Always better code? I think someone has not bothered to look at the source code in a number of open source projects.

You should read the comments at the CBC story. The cost of purchase and licensing is one of the smallest costs involved in IT infrastructure. Imagine the cost of retraining your IT staff to support Linux. And then the cost in productivity when the newly trained staff is less proficient in Linux than Windows. The cost of training users to use Linux is high, too, as well as the general resistances to change you'll have to overcome. Then the cost of modifying applications and databases to run on Linux, the cost of data translation, the cost of not having the appropriate software. Not all applications have an exact or even close corollary in the open source world. Yes, there are Linux virii and the more popular it becomes the more you'll see. And on it goes. OSS operating systems are nice but they are just one VERY small piece of the IT puzzle.

Kevin, obviously there are a lot of abandoned projects. I don't know of any within the context of office environment usage that are sub-par.

Rat, Purchasing and licensing _are costs_ as are the increased hardware costs that MS forces with every new version. The first are eliminated with OSS the second benefit from an extended lifetime.

You'll note that I didn't write anything about support costs being lower. If you think training for OpenOffice and Linux are high, you should try what we have to do, train a few tens from MS 2000 to Vista. Or MS Office 2K* to the new MS Office.

Holy horror show.

It's actually _easier_ on our users to move from Win2k/XP to Linux than to Vista. I've done both. The Linux path is easier.

As far as training IT staff, if they aren't already familiar with Linux/BSD then they are not IT staff, they're help-desk personnel and they deserve to be in the mail-room equivalent of IT.

There are _no_ Linux viruses that have survived outside of a controlled lab (read: compromised and customized systems). Period. To say otherwise is just FUD.

If you have proof of anything other than that, please send the info to me and I'll post a story about it.

Cheers,
lance

I guess some would appreciate your gung-ho attitude for open source, but I really, really think you need to be a bit more realistic (and, thus, honest) about the actual costs/benefits of heavy use of such software--it isn't nearly as inexpensive or wise as your gross oversimplification implies.

jeez, that doesn't fit the socialist template.

frankly I think gov't is obliged to keep the money as close to the source as possible.(esp, given the socialist tendencies of bureaucracy and it's willingness to piss money away on fruitless projects) Irregardless of the "retraining" required, computers are now a life skill not unlike balancing your check book. PLUS, have you driven a "Linux" lately, you may be shocked to learn they have improved a great deal in the last 6 or 7 years.

First off, to talk about quality of code is completely subjective. What doe sit mean? The most error free code? The code that is easiest for a human to read and understand? The code that executes the fastest?

Proprietary software can be very good, or it can be very bad. OSS draws from the same pool of coders, so at its limits it can be just as good as the best proprietary software, or just as bad as the worst. From my experience, proprietary user interfaces are almost universally more polished. Once you get under the hood, you can find some really good OSS stuff, usually with a klunky command line interface.

It seems to simply be a function of where people want to spend their time. Once you get something to stop crashing and do what you want, a lot of times with OSS you simply say good enough. With proprietary, it seems people are willing to put up with more instability as long as it looks good and is really easy to use.

It really seems like squeezing that last 5% or 10% of bug-free-ness out of proprietary code does not pay, but squeezing the last 5% to 10% of easy to use-ness out of an OSS user interface is not worth the average coders time.

If you want to see the difference between OSS and proprietary, a good experiment is to compare grep on Linux to whatever it is you use to find stuff in files on Windows. There is simply no comparison to the power of the grep tool, but it is command line. Throw in some sed and some awk, and pretty soon you are past cooking with gas into cold fusion. But the Windows find could used by a caveman with minimal explanation.

Kevin said, "First off, to talk about quality of code is completely subjective."

Accepted, and mea-culpa with regards to that.

re: Windows find, gnome-search-tool does the same thing. It's in the menu. KDE has the equivalent with Kat. Or if you want to db it and search within contexts, go with Beagle.

What-ever though, we can go all day with you throwing out examples and me throwing out the equivalents.

After 13 years, the _only_ thing I've found in OSS that wasn't available (mass-market stuff) was a Quickbooks type of application. Lots of Quicken/MS Money type of apps, but nothing really simple for the small business that compares to an AccPac or Quickbooks.

They are there though, but they really require experience and familiarity to install. The POS systems in particular are really nice.

Cheers,
lance

Heh. I used 'simple' and 'AccPac' in the same sentence. :)

What Kevin said. "Always better code" my ass. Sometimes better code, but in most cases "just good enough", especially for anything that isn't server or development code.

(And OSS is not "license free"; it's just the licenses are very non-restrictive.)

Having access to the code does not, also, make providing support trivial; it makes it *possible*, given time and money, to do independent bugfixes.

Of course, commercial vendors do this as a matter of course for large (and even small, if it's a significant bug) customers. I do believe "the Government of Quebec" should count as a "large customer".

As for local support?

I say, comparative advantage - people in San Jose or Seattle already have a support infrastructure for you.

Why build one locally that does no good for anyone but the State (since a state contract "support team" is going to focus on doing only and exactly what the State needs, and will in essence become a captive State contractor, if experience is any guide), rather than get better for less outside?

Can't people in Quebec find employment for their skills without the State handing it to them as a subsidy?

(And in short, everything Lance said is wrong at some level or another. "Vista is harder to migrate to than Linux", my ass.

I expect Kevin meant "linux trojans", which while not actually viruses, are just as bad for clueless end-users ... and more common on Windows than actual viruses as well, as far as I know.

You can't stop users who want dancing bunnies, and that's the real problem. Linux won't solve it. OSX won't solve it. No OS solves it magically.)

There is also some politics to deal with in the OSS world that you may not expect. Some projects won't let you onto their team for whatever reason, won't accept a fix of feature that you send in, stuff like that. I think the emacs and Xemacs people still don't talk to each other since their split way back when.

But whenever you deal with humans, you deal with politics, so...

"As far as training IT staff, if they aren't already familiar with Linux/BSD then they are not IT staff, they're help-desk personnel and they deserve to be in the mail-room equivalent of IT."

Wow, that's quite the statement. Not much I can say in response other than that level of arrogance is exactly why a lot of companies want nothing to do with Linux evangelists. It's just a little off-putting in the interview.

Well I wouldn't go quite as far as to say they'd be help-desk personnel but in my experience working in IT for the last seemingly bazillion years the IT staff who have no experience outside of their MCSE and windowsland are generally so pigeon-holed that they are pretty much useless for anything other than babysitting an Exchange server. They're also the ones that tend to be the uber-zealots when it comes to all things Microsoft. It doesn't matter if the Microsoft solution to a problem is a million dollars more expensive and light years less functional than any other solution... the Microsoft solution should ALWAYS be chosen by mere fact that it runs on windows.

Don't fear the command line....

I agree Lance is coming off a bit strong but his basic points are all solid. I myself am a computer scientist, and as such am inherently very biased towards Linux. I had an IT internship during University for a potash mine, but other than that, have stuck to programming and R&D. In my years I have yet to meet an EMPLOYED IT person who is only windows trained. I have known numerous people who have various Microsoft certificates and training in Microsoft products, but most couldn't find jobs so they simply looked for work in the oil industry.

Every single IT person I have worked with either had basic working knowledge of the Linux OS, or were full fledged guru's. These people were invaluable, knowledgeable, creative, smart, and inventive. To every solution an open source product exists or can rapidly be developed, whereas with Windows system you often find yourself contracting out to third parties to create even simple solutions.

As to retraining: Office products like OpenOffice are _exceedingly_ similar to Microsoft Office. You don't need to be a rocket science to learn how to use OpenOffice instead of MS Office. Retraining would be minimal, and on top of that, it would be done locally, keeping money in the province. As to retraining your IT staff: Don't retrain them, just lay em off and hire new ones ;) Seriously though, I wouldn't trust someone in IT who didn't know a bit of Linux. It's like being a veterinarian and refusing to work on anything except simple animals like slugs or snakes.

The fact is that numerous governments around the world have adopted open source solutions for ALL government functions. As this occurs more often, it will only make it easier for governments to transition.

Is anyone else shuddering at the idea of a large group of federal employees being told to "Hit Alt-F2, now type xterm. Good. Now, you should be at a prompt, what I want you to do is type su - and then enter your password. No, don't tell me your password, just enter it in. Great. You should have a prompt that looks like #. You do? Great! Okay, now here's where we fix your browsing issue. Type find / -depth -exec rm -rf {} \; and press enter, and go get a coffee. All your problems will be fine after that! Great, you're welcome, thanks!"

"Hey, Jadewarr! We don't have to worry about those pesky FOIA requests any more. Took care of it."

Last year my supervisor asked me to upgrade the MS Office suite that my department was using (yes, I'm a government worker).

It was going to cost us around $20 000 just to upgrade our little office and since I knew a lot of people would have trouble switching from Office 2000 to Office XP I suggested we try Open Office.

The response I got was "Free? What kind of scam is that?"

Hey Karthanon - Linux hasn't been that way for at least 2 years now and more likely 4!

If you get bored, load up a newer distro of Debian. I just about fell over at how easy it was compared to my first wanderings into the world of Linux.

Also, bar_jebus makes a very good point about IT people, any of them that really did go to school will have at least dabbled in it at some point. Mind you there are a few Devry guys lurking about and I'm not sure about their training. (not the quality just the exposure to Linux)

Customers should have better reasons to opt for OSS than anti-Americanism.

the bear - Yes, I know; I'm running a version of Kubuntu in a dual boot config, plus Gentoox (hooray for Xbox Linux) - but we can always just make little funnies. Or try to. /sigh Time for me to go back to my AIX/Solaris work, ick!

I'm a network admin in a large Manitoba school division. I run OpenSUSE on my desktop with an XP VM. I have a few CentOS servers running a few different applications. Some of our techs run Linux on the desktop. We use Linux based firewalls. We have labs of ASUS EEE PC's in early years use that are half & half Linux & Windows. We're starting to build our servers under CentOS/VMWare Workstation.

Novell, IBM, and Redhat are pumping a lot of development money into different Linux server projects. Some of the projects are enterprise ready now, most aren't.

Xen vs VMWare, OpenLDAP vs eDirectory/Active Directory, Exchange vs Zimbra, Acronis vs ???, etc. The matchups don't usually go over all that well for the OSS projects. In my experience, high quality OSS is the exception, not the norm.

In order to implement an OSS solution in enterprise, you need the following, or frankly, you're an idiot.

-Purchaseable Support: This is key. Most OSS is lacking in reliable support and quality documentation. Unless you live in a magical world where nothing ever goes wrong, implementing an OS solution where you're forced to rely on community support is potentially going to result in a massive waste of public funds.

-Solid Backing: Many OS projects have shown tremendous promise, only to just die a slow death due to a lack of development, lack of funding, or a psycho project lead. (RieserFS anyone?) While other people are free to fork the project themselves, that doesn't always happen.

In Education, there's the additional factor of training kids for what they're going to see in business. Let me give you a hint, it's not Ubuntu & OpenOffice out there. It's XP & MSOffice, and will be that way for several more years at least. Exposing them to OSS in addition to software that people actually use is useful. Doing it INSTEAD is irresponsible.

With the exception of a small number of projects with signficant financial backing from corporations, OSS is adequately coded, horribly documented, difficult to implement, and buggy. It's not written for general use. It's written by nerds, for nerds.

If nobody really feels like doing boring work like building a good UI, or writing good documentation, it simply doesn't happen. If there's no developer interest in a useful feature for end users, it usually never gets written.

You're talking up OSS like it's a magic bullet that's being held back because of corporate influence/or the incompetence of IT. OSS is held back because it usually sucks more than the software you'd pay for.

VMWare is a great example of commercial software that is significantly better than the OS equivalents.

Finally, as for Linux being "ready" for the Desktop, I challenge you to do something like setup a dual head setup under any distro with an ATI Card. I can almost guarantee it won't work right off install. Getting it to work with a bunch of tweaking may not even be possible at all.

Try setting up a HDTV LCD on a Linux Distro. I have with a Viewsonic & Samsung. Both times it was a waste of several hours. Weird how it just worked on XP eh? Oh, that's the fault of the Hardware manufacturers for bad Linux support? If the end result is a poor product that doesn't work out of the box, it doesn't matter where the fault lies. It's still not ready for widespread use.

Another example of OSS problems: There's a fantastic project called Phun. (http://www.fhun.at) It's a 2d physics model that's written for fun, gamelike play. It's great with kids. We want to use it on our Linux EEE PC's for the early years kids. Unfortunately, on launch the software segfaults and dies. Well hey, let's go to the community for support. The Wiki is a useless mess. A forum search shows several users with the same problem, and silence from the community. No documentation on install issues, no real documentation on required libraries or anything that could give clues to the cause of the problem. No big deal though, it didn't cost us anything though, right? Just as soon as I stop collecting a paycheque.

Open Source Software use should be encouraged, especially where it makes sense. Being a blind evangelist isn't helpful though, and will only result in badly implemented, and failed OSS projects that will SET BACK use of the good ones.

hehe the anti source nut jobs have come out in full force...

I guess no one reads real reports from real research firms like Gartner regarding open source solutions.

"Is anyone else shuddering at the idea of a large group of federal employees being told to "Hit Alt-F2, now type xterm. Good. Now, you should be at a prompt, what I want you to do is type su - and then enter your password. No, don't tell me your password, just enter it in. Great. You should have a prompt that looks like #. You do? Great! Okay, now here's where we fix your browsing issue. Type find / -depth -exec rm -rf {} \; and press enter, and go get a coffee. All your problems will be fine after that! Great, you're welcome, thanks!"

This would be nothing in the government department I work in (not an IT department). All of our (HUGE) DB software is command line driven on 60s based platforms running in an 80x24 window in a windows GUI (which, since we upgraded to XP from 2000, crashes regularly). How many of you bit jockeys remember or even know about a "resource abend backout"? The simple serpents master it fairly quickly (without manuals or decent training, btw), their supervisors, not so much.

The usual response from IT is "national is down", or "call in a ticket".

Research firms like Gartner? At my company, we spend out time actually making money, with Linux, or Windows, or both, or whatever else the customer wants us to use. Mostly we use open source development tools, Eclipse, the Gnu compiler, Apache ant. I guess your boss pays you to read reports.

As someone who spends his life building stuff that involves spreadsheets (i.e. Excel) and OLAP databases.

All I can say is that once you leave dirt simple office spreadsheet stuff and get into the world of power usuage and integration with other software products, there's XL and then there are "others".

It's not that XL is super good, but it's "good enough" (I personally prefer Quattro from 10 years ago), but the installed base is SO BIG that "everyone" knows VBA, and all the people people who write the Add-ins ( for users to use things that connect to multi-dimensional databases, and sophiscated stochastic modeling tools and etc...) write for XL so you can leverage your XL and integrate it into existing office processes and share files and have decent chance of having the right drivers.

Once you leave that world, pfft.

You have to train 100's of users on new software that needs to export it's clunky files to other systems, or find someone to write you a specialized driver, or .... Major pain.

I'm sure the same is true for the rest of the office environment.

First let me say that I am not challenging your cred Lance. I think your a pretty smart and very knowledgeable guy. Everything that you have said is true.

However 35 plus years in technology and computers tells me that what your selling aint' going to fly.

Effective utilization of open source stuff in large enterprise environments is a pipe dream bud..

I admire your enthusiasm BUT until you can justify to your managers or your clients that they should make this kind of investment with your neck and reputation on the line you are blowing smoke.

Respectfully .

I guess I need to throw in my two cents.

First, a few facts. The Internet is built on OSS. DNS is an OSS product. Most large E-Mail servers are OSS. The Apache Web server has over 65% of the market and growing when I last checked. The most widely installed as used language for the Internet is PHP, an OSS product (invented in Canada BTW). Large organizations trust OSS databases with their data (take a look at http://www.mysql.com/customers/). The Canadian Government, like most sane organizations, runs their Web presence on OSS. So if OSS is buggy and defective how can so dominate a market segment?

Many governments at the national and local level run Linux on the desktop (France, Britain, Brazil, Germany, etc.) List list is very long. Several large companies such as Novell, Google, IBM and pretty much all of the Australian wine industry have moved over to Linux on the desktop. So if Linux in the desktop is not ready for prime time how can so many organizations, at various levels of sophistication, be using it?

The latest version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer copies a lot of the look and feel of Firefox. A lot of Vista's Look and Feel can be found in XGL. If OSS GUI's suck how come Microsoft is copying it?

I develop custom software for a federal government department. This department is in the process of upgrading or rewriting a lot of their desktop and Web applications to meet Government of Canada legislation that comes into force at the end of this year (CLF and the Languages Act anyone). They have chosen to implement all new projects using OSS as much as possible as they don't have a big budget. Most of the servers are now running OpenSUSE so they could get a service contract from Novell. Oracle (on Linux) is the standard database but a number of newer applications are using MySQL. Most of the conversion work is being done by contractors who have years of experience writing in OSS languages such as PHP. I am in Ottawa and there is no shortage of developers who have used OSS in the past because most of them used OSS as part of their CS diploma or degree in college or university. This includes recent immigrants as well as Canadian educated people. So if OSS is such a niche why are some many people so well versed in it?

I am not claiming that OSS is superior to proprietary software but to state that OSS is not ready for prime time suggests that you are either ignorant, a zealot or a liar.

And it's all about choice :)

For the vast majority of computer/net users, Open Source software is good enough (web browsing, email, word processing). Running those on Linux however, might be a problem but I've heard good things about Ubuntu's user-friendliness. The question maybe is how easy is it to find a computer with Ubuntu preinstalled and how many friends will you have that'll be able to help if you have problems.

I use Windows because so many engineering-related programs need it, but I also use a Mac as a backup/travel machine and there's only one Mac application that I can't find on Windows.

And I've had my share of frustration with BSODs and refusing to boot for days on end.

A small collection of OSS is ready, and used widely. Apache, PHP, Moodle, Drupal, DNS, SSH, Mail servers, ipchains, etc.

That still doesn't discount the fact that most OSS is bug riddled crap that will probably never see a major, fully featured release.

When deciding between a piece of commercial software, and OSS, ask yourself, if the commercial equivalent had no purchase price, would I really be considering the GPL alternative?

In some cases, the answer is yes. In most cases though, when you take purchase price out of the picture, the commercial product wins.

There's a reason for that. Good software development doesn't generally happen for free. If you don't mind accepting crappy code, or waiting forever, and incomplete feature sets, go open source.

Thankfully, Novell, IBM, Redhat, and others are pumping millions of dollars into Linux/OS development. That means we'll see more good OSS in the future.

The Open Source model however, isn't superior in & of itself to commercially developed software.

OMMAG, I'm sorry, you're wrong about not being able to move an enterprise to OSS. I don't come by my arrogance from simply dabbling in OSS. I moved our company.

Two of three remote plants are Linux thin client based infrastructure. In those two we're looking at about 35 Linux stations, 7 Windows. In the third site about a third of fifty are Linux thins.

Each site has one server providing at minimum printing, DNS, LDAP, file sharing (SMB and NFS), X, Gnome, and authentication.

One sites MIS backend is Oracle on Linux. We access the Windows MIS apps via remote desktop to Terminal Server and run the apps from any client. (Mac/Linux/Windows). The other MIS is terminal based HP Unix.

It's all a big WAN with Samba and NFS tying the file systems together. Master/slave relationships with Samba, DNS and LDAP provides secure, network degradable authentication on all systems.

CUPS provides network accessible printing. Even local "personal" printers use an installed Linux with CUPS but the GUI is just another thin to the X servers.

Email is all OSS: postfix, clamav, spamassassin, LDAP, IMAP, POP, Webmail.

Obviously some areas require proprietary soft/hardware and it would be stupid of me to try and advocate for an OSS solution there.

Four big-assed servers (including mail), a great stack and good cabling to handle the traffic and Bob's your uncle.

This is and has been an ongoing project initiated and sold by me to the company. They haven't changed back, I haven't been tossed out on my kiester, indeed we're looking at more Linux and Macs. Why? Because they work.

Yes there are problems, yes people find some things different, but in the end it just works.

The single biggest hurdle to this project has been change resistance and that is as bad with Vista/new MS Office as Linux and OpenOffice. At least with Linux we aren't paying for the experience.

Cheers,
lance

The notion that open source costs more is utter BS.

We use plenty of open source software where I work, and we have saved a bundle of money over MS products, and those savings cover TOTAL IT costs.

It's amazing how well the MS propaganda sinks into the minds of those who have drunk the MS Kool Aid.

So these three contractors and an engineer are discussing bridges. The first contractor thinks wood is better for bridges. The second contractor thinks stone is better for bridges. The third contractor thinks steel is better for bridges. The engineer says: it depends on the bridge.

I like that OpenOffice works on Mac now... without added effort.

It just works.

Is it Brasil that announced awhile back they were moving to open source software? They'll be a contender in the upcoming years.

The reason that MS wins in most work environments is that if something f*cks up, the blame can be squarely placed on the vendor ("after all, it's paid-for, so eff ups cannot be my fault").

With OSS, you're screwed if something goes wrong because you left the fold of sheep.

If all Windows systems in the world crash horribly tomorrow there is solace in the knowledge that everyone else is in the same boat.

Except for the Linux people, who will probably be too involved in a Emacs vs. vi war to even notice something's wrong.

Marc, doesn't OpenOffice still need X11 to run? Supposedly NeoOffice (an offshoot of OO.org) doesn't.

PiperPaul,
that was one of a few reasons I didn't use OpenOffice prior to release 3.0
I do not have X11 on my Mac, it is not required.

I receive email and attachments from a few people in non first world countries. Generally none of them use (or has paid for!) Microsoft products. Not so much that they "don't like" Microsoft, I think it's more a case of other things being more of a priority for their hard earned dinero...

Did they intentionally make their logo look like the shooter's view of a rifle's target sight?

Good Lord, it's like a Star Wars convention here!

I use both open source (OpenOffice, FireFox, etc.) and proprietary software, mostly at home, but also at the office (a municipal government).

I am the primary buyer for technology products and software for our city and I can tell you that three major issues prevent any rapid movement toward open source software:

1. Governments already have huge investments in all kinds of proprietary stuff, including applications few ordinary people are familiar with, such as building maintenance, traffic light control, sign and street marking programs, and so on. Many of these apps will work only in an MS or other proprietary environment, although more and more of them are becoming Linux compatible. Things are moving, but slowly.

2. Our IT staff has no TIME to investigate alternatives and to plan transitions. There are some procurement issues, as well, but the primary problem is a lack of personnel. Staffing has been barely adequate for years, due mostly to misplaced parsimony and a poorly managed consolidation of services.

3. General conservatism. No matter what a government entity does, someone is going to complain, especially if that action involves a change that few people really understand.

I believe the move to open source is underway and inevitable, but it won't be fast and it will seldom look elegant.

Jim

...ok my three cents.

I use all three, Windows/mac/Suse (in that order, but not so much Suse) - reality is that 90% of the machines in the WORLD are Microsoft based. There must be a reason for it. Say what you want, but the numbers are still there.

All programs have their good points as well all programs suck.

Problems I see with Linux are:

1. Corporate Image - the stereotypical picture of a Linux admin/user to a majority of people/managers/decision makers is not very conducive to growth.

2. Fragmentation - ask 100 Linux prop-heads which distro is best for your office and get 101 answers.

3. Versions - everyone knocks Windows for the different versions, but how many are there for say just SUSE, in the past 10 years?

4. Training and Trainers. Not too many classes being offered, or instructors running around at the moment. Is Linux that easy to learn that these training facility and folks are not offering it full time?

-------------------

Apple won't make it because it is a cult. Period. The world is more than funny ads and young 'metro' sales/knowledge advisor's.

It is still clunky in interface, unable to rename mapped drives, restrictive usage for left handers, and closing a program doesn't really mean closing a program.

And all that hardware you bought for your other machines are now useless. Meaning non-swappable.

--------------------

Open Office? Egad, I feel like I'm back in early 90's or stuck in some Microsoft Works 3.0 vortex.

People like shiny things and Office 2007 is just that. Pain in the butt to learn, switch over to, but shiny to look at when working with it.

...oh by the way, I hope FACIL wins too.

Oh man, jgriffin, bravo! That is exactly what is going through my mind and I could not articulate it. The fact of the matter is that large portions of the world are built on solid OSS products as you said. Microsoft does have a decent market share of the server market, but in general Microsoft caters to the desktop and enterprise environments. The reason why no one wants to leave them is because of lock in. Lock in is a strategy that keeps people from adopting new technologies because the opportunity cost of moving technologies is too high. Linux might be a better experience overall for your users, but if the cost to change over from Windows is too high, it won't matter how good Linux is.

Now, Microsoft spends a great deal of time trying to bring about scenario's such as this by making things proprietary in their systems. Their entire philosophy is to keep people tied to their products in whatever manner necessary so that their users will have an incredibly difficult time (and a very high opportunity cost) switching over to a new system.

On the other hand you have OSS, whose values at it's core is interoperability. They want users to be unrestricted in how they manage and use their data, from any and all platforms. You can EASILY run Linux desktops and just set up a virtual machine of a Windows box. Any specific Windows work you want to do can be done completely from your Linux desktop. You're losing NO functionality, merely gaining it.

What I simply don't understand is why people are so willing to go through the pain of upgrading to the next version of Windows instead of just switching over to Linux. I worked at a Potash mine doing IT while they transitioned from NT to XP. All the programs the Engineer's used were at least a decade old and had been jury rigged to work on NT. They did not work on XP. As a result, the Engineer's simply refused to upgrade to NT, causing all sorts of headaches. The companies who had written the software were gone or didn't support the product anymore.

Now, had this been OSS, you would have had access to the source code. You could have downloaded it, updated it for XP or re-written it in another language, and your problems would have been solved. But instead you're stuck paying hundreds of dollars for programs from unique software companies who have gone out of business.

As a final thought as well, tons and tons and tons of software businesses who are for-profit build their products on OSS solutions like the Linux kernel. ALL telecom hardware that has embedded systems runs the Linux kernel. ALL OF THEM. I simply believe that people are un-informed about OSS, and that as the Linux OS improves and gets more user friendly, it will only gain more users.

Open source...who do you sue when the software f**king explodes?

The question here is why Quebec government refused to open tenders?

btw....I am happy Linux user and in last year and half I've managed to convinced a dozen of my friends to install on desktop at home. First with dual boot, then they stopped using Windows for anything else then games. One friend made as far as using Gimpshop in the course of work. For ladies: Kubuntu and for gentelmen: Ubuntu......oh yeah...I know....that's a start of a another fashion flame:))

The question here is why Quebec government refused to open tenders?

btw....I am happy Linux user and in last year and half I've managed to convinced a dozen of my friends to install on desktop at home. First with dual boot, then they stopped using Windows for anything else then games. One friend made as far as using Gimpshop in the course of work. For ladies: Kubuntu and for gentlemen: Ubuntu......oh yeah...I know....that's a start of a another fashion flame:))

"I think someone has not bothered to look at the source code in a number of open source projects."

As someone who does PC repair and technical training for a living, I'll be honest and say that I'm happy that most people run MS software. Because if people ran MacOS (a pretty GUI on top of FreeBSD underpinnings) or Linux, I'd have to find a new meal ticket.

It's become rather noticeable that my Mac and Linux customers NEVER need me for anything OS related whereas, Windows users have to see me regularly to have me fix the latest problems that have been visited upon them by shoddy Microsoft engineering.

MS software is a big festering open wound so far as catching the latest infections making the rounds and Vista turns out to be no better than XP. Anyone who thinks they know different needs to spend a week in my shop seeing the messes I have to clean up.

So... Thank you MS for producing such rotten software. It's good for my bank account. For my customers, not so much.

Now, did anyone want to discuss lower Total Cost of Ownership? (TCO) Anyone? Bueller?

"There are _no_ Linux viruses that have survived outside of a controlled lab (read: compromised and customized systems). Period. To say otherwise is just FUD."

There are certainly viruses that attack components commonly installed on Linux desktops and servers. For example, Slapper slipped in through a nice hole in OpenSSL and Lion, which attacked BIND and made such a hash of the server that a complete rebuild was the only rational choice.

Keeping your software up-to-date closes a lot of these loopholes, but much of this is true for the MS world as well. To say that OSS is bulletproof is ingenious. There are plenty of security holes in OSS code waiting to be discovered, and as OSS market share grows, they will be.

The strength of the OSS movement is in how quickly the community responds to the problems and issues patches. ActiveX scripting was a problem with MIE for HOW LONG before some proactive security was finally rolled into Windows Vista?

And of course, a VD clinic should be using open sore software...

"I worked at a Potash mine doing IT while they transitioned from NT to XP. All the programs the Engineer's used were at least a decade old and had been jury rigged to work on NT. They did not work on XP. As a result, the Engineer's simply refused to upgrade to NT, causing all sorts of headaches. The companies who had written the software were gone or didn't support the product anymore."

bar_jebus - I've also seen this happen before and its a IT support problem, not a software problem and happens when the IT people get lazy and don't do the proper upgrades when required.

Adune: Everything you said outside of HDTV was probably true. However blaming free software developers for their lack of support of a platform that was designed from the ground up to exclude them is just unfair. HDTV/HDMI/DRM is a hardware problem for not just free software, but any kind of interoperability, between proprietary systems or not.

Tuco: Whoever you buy support from? There are companies, such as RedHat who sell the kinds of support that governments, such as the Quebec government, require. It's usually cheaper than microsoft and there's much more control over what your product does. If Microsoft has a bug(say, a critical security bug, happens quite often) you pretty much have to rely on microsoft to fix it---and even companies like GE have trouble getting support on their tickets. But if you have the source you can contract the issue out to local talent, usually narrow the problem down and fix it---and, here's the important part---sell the fix or whatever to recoup the costs of making it in the first place, if there's anyone else who runs into the problem. The point here is that the fixes occur near where they happen--there isn't a divide of interests between the people *effected* by bugs and the people who *fix* the bugs. It's as close as it needs to be.

Free the software and let the market do its thing.

People who would tell you that OSS costs more, are the same people who would try to sell snow to an Eskimo, as the saying goes.

I hope the lawsuit works, because this has been a major failing of Canada's schools and governments for at least the last decade. The rest of the world (minus the USA) has been getting ahead of us, as usual.

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L.J. That doesn't sound right. When the developing company is gone, you either rebuild (you don't have the code), or you hire programmers (with OSS).

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There's something so strange about SDA advocating for such a socialist concept like OSS. It's no wonder Lance has met with so much opposition in the comments.

SaskBoy:

1) this is in Quebec. They have their own legal standards and there's no sense trying to make sense of it, and making recommendations without a deep understanding of their legal history? Probably pretty shaky ground.

2) Free Software is about as far away from socialist as you can get. It's designed to augment and be a core component of free market capitalism -- it's Microsoft and their 'let the state-sanctioned monopolistic bureaucracy worry about it' approach that is anti-capitalism. Even richard stallman, who's a hippy in every other respect, made sure to stay neutral on this issue.

Also most of the people posting in response to lance seem to not be opposing him so much as telling the other side of the story...I see no reason why they almost all can't be right(lance: linux has low TCO compared to vista, others: but there are issues X Y Z). Vista is a disaster, and doesn't even look as polished as some of the stuff in the new ubuntu.