Posted on 07/13/2004 10:40:19 AM PDT by ShadowAce
PARIS, Jul 13 (IPS) - Many European public administrations are distancing themselves from the U.S. software giant Microsoft and turning to free software.
The Paris city administration has announced it is considering replacing its Microsoft systems with public domain software such as Linux, OpenOffice and Mozilla.
The overhaul of the city's data processing systems would entail acquiring some 15,000 new computers with the new software by 2008.
Microsoft said in January the change would cost Paris 15 million dollars, and offered a 60 percent discount on its own systems. That reduction would bring costs down to less than seven million dollars, it claimed.
Joachim Larisch, administrative director at the university of Bremen in northern Germany says free software is better suited to government needs. ”By its mere conception, Linux can be adapted freely by users, without having to solicit permission from private software producers,” he said.
Linux is a competitor to Microsoft Windows. OpenOffice, a free system for data processing, competes with Microsoft Office, and Mozilla, an Internet browser, is challenging Microsoft Explorer.
”Besides being free of charge, Linux and OpenOffice can be easily adapted to an administration's needs,” Larisch said. ”And the Internet browser Mozilla doesn't suffer the numerous safety gaps of Microsoft Explorer, which are very dangerous for a public administration.”
In addition, he said, Linux users are not compelled to use software associated with it, as with Microsoft.
Use of free software has become a central issue in strategies to eradicate the digital divide, the growing technological and commercial gap separating the industrialised rich from the poor countries.
In discussions at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) held in Geneva in December last year, representatives of non-governmental organisations and from the poorest countries emphasised the need to support free software to promote wider access to information and communication technologies.
Several NGOs and representatives of governments from the South tried at the meeting to promote free software. But the U.S.government resisted such efforts.
”Part of the digital divide comes from artificial obstacles to the sharing of information,” Richard Stallman, founder of a project to promote free software told IPS. ”At Geneva the Brazilian government sought measures to promote free software, but the U.S.. government was firmly against it.”
Stallman, a U.S. citizen, said that U.S. President George W. Bush had received substantial financial contributions from Microsoft for his election campaign.
National sovereignty is yet another argument for removing Microsoft from public administration, leading software experts say.
”If a public office changes from Microsoft to Linux and other similar software, it breaks dependence on a private foreign corporation,” says Bernard Benhamou, analyst at the French Agency for the Development of Electronic Administration.
”Of course, there are economic advantages in such a change,” Benhamou told IPS. ”But the question of sovereignty is central to a topic of the strategic importance of electronic data processing.”
If Paris were to replace Microsoft programmes with Linux, Mozilla, and other open source software, it would follow the example set in May last year by the German city Munich when its Social Democrat mayor Christian Ude discarded Microsoft systems for free software.
Munich became the first major city administration to switch to free software. With more than a million inhabitants it is the third largest city in Germany.
Fearing a snowball effect from Munich, Microsoft chief executive officer Steve Ballmer had personally tried to convince the city administration to keep using Microsoft systems.
Ballmer has more reasons to worry. Late last month the municipality of the Norwegian city Bergen followed Munich's example.
In Paris official sources say the municipality is waiting for further price reductions from Microsoft. ”We are sure that Microsoft fears losing us,” an official told IPS. ”And we are also sure that it is ready to pay dearly to prevent this loss.”
Microsoft's highest executive in France Christophe Aulnette refused to comment on the city government's expectations. But he said Microsoft hoped governments ”would avoid taking ideological decisions, and base them only on the efficacy of a system.”
Munich's example is likely to be followed by other public administrations. Two weeks ago French minister for public services Renaud Dutreil urged all state administrations to consider discarding Microsoft.
”Microsoft should be considered a normal supplier, and not a unique provider of software,” Dutreil said in a public statement. ”Free software has become a credible alternative, both in terms of price and functionality.”
Until recently public administration has been a protected domain for Microsoft systems. Government services and institutions around the world have been using Microsoft systems.
But this is changing rapidly, especially in universities and at research and education centres.
Jacques Le Marois, French founder of Mandrakesoft, the software manufacturer distributing Linux in France, says Dutreil's declaration ”is a political signal of enormous importance, and should have a strong impact upon the state administrations' choices.”
Microsoft is facing other challenges in Europe. In March the European Commission (EC) fined the company 600 million dollars for ”abuse of a commercially dominant position.”
The EC gave Microsoft notice to offer clients a new Windows system that does not force them to use MediaPlayer, the Microsoft programme that gives access to sound and video files on the Internet.
The EC said forced use of MediaPlayer meant illegal competition to other software systems such as Realworks. (END/2004)
Microsoft/Linux Ping
So, from the first sentence it appears they have no idea what they're talking about.
Yeah, it could happen but it won't. They are just replacing one software vendor with another, reinventing the wheel. We had CAD before AutoDesk [wrote our own, took a week], we had word processors before Word [wrote our own, took an hour]. But write that junk again? Why?
So many references to "free" and so few to "open source." The primary distinction between MS Windows/Office and Linux/OpenOffice isn't that the latter is "free" and the former isn't, but that the latter is open and the former is closed and proprietary. Open standards is just a much better play long term.
yeah--but what do you expect? They're French.
> Cities Begin to Look Away from Microsoft
Microsoft is terrified of government adoption of open-
source, because it will cause a big problem for the
next stage of the MS anti-open strategy: submarine
patents.
MS is presently funding (in most cases secretly) a
major FUD campaign against Linux. It's not only not
working, it's backfiring.
The next stage, as suggested by the retroactive
enforcement of the bogus patent on the FAT filesystem,
is to assert MS patents to attack open source.
The problem is that this will hurt end users, and if a
significant number of end users are governments, there
will be backlash - possibly including voiding the
entire goofy concept of software patents.
As for which is the best "play" in the long term, it really depends on the requirements, now doesn't it? No one is out there putting up highly secure sites on Linux, and most chief architects think twice about doing it in MS (though there are large MS transactional sites all over the financial community) If you were to talk to large scale site owners and production outsourcers they would tell you the Linux boxes get hacked withing the first day that they are out there. Micrsoft sites are slightly better, but no one beat the major UNIX players.
The problem with Linux boosters is that they are mostly all under 40 and have never been responsible for a multimillion dollar budget in any operational or MIS capacity, and very few even have had CTO level responsibility on the development side, particularly in Fortune 500, N-tier transactional web-centric applications where real money is on the line (as in litigation for security breaches and failures.) People talk about Linux but must real corporate usage is as a file server or just on a presentation tier. IBM loves to push Linux to its webshpere community but almost all of the actual large IBM applications are running under AIX on the data and middleware tiers.
There are some startups using it, but the minute they get the real buck they convert to a much more secure environment. It is true that the GRID people are making inroads but these are for the most part in the academic world. Some of the work going on with Oracle and DB2 may change that, at least for the data tier, but folks are still pretty cautious about it. Again I am talking about general best practices: Every community has their red banner instances that they like to cite, and I am sure that the Linux community has some to tout, but in the main, Linux usage for mission critical usage, particularly if it is client facing or entails real liabilities, is in reality pretty slim at the moment.
As for the desktop, in any meaningful business application, MS Excel rules the day.
I also question if it is a better play to exclude one's firm from the fruits of a software company that spends billions on R & D a year. Younger people tend to think that "open source" is something new. The UNIX community, however< was pretty much "open source" up until the mid eighties. after that time the business model changed and we saw the "Unix wars" of the period. (I was on the OSF committee) I imagine that we will see similar mechinations happen in the Linux community when real money comes into play. Look for the Chinese to break the model here.
I would also assert that very few people are going to sell innovative software that they have spent millions on if they have to give away the source in some sort of freeware scheme. The next big step will be web services - the only viable commerical stance wqith Linux in this market is an ASP model; my guess is that sooner or later this will not cut it and people will be forced to actually license and unbundle code.
The security and change management issues have not really hit the Linux community yet because its usage pattern if so confined and the actuall market share lags behind its "mindshare"
Great. Now, you OSS bigots can claim to be on the side of the French. Let the Americans eat cake. Enjoy.
What's so great about these foreign countries getting their software from somewhere besides the US now?
Man, these are all great points, and I feel like I am at the feet of a guru here. What I really meant to get across, though, was that the open-ness of Linux and OpenOffice was the real attraction. In other words, all the file formats, extensions, calls, etc. are all public and accessible. Keep the code private if you want, and as long as a competitor can provide you with a faster, easier, more secure, whatever, way to get the same result, great.
"Great. Now, you OSS bigots can claim to be on the side of the French. Let the Americans eat cake. Enjoy."
The french are currently on the side of bill gates.
So are you.
You = the french.
Just using your 'logic' there.
Damn if I don't like my Mozilla Firefox 0.9.1 with the added extensions et al... Humms like a bee; so much faster than IE; none of the baggage too... I ABSOLUTELY LOVE IT!!!
Having said that; I've also tried Thunderbird and IMO it has a long, long way to go before even beginning to think it could be incorporated into high volume corporate or governmental environment. I suspect the "Office" clones have the same shortfalls...
And the dirty question nobody wants to answer is how these open source applications integrate into highly specialized software systems... Say 30 years worth of bonding activity for a governmental housing authority and its database...
Most likely, they were going to acquire mostly new computers by that date anyway. The big thing it would likely entail is giving up or rewriting most of their applications now in Visual Basic. We've got so many zillions of lines of VB6, laced with boatloads of Microsoft Transact-SQL and API calls, with good new Win32 projects conceived, written, and tested by genuine US cowboy-style programmers going in every week or so. Under these circumstances, I'm wondering how we'll ever be able to convert to .net, much less desktop Linux. Lots of shops where the programmers actually work must be in similar situations. Personally, I am still more interested in saving money by offloading from mainframes to Win32 than in checking out a new OS.
What have you got against Mainframes?
Do you know of a package for Linux like NoteTab which seems to be only for Windows, or is there a way to run it on Linux?
What is NoteTab? Anything like Wordpad?
With all the outsourcing Microsoft does, much of the profit ends up outside the US anyways.
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