Posted on 10/01/2005 12:59:08 PM PDT by N3WBI3
The NSW Office of State Revenue (OSR) is taking a tough stance against Microsoft's decision to make an enterprise edition of Windows Vista only available to companies that have signed on to its Software Assurance program. The tax collection agency has declared it would rather switch desktop operating systems than lock itself into Microsoft's licensing regime.
Delivering a presentation at the South East Asian Regional Computer Confederation (SEARCC 05) in Sydney yesterday, OSR chief information officer Mike Kennedy and the agency's manager of client services Pravash Babhoota confirmed they would start scoping for a move to a Linux desktop within six months.
The OSR collects taxes, levies and duty for the NSW government and is the second biggest revenue authority in Australia after the Australian Taxation Office. Answering directly to the NSW Treasury, OSR has about 600 staff, 200 of which it recruited during the past year.
Babhoota said the agency had already successfully bedded down open source on its back-end, running its Oracle 9i and 10g core databases and assorted other transactional applications over Citrix on Dell-based clusters and had guarantees of open source support from key enterprise applications vendors.
While the back-end migration consisted of moving off heavier Unix- and Solaris-based operating systems running on Sun hardware, Babhoota said the emergence of a new version of Microsoft Windows, Office and their commensurate licensing would naturally lead his IT shop to consider consolidating its applications on open source.
"At this stage the benefits have been in delivering [savings through] consolidation and thin clients. In a few more months the focus will shift to replacing Office," Babhoota said.
Asked whether Microsoft's Software Assurance subscription licensing regime - under which volume users pay an annual fee for support, patches and upgrades - was influencing any potential shift on desktops, Babhoota said previous upgrade offers from Microsoft had provided a less than compelling economic case to his organization.
In particular, he said early offers to upgrade from NT to XP under Software Assurance had not provided sufficient value in their initial stages, noting the waiting game had paid off because ultimately prices dropped while stability, functionality and support increased.
"As soon as support ends for XP, we will look at moving to Linux [desktops]," Babhoota said, adding the back-end switch to open source had cost 17 percent of what a proprietary upgrade had been costed at, with the agency doubling the amount of business it processed in the same 12-month period.
Free Republic is a marketplace of ideas, not a stock shilling site. It would be nice if you had an idea once in a while about a different subject. Your obsessive posts may be to the point of having the opposite effect of promoting Microsoft.
Or they can wait a few weeks, as Suse Linux Professional v10 will be out. And Novell dropped the price. It's now $59.00 retail (down from $99) And they've got a special right now, where if you order it directly, before the shipping date, they'll ship it for free.
Mark
Bill gates praised the chicoms, end of story..
The usual IT support director, thats right, the socially inept one with the clumsy gate and slight stale odor, just might be hauled off for downloading porn on his fabulously quad monitored outfitted special workstation or be forced to leave employment for harboring old outdated musty closely held failed technologies that he never honestly reports.
Unless an OldStuffDavinci code book is found, how would the next in line be able to unravel the spaghetti code and little exception thingies.
Is this where I'm supposed to insert /sarcasm?
^^^^^^^^^^^Sure you can't stand Stallman, you just spend every spare moment pushing his free software on everyone out of your disgust.^^^^^^^^^
Actually... no. Like or not, the way things sit now the better software is on the OSS side.
I dare you to run your computer without antivirus and firewall for a week. Let us know what happens.......
"kudos for admitting the obvious" "you can't be that blind"
Those are oxymorons of each other.
Earlier you said "around here", surely you have a few usernames.
It should go without saying that it's not a very effective "loss leader" when only 2% of the users ever actually pay for it.
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/oct2005/tc2005103_0519_tc_218.htm?site=cbs&campaign_id=cbs
I was wondering what MS would do to force people onto SA.
Windows has been around for a very long time, but corporations and large developers still usually buy support.
I'm all for free markets. If we don't make the best and people don't want to buy from us, then it's our own damn fault. But then the best Linux distros are from American companies.
Typical insults? No, I think he pretty much factually slammed you on that one.
And your proof of this claim is?
Prove most MS customers buy additional support, else I am completely correct.
You miss the point. They don't necessarily require support, but accountability requires that the company get support.
As the product matures, it should become more stable and lead to less bizarre and unexpected failures.
Then by your definition, Windows is not yet mature. BTW, HP/UX has been out for 20 years. Please tell me why people still buy support.
You also fail to take into account that Linux itself may be only 14 years old (yes, older than NT and not much younger than 16-bit Windows), but the design is based on a quite stable and proven 36 year-old OS.
Actually, you'd think that the quality rather than the age would be the main indicator of support. Most people who work with Windows, Mac and Linux generally report that Windows is the most troublesome.
You remind me of a problem we had with the tried and true, very mature HP/UX. It had a problem seeing too many hops away so we had to set up a Linux (then only four years old) box as a relay because HP couldn't fix the problem quickly enough.
The funny part is -- get this -- Microsoft paid for it. But it was removed as of NT 3.5.
Watch out, he's about to start ranting about them stealing our bodily fluids.
Microsoft, plus some of Apple's own bad moves, are what almost took out Apple. Apple has grown exponentially during the time that Linux became widely popular. And they did it partially on free software.
No kidding I love neoOffice and firefox on my mac..
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.