Quebec Govt Sued For Ignoring Free Software 388
Mathieu Lutfy writes "The CBC is reporting that 'Quebec's open-source software association is suing the provincial government, saying it is giving preferential treatment to Microsoft Corp. by buying the company's products rather than using free alternatives. ... Government buyers are using an exception in provincial law that allows them to buy directly from a proprietary vendor when there are no options available, but Facil said that loophole is being abused and goes against other legal requirements to buy locally.' The group also has a press release in English."
Don't waste my money! (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, I'm not Canadian, but this applies to everyone when their local government is pissing away money for no good reason.
It's one thing for a business to choose the more expensive option, the people making the choices must eventually answer to their stockholders. Well, as a voter, I'm a stockholder in my country. Wasting truckloads of money for no good reason means I'm going to vote your ass off the board of directors.
Most of the time, alternatives such as Openoffice.org are more than adequate for the job (and usually a better choice). Sometimes there are special needs which will allow for an exception, e.g. a large investment in Excel macros that are essential and very expensive to convert.
Local schools seem to be the worse offenders. They constantly bitch and moan about lack of funds, then piss away a pile of cash on a site license for Microsoft Office so they can teach their word processing course. Openoffice.org (and a few others) are perfect for the job. They are free and the cover everything necessary to learn word processing - which should be covering typing skills and how to lay out a well designed document - not how to use a specific product.
Re:Don't waste my money! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Don't waste my money! (Score:5, Insightful)
School's get absurd discounts on software I believe and MS software does connect well together. For example open office updates would need to be controlled separately from MS updates (which are possibly centrally managed).
In my personal opinion it's also a lot harder to fuck up a windows network setup and windows networking is a lot more intuitive (ie: you need less knowledge to passably manage it). I've had to recently deal with a school's linux network and I feel like gouging out both my eyes with a spoon. The rats nest of possible programs, setting, distros, incompatible utilities (ie: this works with X, Y and Z but not your version of Z) and so that is possible of linux alone makes me want to gouge out one eye.
Re:Don't waste my money! (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, IMO amateurs shouldn't be sysadmins.
Re:Don't waste my money! (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, many professionals shouldn't be sysadmins either.
One side of the coin is that folks with honest training and experience can sift through a wide range of possible technologies, then find and properly maintain the best one for the situation. The other is that the amateurs have a motivation for easy, so seem less likely to dig themselves incredible, embarrassing, money-sucking pits...
And this is government. If you're not cynical about the kind of professionals they hire, you're not paying attention :)
Re:Don't waste my money! (Score:5, Insightful)
Any third party app installed on windows needs to be updated seperately... A linux distro on the other hand will typically supply all the apps you're going to require and update them al centrally.
As for all the myriad of possible distros, you just standardise on a single distro across the board and use the apps supported by the distributor.
The problem of incompatible versions happens on windows too, and is often worse, even microsoft apps can have incompatibilities with each other and as soon as you throw third party apps into the mix the problem gets much worse, but the apps supported as part of a linux distro will typically be tested fairly well together. Also since the linux apps are far more likely to use documented formats, the chance of third party apps working with them is higher too.
Re:Don't waste my money! (Score:4, Insightful)
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More importantly...
Kids will break and/or steal machines (or their components which are smaller and easier to hide), using worthless computers (old machines make great thin clients on the cheap) or thin clients which are useless without their server reduces the likelihood and cost of theft.
This guy is right (Score:4, Insightful)
I have seen this in action. It is amazing what it can do even with one pathetic P4 and a couple gig of ram.
It really gets rolling with a quad core server and 8 gig. (I can build one of these for mere hundreds of $$)
You can even have the whole class doing 3D modeling with blender. Imagine the cost of doing this with proprietary software and without thin clients?
Also, upgrading is so cheap. The cost of upgrading everyone is just the cost of the server. (and that is under a grand)
I have found that just the LABOR cost of procuring 30 new desktops, imaging, configuring and deploying them is more than the cost of a new LTSP server. YMMV
Re:Don't waste my money! (Score:5, Interesting)
Naturally, preferences and documents are saved on the client.
Easy Linux upgrades (Score:2, Informative)
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Unfortunately, at the school where my kids go, the physical network is a complete mess (network cables running under doors and such) because the IT admin is a job that rotates between all teachers every year, none of whom have any real idea.
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School's get absurd discounts on software I believe and MS software does connect well together. For example open office updates would need to be controlled separately from MS updates (which are possibly centrally managed).
Not quite, at least not everywhere. In NZ, govt signs a deal with MS to supply primary and secondary schools with set number of windows and office licenses. Few years ago the figure was NZ$50 mil. This is lot of misappropriated taxpayer's dough.
Re:Don't waste my money! (Score:4, Interesting)
you've never managed a incredibly botched Active Directory setup.
9 times out of 10 the only real way to fix it is to wipe the servers and start fresh. at least with linux I can change all the settings without reinstalling the entire freaking server OS and all it's apps.
AD is not fun when it's borked.
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Two points.
1. Many schools pay high costs for MS software.
2. It is much easier to lock down and support a Network of Linux Computers.
I have friends that became so frustrated with the cost and work maintaining classes of Windows PC's that they deployed LTSP. They have never looked back!
They now can buy many things for the tech labs that they couldn't before because of the new surplus of cash and time. (setting up audio workstations for multimedia training etc.)
special needs and government (Score:3, Interesting)
As an expat canadian I wasn't aware of any such law but I was from Ontario perhaps they have a different law in Quebec. Anyways, fair competition only seems to make sense to me. Seems rather odd for a open source software organization to fight this fight though. Unless they represent for profit service companies I don't think they'll be able to prove any loss in court so the case could get thrown out on that grounds. They probably would have been
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Competitive bidding should be the norm, and exceptions to this rule should be rare. Once a spec is given and bids are in, there'll be an obvious choice.
When time or special circumstance doesn't allow bids, there certainly needs to be a detailed report on the reasons one vendor was chosen over another. Someone needs to put his ass on the line and say "Symphony, StarOffice, Openoffice.org, and Gnome Office don't meet our needs" f
Re:special needs and government (Score:5, Interesting)
When time or special circumstance doesn't allow bids, there certainly needs to be a detailed report on the reasons one vendor was chosen over another. Someone needs to put his ass on the line and say "Symphony, StarOffice, Openoffice.org, and Gnome Office don't meet our needs" for reasons a, b, and c. When an accountant comes back to audit the department, he'll back those up or pay the price.
In theory you are correct however that is not the way Government departments work. In Australia we have a taxation year between 1st July to the 30th June and at the beginning of the tax year most Government departments receive a budget allocation. It would be a very courageous IT manager that could go to his/her department head and say we can slash our budget by upto say 60% by choosing open software such as Open Office and the savings could be spent on upgrading the IT infrastructure.
What normally happens in the above scenario is the upgrade never happens because there are few people in authority that will sanction this since they perceive that the old hardware is good enough because you normally can extend the life of the current equipment with open software and the IT managers budget is slashed. Of course when the time comes to replace the ageing equipment the IT manger is accused of overspending.
Most IT managers are well aware (or should be aware) of this double standard and to keep their jobs and credibility take the easy way and buy Microsoft products since all senior department heads know about Microsoft and appear quite amenable to a three or four year hardware and possibly software update cycle even though in the long term it is much more expensive, however this can be easily and consistently budgeted for with only an acceptable increase per year.
Actually it is very easy for IT department heads to justify proprietary software over open software since they only have to point to many Microsoft and so called unbiased web sites that show Microsoft software has a much better Total Cost of Ownership than open software. The "How to Lie with Statistics" technique.
Do I think this is right? I don't but that is Government business politics for you.
Microsoft - The new IBM (Score:4, Interesting)
Whenever I put myself on the line for a Linux box (server, desktop or otherwise), I always know it's going to have out-perform (in whatever metric is important to the person considering it) the competing Microsoft option by a factor of two to be considered equal.
Re:Don't waste my money! (Score:5, Informative)
Local schools seem to be the worse offenders. They constantly bitch and moan about lack of funds, then piss away a pile of cash on a site license for Microsoft Office
I agree most secondary school IT teachers seem to think IT education == Microsoft training. But it's worse than that - in the UK, most schools actually buy all their MS stuff from a reseller such as RM Computers. Which is a giant rip because, for example with servers, they just take Windows 2003 and bolt a load of "admin tools" onto the side. They deliberately make it non-standard and harder to use so they can then charge the schools giant support contracts. It also doesn't help that most school IT techs are completely hopeless.
I speak from bitter experience, BTW.
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RM machines is a complete scandal in the UK. Originally they developed machines from scratch like 380Z and Nimbus. Then as those lagged behind PCs they switched to making PCs. But schools still buy their Wintel PCs from RM, despite the fact that there is no reason for single sourcing, apart from tradition.
And I suspect that RM's founders are well connected in educational circles.
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That we have an IT industry at all is testament to pupils doing individual study at home and then going to University; the education system through the eighties and nineties was a massive disadvantage to our economy. If someone had pulled their finger out in 1985, who knows, Google or Yaho
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If someone had pulled their finger out in 1985, who knows, Google or Yahoo may have been British
In 1985, the
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RM might be bad, but MS are far worse. They (in the UK will charge schools for installing linux[1]. They, on anti-competitive grounds wont let people know how much MS in schools costs [2]
"This relates to circumstances where schools using Microsoftâ(TM)s School Agreement licensing model, are required to pay Microsoft licensing fees for computers based on Linux, or using OpenOffice.org. Finding ourselves in a position whereby a school pays (say) £169 for a device only to be faced with for exa
Re:Don't waste my money! (Score:4, Informative)
Ok, I'm not Canadian, but this applies to everyone when their local government is pissing away money for no good reason.
It's one thing for a business to choose the more expensive option, the people making the choices must eventually answer to their stockholders. Well, as a voter, I'm a stockholder in my country. Wasting truckloads of money for no good reason means I'm going to vote your ass off the board of directors.
Most of the time, alternatives such as Openoffice.org are more than adequate for the job (and usually a better choice). Sometimes there are special needs which will allow for an exception, e.g. a large investment in Excel macros that are essential and very expensive to convert.
Local schools seem to be the worse offenders. They constantly bitch and moan about lack of funds, then piss away a pile of cash on a site license for Microsoft Office so they can teach their word processing course. Openoffice.org (and a few others) are perfect for the job. They are free and the cover everything necessary to learn word processing - which should be covering typing skills and how to lay out a well designed document - not how to use a specific product.
I love Quebec, but when it comes to politics, I hang my head. For example, you cannot even put up a poster in english. The stop signs say "arret", french for stop. In France, they say "stop".
I can only imagine what the politics would be like in a school board...
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I love Quebec, but when it comes to politics, I hang my head. For example, you cannot even put up a poster in english. The stop signs say "arret", french for stop. In France, they say "stop".
From a foreign Frenchspeaking point of view. There are Frenchspeaking orthodoxes using French words almost forgotten on the other side of the Atlantic and a quite funny French with English words. Sometimes the mix is incredible you feel like speaking to a XVIIth person working for a hi-tech marketing department :-).
But I would go back any day :-). Great people, great country, for frenchspeaking people, there are "our" americans ;-).
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You can put up a poster in english. However, businesses are not allowed to put-up a sign, a business sign, in english. The idea is to drive the point home to immigrants that they can't expect to live here without speaking french.
And businesses are not human, so they cannot enjoy human rights. No human has ever been pr
Re:Don't waste my money! (Score:5, Interesting)
Ok, I'm not Canadian, but this applies to everyone when their local government is pissing away money for no good reason.
WTF?! Do you even following politics?
Business is greatest influence force in politics.
This is classical form of corruption: business makes a undertable deal with local politicians so that they buy their products. The statue that all procurement deals have to be public and open to competition - is the most often ignored statue. (Also popular (in 3rd world) are preferential investments, but they are quite hard to hide and rarely happen in developed countries.)
This is essentially how politicians make money. Or you thought that they simply do their thing out of pure altruism and patriotism? [Sarcasm intended.]
It's about CYA, Gov/MS deals, and code-ophobia (Score:3, Interesting)
I work in a government office (I bet you didn't see that one coming!) and I'm always suggesting (F)OSS alternatives to the expensive proprietary commercial crap everyone loves. The problem is that the other guys in my IT department, and in some cases any higher-ups who end up having a say in it, are terrified of it because (in their opinion):
- When something goes wrong, it's time to play the blame game, and if they can't call up a large corporation and bitch they don't feel that their ass is covered. This i
Re:Don't waste my money! (Score:5, Insightful)
If it is true they haven't even evaluated the other options the complaint is valid.
Re:Don't waste my money! (Score:5, Interesting)
could create thousands of jobs
I'm a little fuzzy on the details from TFA but... what exactly would these jobs entail? I mean, if some govt. office is running MS Office now and have 100 employees, switching to OpenOffice would create 100 openings more? Or what?
Sounds to me like an emotional argument rather than something based on fact.
Re:Don't waste my money! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Don't waste my money! (Score:5, Interesting)
Right now money is being spent on licenses. This money goes out of the province (indeed out of the country) to a company that sells the software. The money is then either reinvested into building the next upgrade, a new products, used for corporate overhead or designated as "profit".
The TFA notes that the amount of money spent on software in the 6 months from February to June was 25 million dollars.
If free software could be used to replace the proprietary software, then the money could be:
1) used for other government programs
2) used for training
3) used for local support
4) used for enhancing the software for new features
5) used for lining the wallets of local entrepreneurs.
But in these cases the money stays local. Since the government almost always spends all the money that it has, in all cases except for #5 the result is that the money ends up as salaries for other employees. And since this is money over and above money that they are already spending on salaries, it means new jobs.
If we work out the numbers, let's say we give the greedy entrepreneurs a million dollars. Then let's say that the other uses result in something close to 20% for equipment and capital costs.
This leaves about 20 million dollars. At a loaded
labour rate of 100,000 dollars a years (which is generous given that we've already taken out 4 million for equipment and capital costs), this gives us 200 new jobs.
So you are right, "thousands" of new jobs is probably not realistic. But if they can really reduce the outgo of software licensing money to foreign companies, it is not an exaggeration to say that hundreds of jobs would be the result.
Re:Don't waste my money! (Score:4, Insightful)
1) used for other government programs
2) used for training
3) used for local support
4) used for enhancing the software for new features
5) used for lining the wallets of local
entrepreneurs.
6) used to buy textbooks, etc.
How the hell did you miss that one?!?
Re:Don't waste my money! (Score:4, Insightful)
7) used for hiring more teachers in math, sciences, and phys-ed so you canucks don't become dumb lazy fatties like we Americans are becoming.
Re:Don't waste my money! (Score:4, Interesting)
I am going to assert that Open Source software has not previously been successfully deployed as an enterprise solution to a large government's IT infrastructure. In other words, it is a big fat risk. One of the first rules of engineering is to minimize and mitigate risks.
The first couple of governments that shift to Open Source will be blazing an expensive trail to deal with interoperability and all the minor "glitches" that come up along the way. With any luck, they will also DOCUMENT their journey so it can be repeated by other governments without such huge expenses.
And as to what can be done with $25 Million dollars that TFA says was spent on software during the first half of the year (assuming that government's can get past the 'growing pains' effect mentioned above that the early adopters will face)... I would like to see that the savings be allocated to fund city improvement projects to beautify the urban landscape. Build parks, improve roads, and erect attractive low-income housing buildings. I guess that is covered by #1 (used for other government programs), but nothing would be better for the local citizens than having a city which is invested in keeping the standard of living for all its citizens high.
In light of that, when I noticed that my local government (the state of Massachusetts) was considering an Open Source agenda, I sent them my support and feedback [metaphrast.com].
Re:Don't waste my money! (Score:5, Interesting)
> I am going to assert that Open Source software has not previously been successfully deployed as an enterprise solution
> to a large government's IT infrastructure.
And you would be wrong. In 2000 I was the lone wolf howling in the wilderness. Today there probably isn't an agency in our state's government that doesn't have a Linux box here or there. The main state webserver is now running it, the state library has been there for years. The school board in my parish is totally penetrated in the backend as is the parish to the north. I contract for our parish and know one of the IT guys to the north so I can speak first hand about those.... but we aren't alone.
That said, the desktop is a case of fighting the FUD amongst the teachers. I really don't think students would care, but most people don't realize that the government schools are designed for and run for the sole benefit of the teachers. Students are just there to justify the whole game. So until we find a way to get the teachers to buy in the desktop belongs to Microsoft forever, and teachers (as a group) don't DO anything unless they have absolutely no option. So unless we hit a budget crunch so hard it becomes a case of Windows or RIFs that bite deeply enough to get teachers they will veto anything that would require even an hour of retraining. And again, for those who don't know better, that isn't possible because teachers are the absolute last place cuts are made. They would discontinue the use of computers in schools entirely, RIF the whole IT budget, eliminate building maintaince and stop buying textbooks before they allowed one teacher to lose out on their annual cost of living increase.
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Well, your efforts to command the backend of the school network are commendable. Do you recall the most hopeful part of my original post, though?
With any luck, they will also DOCUMENT their journey so it can be repeated by other governments without such huge expenses.
If you wrote a document which lays out the software and infrastructure needed to command an Open Source infrastructure, it would empower others to do what you've done. Obviously, a well-written document would help make it easier to convince others that it is a good idea and your guidelines would include invaluable "Lessons Learned".
Of course, you could start b
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You forgot
6)Cutting the taxes of those who pay them.
Re:Don't waste my money! (Score:4, Insightful)
You cannot simultaneously claim that switching to non-Microsoft costs more, because of the salaries involved and claim that it doesn't create more income for IT workers.
Re:Don't waste my money! (Score:4, Insightful)
Someone has to be paid to write software. Money you are spending on MS Office is being used to pay Microsoft employees. If you use OpenOffice.org and you need a new feature or a bug fix, then you can pay anyone with the right skills to provide it. If a major government branch is using it, then it is reasonable to assume that local software companies will invest a little bit in making sure they have someone with at least a passing familiarity with the OO.o codebase (or, failing that, someone who can acquire said familiarity quickly when a lucrative contract appears).
If you need a new feature in MS Office, then your only option is to upgrade to the next version, which involves sending a pile of money to the USA. If you need a new feature in a Free Software program then you can employ someone locally to add it. This keeps the money in the local economy, which is good for the government since they then get a cut of it back when the workers are paid, another cut when they spend it, and so on.
Re:Don't waste my money! (Score:5, Insightful)
You realize of course that this statement can be applied almost universally to undermine the value of any kind of trade. For example, wouldn't it be better if my town harvested its own trees for building the new police station rather than importing lumber from some far away place like Canada? After all, it keeps the jobs and the money local. No, the reason trade is beneficial is it fosters competition, and it allows for specialization, which in turn drives efficiency. Software is no different from any other industry in this regard. Just because it's *possible* for local people to write/modify office software doesn't mean it's a wise course of action. In fact, I shudder to think about every local government hiring/contracting with local software engineers to add this-that-or-the-other feature to a fork of Open Office. The last thing I would want is my local government getting into software development. They struggle to fill potholes for goodness sake.
what a crock!
First off, you don't get much more efficient than ready-made software that's free out of the box, and which-- on this scale where the govt is spending 25 million on MS licenses-- provides a cheaper and more convenient means of implementing any missing or needed features.
A software contract to "tweak" an oss project that comes close would be a one-time fixed expenditure for less money than they spend annually, and maintaining a core team to "maintain" the resulting code would entail minimal cost, assuming the community doesn't pick that up after.
Finally, there's the fundamental assumption at the general level here which is fully out of place. Trade promotes efficiency and specialization in an ideal environment.
In the real world(tm), what free trade does is destroy the middle class of developed nations which have human, labor, and consumer rights laws by severely diminishing the capacity for labor to organize and compelling governments to "compete" for the attention of multinationals.
In the long term it has other deleterious effects, creating a fundamentally unequal playing field in which new startups will never be able to compete on a local level because of economies of scale, save for whichever nation is "lowest" on the wage and labor/human rights totem poles at the time.
I love all the "starry-eyed" conservatives/libertarians who claim FTA's are beneficial in any long-term sense.
Re:Don't waste my money! (Score:5, Interesting)
Finally, there's the fundamental assumption at the general level here which is fully out of place. Trade promotes efficiency and specialization in an ideal environment.
You were doing so well until your tangent. Here's the real final flaw in his argument:
Using your own natural resources when it's much cheaper to buy similar quality commodities from elsewhere is dumb. With software, there's no such inherent geographical bias. I'm unaware of any fundamental reason why a programmer in Quebec is less intelligent or capable than a programmer in Redmond, so I see no reason for Quebec to export their money to Redmond to get an item they could otherwise get locally.
Re:Don't waste my money! (Score:5, Insightful)
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If a government body wants to save costs, saying "it will create thousands of jobs" isn't exactly a good thing. Amazingly enough when people get jobs, they expect to be paid.
Re:Don't waste my money! (Score:5, Insightful)
In this case, I think the meaning is "create thousands of jobs IN CANADA, as opposed to Seattle. Even if the expenditure is similar, governments should prefer to spend their money on their own constituents (who will also pay tax and return a good proportion).
Re:Don't waste my money! (Score:4, Interesting)
If a government body wants to save costs, saying "it will create thousands of jobs" isn't exactly a good thing. Amazingly enough when people get jobs, they expect to be paid.
I knew it was familiar..
The launch of Windows Vista next year will be directly responsible for creating more than 50,000 IT jobs in six large European countries, and will lead to a flood of economic benefits for European companies, according to a Microsoft-funded IDC study released on Thursday.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39283327,00.htm [zdnet.co.uk]
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Because thinking employees add more to a company than human automatons.
Yes they do. But practically no one is interested in actually thinking, so we have to expect them to turn out as automatons until proven otherwise.
Then the message is inconsistent.
Every class and school policy, all the way through college (and my school was top 20) penalized me for independent thought.
The sad thing is this isn't the school's problem. If businesses made it clear through their hiring practices that they don't care about numbers or a cookie-cutter mentality this wouldn't be an issue..
Yet every interview in the professional sector i've attended has had a masked message of "we want a cookie-cutter attitude", and 60-70% of posted jobs to th
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OK, I am an OS whore (I try EVERYONE that comes across my path), so I will bite.
The linux distro's may be a little lacking on uniform look and feel throughout the ecosystem, but they are not really lacking in usability vis a vis MS Windows. The UI is usually selectable anyway.
(My four year old daughter does not even notice the difference between Linux and Windows... She thinks the screen just looks different because they are different computers, just like our cars look different. She uses them equally wel
En franÃais (Score:5, Informative)
Pardon moi? (Score:2)
Don't the French Canadians learn English anyway?
Encoding please??? (Score:2, Offtopic)
Let's do some testing here:
à -This is a large Scandinavian O with slash
Ã- -This is a Captial O umlaut
ã -A spanish a-tilde
à -A french e-circonflex
On my PC, the same one I wrote it on, they all render like A-tilde. Come on coders!!!
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Too right! I blame Perl. Go for Python and life will be better for all.
*hides*
Re:Hey, here's a question (Score:4, Funny)
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merde!
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Re:En francais (Score:3, Interesting)
Not sure about Canadian law but (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't you have to be somehow affected by defendant's actions to sue them? Is the Quebec's open-source software association harmed by this directly? Or do they have a plan to sell tech support contracts once the free software is installed?
Re:Not sure about Canadian law but (Score:4, Informative)
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>Don't you have to be somehow affected by defendant's actions to sue them?
Probably, but where do you think the money the government spends with Microsoft comes from?
It's an association from Quebec after all: every citizen who pay taxes are harmed when governments don't really open the bidding process.
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What's this all talk about Canadian this and Canadian that? The article is about Quebec - doesn't anyone outside Quebec know that it is a sovereign nation?
Please Rate the Canadian Justice System (Score:2)
Most Slashdotters are familiar with the difficulties associated with Linux, but cannot judge the decision of FACIL representatives without being able to make a comparison against the difficulties associated with bringing a lawsuit.
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Unfortunately even if Canadians can comment on your question most of us can't comment on it in regards to Quebec. They have a distinct legal system from the rest of Canada.
No, I'm not kidding.
Frvivolous suites are substantially more rare in Canada than in the U.S.; Although I think there are more common in Quebec.
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Frvivolous suites are substantially more rare in Canada than in the U.S.; Although I think there are more common in Quebec.
If no one responds, then I'll just assume they're all too afraid, to rate the system 10-frivolous, out of fear of being sued for liable.
Re:Please Rate the Canadian Justice System (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not sure why you'd consider this odd. I can think of at least two OECD countries with varying internal legal systems, besides Canada. In the USA, Louisiana is the only U.S. state partially based on French and Spanish codes and ultimately Roman law, as opposed to English common law [wikipedia.org]. In the UK, Scotland [wikipedia.org] has its own unique legal system - right down to three possible verdicts in a jury trial ("Not proven"). I believe, though I can't find a reference right now, that New York had a feudal-based system of property law until the late 19th century (unlike Scotland, where the feudal system gasped its last breath in 2006 or so... I got a letter from my "feudal superior" a year or so back)
Blame the new Prime Minister (Score:3, Funny)
It's his new laws that took horses from the mounties, wine from the Frenchies, and sodomy from Newfoundland. Apparently that wasn't enough, he's taking open source too.
Oh well.
There's no Canada like French Canada
It's the best Canada in the land.
And the other Canada - is a bullsh*t Canada!
If you lived here for a day, you'd understand!
(for those who don't get it, click [wikipedia.org])
Ironic (Score:3, Funny)
So, after all you *can* be sued for choosing microsoft :-)
News report on Radio-Canada Thursday 28th at 22h (Score:5, Informative)
The issue is getting great coverage and will be having a television news report today, Thursday 28th of august, on the 22h news of Radio-Canada (francophone equivalent of the CBC). It will also be aired on RDI (the 24h news channel of Radio-Canada) at 21h.
From what I've been told, there will be reactions from other board members of the association, our lawyer, university professors and last but not least, the Quebec government.
If you're in the area, don't miss out the press conference on Friday the 29th of August, 10h30, 7275, Saint-Urbain, Montreal, suite 201.
Finally, the best way to support Facil is of course by spreading the news, but also to become a member or to donate to the association (sorry if the website is not well translated, we are working on it). We are getting into a lengthly legal battle which will hopefully send a clear message to other governments. This is only the start.
Thanks for all the great comments!
Mathieu
Re:Tech support. (Score:5, Insightful)
Most large organisations including government provide 90% of their own tech support. Microsoft, in practice, provides none. At least it's like that where I am. The only "support" they provide is helping to ensure all of the machines are licensed properly.
So if a local government can't figure out that they can take save the $25 million they have spent on licenses by training their IT staff or supporting local business, they really aren't intelligent enough to be working for the government.
That whole support argument is bullshit, as is the TCO argument that gets bandied about.
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Tech support from Microsoft? Let me tell you how it goes here: Geek kids are not allowed to explore the internals of the system even to fix them, but they do it anyway after being frustrated that there are only 5 out of 20 PCs at school that actually *work*
Of course last year the schools here installed some kind of backup thingy which restores the HD to it's previous state upon restart. Sucks big time IMO, but better than PCs not working at all...
Where does microsoft support come into the picture here? exac
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Except if the students have root access, what's to stop them removing the tool that restores the disk on boot?
Re:Tech support. (Score:5, Insightful)
Bull. Paid tech support for custom/specialized apps is one thing (the company I just left made a very significant percent of their revenue from support and maintenance), but that's just not the case for MS Office. And having paid for MS software in the past, I'll let you know that the only "support" I ever got was from someone named "John" in $randomOutsourcedCountry when I needed to re-activate the damn thing because apparently a system upgrade is a novel thing that nobody had tried before.
Ironically, those 'support' issues went away when I stopped paying for MS software, and obviously also haven't been an issue since I stopped using their stuff entirely.
Don't get me wrong - support is a legitimate concern for some software, even some from MS. But when it comes to Office software, that support is coming from the IT guy, not Microsoft.
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That's true. But the people who call the shots think differently. To them, business solutions are more reliable than open-source ones. What is better doesn't matter -- it's what management thinks is best.
Re:Tech support. (Score:5, Interesting)
Depends on the IT guy's skills in explaining things - or, indeed, 'selling' the open-source solutions. Obviously I'm generalizing here, but most IT people aren't overly business-savvy, so they're often of little help when it comes to explaining why X solution is better than Y. Management doesn't care that CrapSoftwareY is talking to a set of cobbled-together Access tables where DecentSoftwareX functions off of a proper relational database unless the IT guy evaluating the software can explain the BUSINESS benefits of one over the other (and "users won't end up going batshit insane over file locking when trying to hit stupidfile.mdb over a samba share" won't cut it).
Open source guys can evangelize all they want, but if they really want to see adoption, they'll need to sell it. Not via cold calls, but at least throw some copy online that the IT staff can use when they're pitching it against whatever half-assed proprietary product that's backed by a sales department. And let me tell you, MS has a damn good sales department. /used to work in software sales, and outselling open-source is trivially easy for those reasons
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Agreed. And I would imagine many managers don't have highly refined IT skills, either, which is why IIS is still used instead of Apache. Or why Windows is still used for servers in the first place.
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I couldn't let that one go. Had to fix it.
Re:Tech support. (Score:5, Insightful)
Typically very little tech support from MS is included with the license. That's the "beauty" (for MS) of their pricing schemes; it's basically a money pit. First you get hooked on the software, then the support, then the proprietary formats help keep you locked in. It's like quicksand.
Again, incorrect. There are a several good open source vendors who offer excellent support. But quite often OSS shops find they need very little outside support. I would expect most schools to fall in that category, though I have no personal experience working in that sector.
Re:Tech support. (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, it's really just a way for them to legally cook their books. While they never provide support* on any of their consumer products, they're still allowed to have a ton of unearned revenue since they only recognize 1/12th of the purchase price each month, or however long you're supported for. Assuming it's one year and a copy of Windows is $300 (I was at Staples today, and apparently it is at least for some version of XP), that means that after a month, they've got $25 of earned revenue and $275 of unearned revenue on the books. Basically, it fucks with the numbers and makes them look richer than they really are.
Of course this isn't at all specific to Microsoft - most companies that provide some sort of support contract do the same (Best Buy extended warranties? Oh yeah). I'd suggest they abuse it a bit more than most, but what do you expect?
*you know what I mean here - I'm sure there's the odd instance of it happening, but by and large the only time you get them on the phone is for an activation problem.
$25 million (Score:5, Insightful)
If they went to FOSS, they could take the 25 million they spent on M$ licenses (in 08 alone!) and pay local Quebecois to provide support. In fact, that's their whole grounds for bringing the case to court.
From TFA: "Quebec's public administration refuses to even consider and evaluate these options...the regulation implies that public markets have to enhance the local economic development as well as the Quebec technologies....From February to June 2008...sales of proprietary software for more than 25 million dollars"
Sounds like good case to me. My parents actually worked in the kind of local government that would be using this software, and I'm here to tell you, the transition would go fine. The fact is, most of them barely bumble their way through no matter WHAT software they use (on their outdated machines). All they use is a word processor, email, and maybe a spreadsheet and simple database. Just the basics.
This from TFA actually kinda scared me...scared because I'm worried about how far the US is falling behind other countries when it comes to tech: "In the Netherlands, the public administration, one of the most modern in the world, has decided to forbid the use of proprietary software in the public sector."
Re:$25 million (Score:5, Informative)
"In the Netherlands, the public administration, one of the most modern in the world, has decided to forbid the use of proprietary software in the public sector."
Actually, I don't think that is correct. What I know is that a motion has been passed that requires the government to consider alternatives, and give preference to open software when it is equally suitable. The government subsequently ordered a lot of software from Microsoft, without investigating alternatives. This stirred up some commotion, after which a motion was adopted that requires the government to carry out the previous motion. I don't know what has happened since then, but I don't think forbidding proprietary software actually happened.
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And what level of support do you get with the software, and how often is it used?
Open source developers and distributors will also supply paid support, but you pay *only* for the support and not the software. Most organisations have their own internal staff and very rarely make use of vendor support for software thus paying for it is often a waste, there was even a slashdot story a few weeks ago about how free distributions are gaining popularity in corporations because of the lower cost.
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Each license bought allows for tech support from Microsoft. Is there any such tech support from open source developers?
Of course there is. ....
https://www.redhat.com/apps/support/ [redhat.com]
http://www.ubuntu.com/support/paid [ubuntu.com]
http://www.novell.com/support/product/products.do [novell.com]
http://www-03.ibm.com/linux/prod_svc.html [ibm.com]
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You might have had a point somewhere, but you lost me at joining "expedience" and "bureaucrats" in the same sentence
Re:Tech support. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't really know. I do know public education contains some of the most laughable IT staffs in existence, though.
I would take a guess that it's all about the feeling of security. Managers (or whatever government equivalent) are going to feel safer with business solutions rather than open-source alternatives because of support for bugs or other problems. If MS Word screws up, you call Microsoft. If Open Office (using it as an example) screws up, what then? There's no business guarantee that OO will respond in a timely manner to the problem.
I've worked in a school so I've got a bit of experience here.
Laughable IT staff or not (and there is a glimmer of truth in that), managers (or whoever has the role of managing IT - often a teacher) does indeed get the warm fuzzies from buying as much as possible from big companies like Microsoft.
Furthermore, there's another angle. It's fairly common to find that the companies that supply schools (and here I'm talking about primary/secondary level education in the UK) don't tend to supply many businesses and vice versa. The companies that do supply schools will tell you that this is because they specialise in education and can offer better support more appropriate for schools. Many of these companies have been supplying schools for many years and are more-or-less 100% Microsoft shops. Guess what they put in?
Anyone who's any good at IT and has worked in a school will know that this is complete bullshit and that there are dozens of small consulting companies would love to have a few school contracts and could do a perfectly good job for a lot less. However, in the valley of the blind and all that.... there are plenty of schools that believe they're getting a good deal because they don't have anyone on staff who knows enough to tell them otherwise.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Time to relive the glory days of high school...
Well, you know your public school's IT is bad when a kid gets in trouble for sending a message to every school computer through netsend.
The school's solution? Forbid the kid from using computers for the rest of the year, instead of disabling the netsend service.
Ah, school administrators, how we love thee...
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I'm fairly sure this is a story repeated at more schools than you can imagine.
Back in the day my school got a big shiny computer network(which caught fire a lot, I'm not talking figuratively.) with a computer in every classroom etc.
It was all micrsoft, all "locked down" in the most restrictive but pointless ways (no right click, no typing a directory into the address bar, pretty much the only programs you could open were word and excel) yet the whole thing was just a veneer. The private company in charge (t
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MS makes it mandatory to pay for the software and the lowest level of support wether you need it or not, and charges you extra for better support. I don't think you get any guarantees with their low level support either.
OpenOffice provides choices, everything is optional, you can buy a supported package with a similar level of support and it's still cheaper than MS (eg staroffice, or bundled as part of a supported linux distro), or you can get an unsupported package that's free.
Not everyone wants support, a
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And that's why they chose Microsoft. To match levels of competency.
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Kids!
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I use Ubuntu on my laptop at College (BCIT) and whenever I have to print something, I just use OpenOffice Portable [portableapps.com] which I have on a USB key.
For those that don't want to use up 80MB on their USB key, there is also AbiWord Portable at 6MB for text documents.
PortableApps [portableapps.com] are invaluable if you need to use programs temporarily on windows machines.
Re:You Linux nerds disgust me (Score:4, Insightful)
Example? I can't count the number of times I had to eventually save my OpenOffice file as a Microsoft Word Document and opened it in Word only to find that I had to do a whole bunch of reformatting before sending it to the library printer!
On the other hand, I can't count the number of times I have saved my Microsoft Word file in Microsoft Word format and open it in Microsoft Word only to find that I had to do a whole bunch of reformatting before sending it to the printer (changing of the restarting of numbered lists is one particular thing that isn't always persistent through a save-and-load cycle, and with Office 2007 paragraph indentation isn't always persistent either).
I have to use MS Office for work, but I keep a copy of OO.o on my computer because it's far better than MS Office's recovery mode at recovering corrupted MS Office files. Sure, I usually have to sort out some formatting in that case too, but I'd sooner reformat a 20,000 word report than scour through trying to remember all the critical changes since the last backup.
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You're using a word processor for 20,000 word reports? I really suggest you learn LaTeX - there's a steep learning curve at the start, but the long-term time savings are incredible.
I wrote the interim documents for my final year undergraduate project in StarOffice, and eventually bit the bullet and learned the basics of LaTeX for my final report. Even though the final report was around four times as long, I spent a lot less time worrying about presentation issues than I had on either interim document.
Re:VIVE LE QUEBEC LIBRE! (Score:5, Funny)
Have you considered the total cost of ownership? Having to power lights throughout the entire day must get expensive. Installing windows sounds much more affordable.
Re:I thought Microsoft was a monopoly? (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft clearly fits the definition of a monopoly.
Don't think so?
Do a little research on Standard Oil, which was broken up in the United States under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. Standard Oil was not the only oil company in the United States at that time, nor were they the only one that operated gasoline stations. However, their market dominance was such that they were within the definition of a monopoly.
There are other OS, mail server, and office suite vendors out there, to be sure. However, Exchange has a 65% market share (probably more in the global 2000), Windows has 90% of the desktop, and probably more than that in business desktops. Microsoft Office has about a 90% market share, too. It has been so successful, in fact, that "Excel" and "Word" have become generic words in the lexicon of many people. I regularly encounter users who think "Excel" is what you call a spreadsheet program. I have NeoOffice on my wife's Mac and and she calls its spreadsheet Excel all the time. This has become very common.
Yes, Microsoft has a monopoly. You don't need 100% market share to have a monopoly. You just need so much market share that the market is no longer anything like a level playing field for others. The fact that some competitors have been able to survive or even make headway anyway is not testimony against Microsoft being a monopoly or even for a level playing field, but rather testimony to the quality and tenacity of those competitors.
Granted, Microsoft has jumped the shark, but it's still a powerful monopoly.