The Penguin Ping.
Wanna be Penguified? Just holla!
Got root?
Posted on 06/28/2004 2:58:07 PM PDT by ShadowAce
According to the French publication Libération, the objective of Microsoft is clear: at the time when an increasing number of public administrations around the world are choosing to use free and open source software, Microsoft considers losing the City of Paris to open source out of question. And they'll do anything they can to prevent it.
According to a document to which Libération had access, Microsoft proposed a price reduction of almost 60% to the Paris city leaders for the 15,000-computer city contract.
The battle around the city's software was precipitated by the arrival of Mayor Betrand Delanoë's team at City Hall. The new administration found the current software systems "decayed," according to François Dagnaud, assistant in charge of the general administration. A new plan was implemented to modernize the system which, following the current majority of the administrations and companies worldwide, was a good fit with Microsoft's product offerings.
Then Munich occured: last month, that Social Democrat city government chose a radical turn. From now until 2008, 14,000 PCs will be equipped with Linux, the free operating system competitor of Windows. This was the largest such move away from a Microsoft installation, and a humiliation for Microsoft as well.
In spite of the costs of migration, Munich hopes to save money. In particular, it hopes to gain independence from a single and ultradominant supplier. One of the characteristics of free software is that it can be conceived by thousands of programmers, often voluntary, and the code can be copied and modified with leisure according to the user's needs.
In October 2003, the town hall of Paris decided to launch a study on the possibility of a migration from Windows towards free software. The study was entrusted to the service company Unilog, the same one which consulted for Munich. For Microsoft, the tension went up. On January 14 of this year, a "commercial proposal" from Microsoft was addressed to Philippe Schil, the data-processing director of Paris.
The proposal indicated that with Paris' 15,000 PCs, the cost of of Microsoft software would normally be approximately 13.27 million euros over three years. The actual price Microsoft proposed was 5.65 million euros, which is a 57.4% reduction... a figure which could still drop, so much does Microsoft fear the loss of Paris. "They fear the symbolic effect of losing Paris more than anything," indicated one of Mayor Delanoë's staff.
Another Microsoft battleground tech ping
</sarcasm>
Let 'em eat Penguin.
I'd have guessed Paris would have surrendered to Microsoft by now.
In the absense of actual bullets that may fly, France just waits until the bribe is large enough.
Wanna be Penguified? Just holla!
Got root?
Time for Microsoft to dip into that "never lose to Linux" slush fund. But then this could just be another round of "Say we're looking at Linux so Microsoft drops its prices and eases its terms."
So, are the French going to do what they did here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1156059/posts
That being take an American product, Red Hat, strip the name off and slap their name on there, Mandrake, then sell it to France without a dime back to the US? Why wouldn't they, especially when fools over here cheer them on?
I can't believe that you keep posting the same crap even though it's incorrect on thread after thread, hoping no one will notice.
Incorrect only to a self-serving zealot...
What's incorrect? That France gets to load a copy of Red Hat for free, without a dime back to the US? If you think that's incorrect, you're incorrect.
Straight from O'Reilly:
"(French) Mandrake basically takes the Red Hat source code, customizes it for a workstation audience, and re-releases it as Linux Mandrake. It claims to be 99% compatible with Red Hat."
http://linux.oreillynet.com/pub/ldist/8
It's too bad MS profits won't yield the same stock inflated price it did before. But all things gotta end sometime.
This is good news? That the US loses it's long standing dominant position in the operating system industry? Not just Microsoft, Apple, and the many versions of Unix. Around the world they used to come to the US for their systems and software. If Linux continues to pick up, as we see first destroying the US *nix market, these free copies of US software mean they don't really need us for anything anymore, except CPU chips. Take a look at these recent cases in Malaysia and Thailad.
Dictatorships are bad, no matter who runs them.
"
"(French) Mandrake basically takes the Red Hat source code, customizes it for a workstation audience, and re-releases it as Linux Mandrake. It claims to be 99% compatible with Red Hat." "
The article you quoted is from 2000. Mandrake makes quite a bit of changes!
Something that you don't point out is that "Red Hat source code" is nothing of the sort - it's not written by Red Hat, it's all open source software written by many authors that Red Hat packages together with an installer. BTW, Mandrake has their own installer.
Red Hat makes most of their money from SUPPORT.
US companies can also install Red Hat without paying - they just pay if they want support, or for training, or if they want their engineers to be Red Hat certified.
You are taking your (possibly purposeful) misunderstanding of the business model and crafting and argument which in fact does not exist.
Capitulation...
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