I thought lemon was almost funny in that context.

Re:no longer be purchasing any commercial software

Paying for people's NON-work (Elvis is dead. No one who makes money from his work now has contributed anything significant to the art) is antithetical to a healthy society. It's a social malaise.

Re:Correction

Stallman? You there?

GNU/Correction

See, I've corrected the subject for you.

Re:Sorry to ruin all your fun

Are you sure that not "Eurpoean moves" is an NP in it's own right, combining with "some" to a larger NP?

Re:Let's boycott all IP of all forms!

Retards.

Hmm... You put forth a compelling argument.

They don't seem to grasp the concent of "if you want something you have to pay for it". Without funding, it wouldn't exist in the first place.

I didn't have to pay anything[*] for Linux. It was given to me free of charge. Therefore you are wrong. You should have just stopped at "retards", that was the height of your post.

[*] To preempt the TANSTAAFL crowd, I paid no money at all for Linux. The bandwidth and disc space expended have absolutely nothing to do with the IP involved, nor with funding the product's creation, which is what this AC was on about.

Re:Good for MS users

Good - we need more pressure on Linux to tighten its security. Even the public exploits are too many, and many lesser distributions have a poor response time to patching. BSDs and even the proprietary Solaris are more secure in general, and if Linux catches up in this space (difficult with its development model, but entirely possible) it will be better for absolutely everybody, even people whose only contact with Linux is servers, even Microsoft who necessarily rely on a lot of Linux machines in the world to host software that unfucks Windows a little. So a higher adoption for Linux implies a higher pressure for security engineering and quality control, which is better for everyone. Monoculture should still be avoided, but most of the damage of monoculture can be negated by individual randomization like what OpenBSD has been doing by default for some time.