Secret EU Open Source Migration Study Leaked 311
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."
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.
Oh noes! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why do we let Gartner Continue? (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.
Re:Oh noes! (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, Insightful)
Re:Why do we let Gartner Continue? (Score:3, Insightful)
2005 != 2009 (Score:5, Insightful)
"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?
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.
Re:Why do we let Gartner Continue? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:"WinFS Arrives?" (Score:1, Insightful)
Please read the following carefully: NTFS was an abstraction layer THAT WAS GOING TO RUN ATOP A HARD DRIVE.
--End sarcasm--
Functionally, what difference is there between a file system that runs atop a platter of bits and one that runs atop a stream of bits? To me, it seems that a File System can run atop another file system and still be a file system - look at GMailFS, for example. Think of it in terms of compilers - does a backend targeting assembly make something a compiler, while a backend to C/Java/Brainfsck do not?
Re:Oh noes! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why do we let Gartner Continue? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why do we let Gartner Continue? (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:"WinFS Arrives?" (Score:3, Insightful)
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 useful (except desktop search, but that's already been implemented without WinFS.)
Re:Oh noes! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:As an European who's been using linux desktop.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay, enough bad analogies.
Re:Why do we let Gartner Continue? (Score:1, Insightful)
No. The Gartner study was about 'predictions' too. And it is easy to demonstrate that those were wrong. What it's worst, I suspect there were purposely wrong.
Re:Why do we let Gartner Continue? (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:As an European who's been using linux desktop.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why do we let Gartner Continue? (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: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 for better technology education in K1-K12 and I'm not talking about using particular software. Advocate education on how to use the computer as a general purpose tool. It doesn't take much to see through companies like Gartner but it takes SOME education.
LoB
Re:Oh noes! (Score:2, Insightful)