Posted on 06/12/2019 7:50:19 PM PDT by dayglored
They cite the increasing costs of commercial software as reason
CERN is best known for pushing the boundaries of science and understanding, but the famed research outfit’s next major experiment will be with open-source software.
The cost of various commercial software licenses has increased 10x
The European Organisation for Nuclear Research, better known as CERN, and also known as home of the Large Hadron Collider, has announced plans to migrate away from Microsoft products and on to open-source solutions where possible.
Why? Increases in Microsoft license fees.
Microsoft recently revoked the organisations status as an academic institution, instead pricing access to its services on users. This bumps the cost of various software licenses 10x, which is just too much for CERN’s budget.
Commercial software fees are not the only reason why the organisation is now evaluating open-source software. The ‘Microsoft Alternatives project’, codename MAlt, also looks to help “take back control”.
“MAlt’s objective is to put us back in control using open software. It is now time to present more widely this project and to explain how it will shape our computing environment,” CERN’s Emmanuel Ormancey explains in a blog post.
“The objective is to put us back in control using open software”Emmanuel Ormancey
CERN (like many scientific and research institutions) already make use of open-source software and Linux in various areas so they’re not exactly dabbling with the unknown.
The first “major changes” will be replacement mail service for the CERN IT department, and moving some ‘Skype for Business clients’ over to a ‘softphone telephony pilot’.
For an organisation as big and as important as CERN planned migrations will require time, patience and gradual testing.
But they seem buoyant on the potential, stating:
“While the Microsoft Alternatives project is ambitious, it’s also a unique opportunity for CERN to demonstrate that building core services can be done without vendor and data lock-in, that the next generation of services can be tailored to the community’s needs and finally that CERN can inspire its partners by collaborating around a new range of products.”
Switching away from Microsoft Windows and other MS proprietary software has worked well for some, not so well for others. Some municipalities dropped MS-Windows and MS-Office, switched to Linux and OpenOffice, but found it wasn't the cure-all they imagined. Others have been very successful at getting into open-source products and claim they'll never go back.
My guess is that CERN will be one of the successful ones.
Microsoft Alternatives project (MAlt) https://home.cern/news/news/computing/microsoft-alternatives-project-malt
Given the collaborative nature of CERN and its wide community, a high number of licenses are required to deliver services to everyone, and when traditional business models on a per-user basis are applied, the costs per product can be huge and become unaffordable in the long term.A prime example is that CERN has enjoyed special conditions for the use of Microsoft products for the last 20 years, by virtue of its status as an “academic institution”. However, recently, the company has decided to revoke CERN’s academic status, a measure that took effect at the end of the previous contract in March 2019, replaced by a new contract based on user numbers, increasing the license costs by more than a factor of ten. Although CERN has negotiated a ramp-up profile over ten years to give the necessary time to adapt, such costs are not sustainable.
They should have done this a long time ago.
It’s possible to rid thyself of Microsuck. The company I work for is free of it. There are plenty of good freeware out there. Tools like IntelliJ are good and replace Visual Studio quite well, and it’s MUCH cheaper.
-SB
I hope CERN has some smart people on staff who can make this transition successful ...
Who wants to bet that negotiation DIDN'T lock them into those
10 years?
BTW- an alternative to skype- no software needed, is https://talky.io/
Can talk with friends over your browser- not sure how safe it is though- maybe some experts can weigh in on this?
They used NeXTStep to develop the World Wide Web.
Hey ShadowAce — here’s maybe one for the Linux/Tech Ping List.
I’ve been off the Microsoft Plantation 4 years now. I miss a few things, but not enough to go back since I have all the software I need.
Tim Berners-Lee at CERN did these outstanding things:
CERN has one heck of a history.
Marc Andreessen at NCSA-UIUC (Univ. of Illinois) invented the first useful web browser (Mosaic). He started Netscape.
Microsoft set out to destroy Netscape, and succeeded. The Browser Wars were a low point in Microsoft's descent into evil business practices.
There's more than a little karma in CERN finally telling Microsoft to kiss off.
There is a free version of visual studio available.
CERN should take whatever they come up with and find a way to make it significantly improve online porn. Maybe it’d take off like a wildfire and beat up MS.
For a real game changer, I wish CERN would release a search engine since google got out of the search engine business.
I somehow doubt that CERN will invent their own replacements for Microsoft’s products. More likely they’ll just adopt some distro of Linux and some version of OpenOffice or LibreOffice. How that will affect modern online porn? Not at all, is my guess. Sorry to disappoint you there.
A good search engine is something else entirely. Google’s was actually very good until they started biasing it for selling people to marketing companies. Maybe CERN could revitalize AltaVista.
“Free” as in your first bag of crack is on the house.
“Tim Berners-Lee at CERN did these outstanding things.”
True. Sir Berners Lee is a humble super star. I once walked by his office in Marina Del Rey, saw the closed door and paused for a moment of silence. When asked about the WWW, Sir BL smiled and said something like, Yeah, it was cool at the time: world wide web. Sorry for not making it shorter to type.
Have been using Duck Duck Go for several years. They promise NO tracking, NO selling your data. And it’s ‘just as good’ as Google, assuming you like Google.
Give it a try: https://duckduckgo.com
Privacy policy: https://duckduckgo.com/privacy
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