7 ms·
IRS misses XP deadline, pays Microsoft millions for patches
- PeterisP 13y agoAnd so, XP support still lives on. Actually, at $200 per computer per year, it has the potential to be quite a lucrative support, so it'll continue as long as there's demand.
- higherpurpose 13y agoIt's okay. It's only tax payer money. They're not paying it out of their pockets.
- Vivtek 13y agoSure. Everybody knows that federal employees are exempt from taxation.
- VMG 13y agoObviously they are not, but they pay the same amount of taxes regardless how large their spending is. It's a concept so basic I'm stunned that anybody would be so bold to write a sarcastic comment about it.
- mjolk 13y agoWhile the snark is amusing, there's a big difference between running a business with a hard budget and always being able to borrow or demand more money.
- Amezarak 13y agoThe _government_ might not have a "hard" budget, as you mean it, but you can bet the IRS does. Congress decides what they get, and you can be sure it's barely enough to keep running as-is, let alone enough to put into future investments like say, an upgraded IT infrastructure, which then necessitates emergency measures like paying MS for XP support. Work with government long enough and you'll find the majority of "waste" comes not from spendthrift government layabouts, but insane auditing and transparency requirements (which require oodles of paperwork and three people to review it to make sure you're not wasting taxpayer money), hamstrung budgets (renting the same building at exorbitant rates because Congress will give you the money for that, but not to buy it outright, which would be far cheaper; paying for continued XP support because you couldn't get the funding for an upgrade), hiring contractors for decades-long jobs, and a legion of other controls in place to save us from government excess. I'm by no means saying that we should let them run around doing whatever they want, damn the cost, but keep in mind that auditing and transparency have a cost, and we need to look at what's cheaper in the long run and not just in the short term.
- mjolk 13y ago>Congress decides what they get, and you can be sure it's barely enough to keep running as-is, let alone enough to put into future investments like say, an upgraded IT infrastructure, which then necessitates emergency measures like paying MS for XP support...I'm by no means saying that we should let them run around doing whatever they want, damn the cost, but keep in mind that auditing and transparency have a cost, and we need to look at what's cheaper in the long run and not just in the short term. I sincerely doubt that the IRS, a revenue department, is running efficiently and is underfunded. I did a cursory search to see if I'm making up crazy claims and it seems like the lack of funding is largely self-reported.[1] I sincerely believe that this is due to a lack of planning and just 'kicking the ball down the field.' Why go through all the annoying conversations about upgrades when you're going to retire or leave before it matters? Microsoft first set the end of support for 2011. As a nod to their massive XP user-base, they pushed EOS to 2014. You're suggesting that the IRS is rational in paying for emergency patches to something that they received a 3 year extension on? Windows 7 was released EOY 2009 -- it's not as if they were stuck for lack of options. This is crap planning and I really doubt that consequences exist. [1] http://www.taxpayeradvocate.irs.gov/2012-Annual-Report/irs-funding/ http://www.taxpayeradvocate.irs.gov/2012-Annual-Report/irs-f... (side note: I like the "automation is bad, boo" bullet-point)
- Vivtek 13y agoYou've obviously never worked at a large corporation.
- wayne_h 13y agopaid for with taxpayer money - so it should be made public. we own those patches!
- justinsb 13y agoAlternatively, Windows 7 / 8 is such a disaster that the IRS is paying a few million dollars (out of their 10 billion dollar budget) to stick with something that works. To me, that seems like a very prudent decision.
- xtc 13y agoI think Windows 7 is quite solid. What's wrong with it?
- justinsb 13y agoAh - I meant the collective "Windows 7 & 8". Windows 7 is fine, but has already been replaced by Windows 8, so why not Windows 8? Windows 8 introduced Metro, which is hated and not really an option for the enterprise, so 8.1 has sort of removed it (but not fully). And Windows 7 support ends in 2020. In short, it's not a confidence-inspiring roadmap, and I think waiting a year is a valid choice.
- ugexe 13y agoWindows 7 (and Vista) won't run on PCs without ACPI support in the bios. I don't know how prevalent these old PCs are in the government setting but its certainly affected some POS systems for some businesses.
- zanny 13y ago1. Size. Standard install takes up almost 20GB of hard drive space. Fresh Lubuntu, Crunchbang, or Debian takes up a gigabyte. 2. Backdoor prone black box. Something like Windows - buy licenses, get support from a 3rd party, be ignorant about product itself due to withheld software freedoms - works for the small to medium business. When you are federal scale, it makes no sense to spend tens or hundreds of millions in MS tax when you could, for a fraction of the price with a small dev team, maintain your own Linux fork. And while the IRS is on the "same side" as the NSA, who puts back doors in Windows, it should be hard to sleep at night knowing Microsoft could be bought off like that, and that China might do the same. Unless they get special source access to inspect it, at that scale they might. 3. No package management. For enterprise deployments, I've dealt with enough small businesses who just sit on half a decade old Firefox or Chrome because they can't enable the auto updater and didn't set up an Active Directory applications server. So the middle road is just having your own package repository of updates with all the machines synced to it pushing whatever new stuff you want available automatically. And you could also throw in that a GNU/Linux distros modularity makes it much more reasonable to deploy to servers, embedded devices, and desktops at once with one maintenance crew. And if the IRS is running Windows Server.... taxpayer dollars at work, all right.
- afarrell 13y agoThe federal government hasn't had a budget for four years until less than a month ago[0]. Up until then, our government was funded with a variety of appropriations bills as stop-gap measures. When a large organization doesn't have a budget, how do they make long-term investments in their IT infrastructure? So, the IRS can't very well execute a major migration when they don't have a budget and they aren't going to do so a few weeks before April 15th. Yes, this is wasteful, but what else could the IRS have done without approval from congress? [0] http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/23/us-usa-fiscal-budget-idUSBRE92M02D20130323 http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/23/us-usa-fiscal-budg...
- wslh 13y agobut what else could the IRS have done without approval from congress? Patching the security issues themselves? I know this can be complex in many cases but the security and reverse engineering community have this knowledge, probably not fixing the whole issue but at least blocking it. I've wrote an article about doing this here: http://blog.nektra.com/main/2013/08/07/using-deviare-to-create-a-temporary-zero-day-patch/ http://blog.nektra.com/main/2013/08/07/using-deviare-to-crea... last year.
- yeukhon 13y agoOfficial patches are more trustworthy in the enterprise and public service world. Whether those patches are better or worse is up for another debate. You wouldn't want someone downloading random patches off the Internet or hiring a non-MS employee to make a patch without hiring multiple people to verify the integrity and usefulness of the patch (think backdoor) to fix computers handling your tax information. Do you? I wouldn't. You wouldn't download a random patch for heartbleed until openssl releases the official notice and patch. Or you won't download because you want the fix from your distro vendor.
- wslh 13y agoDo you? Yes. At the end it's all about trust. With a good community making hotpatches, and explaining their fixes I will install them.
- wyager 13y agoWhat are the reasons for the government not to switch to linux? I'm not trying to be snarky; it really seems like there are a huge number of benefits and very few downsides. I understand that the government has a contract with MS, but it seems like it might actually be costing the government more to take advantage of the contract.
- Igglyboo 13y agoI think it would be great for them to switch but I can think of 2 huge reasons they wouldn't. 1. Retraining the users, very few people use linux so it would be a massive undertaking to retrain their thousands of mostly non-technical workers to use a new, unfamiliar, operating systems. 2. Microsoft Office. Say what you want about LibreOffice and OpenOffice but when it comes to enterprise grade software MS Office is unrivalved, especially concerning Excel.
- awda 13y ago3. And whatever other IRS-focused enterprise software they may be running, probably runs on the Windows platform. Side note: Maybe this gets better in 10 years when lots of things have been written on the managed CLR? Although I don't think the challenge Wine has is running the C++ programs, but implementing all of the stubbed out APIs correctly... the same challenge exists with a C# interface.
- piyush_soni 13y ago4. As good as Ubuntu's latest version and its UI may be right now, anything other than basic stuff you want to do requires command prompt. Normal users who are not geeks can't imagine themselves doing that on a daily basis.
- touristtam 13y agoStill wondering how they even go by doing their job on a computer. If you ever worked in a support role, you'd know that no matter how many years of experience they have, they are most likely being confused by the UI change every time MSFT decide to be 'cool' and 'innovate' (See the ribbon style introduction back in 2007). And this is without the regular nagging of them not wanting to learn where are the options they want to modify, despite the menus and sub menus. With regards to MS Office and MS mail client, sure they are more polished, but does that really matter? Are those people crafting an art piece every time they want to add an image to their report? Just an honest question.
- atmosx 13y agoNow I wonder, considering the financial and other non accountable damage at this point, John Koskinen should or should not be sacked? From 2008 to 2014 it's a long time for any migration to take place. Six years? They could have migrated to OpenVMS and have a team write custom software for them in six years for Christ's sake!
- pjzedalis 13y agoHe's only been in charge a few months...
- atmosx 13y agoSorry, I didn't knew that... My bad.
- massysett 13y agoYeah, given unlimited appropriations and manpower I'm sure the IRS could have gone to the moon in six years, too. But since the IRS is like every other federal agency, it operates with limited budget authority and, therefore, it needs to choose its priorities.
- na85 13y agoGood god, why do these agencies not run on Linux or BSD? Think of the money that could be saved. How is this a responsible use of taxpayer money?
- Igglyboo 13y agoI think it would be great for them to switch but I can think of 2 huge reasons they wouldn't. 1. Retraining the users, very few people use linux so it would be a massive undertaking to retrain their thousands of mostly non-technical workers to use a new, unfamiliar, operating systems. 2. Microsoft Office. Say what you want about LibreOffice and OpenOffice but when it comes to enterprise grade software MS Office is unrivalved, especially concerning Excel. It would be much more expensive in terms of hours lost to make the switch.
- zanny 13y agoIt would cost them a tenth of this XP license nonsense to fix whatever makes LibreOffice or Calligra "not enterprise grade enough" for them. And they are switching to 7. Inherently, they have the retraining costs already, and Lubuntu or Zorin is much more linear a change than going from no-search no-dock quicklaunch to Windows 7.
- Jtsummers 13y agoThe government, for various reasons, is not really in a position to direct their employees to fix LibreOffice to make it suitable for them. They also aren't in a position to offer a grant to some organizations/individuals to do the work. They need something that exists at this moment. If free software proponents (myself included) want the situation to change, then we have to improve the status of free software in the enterprise (either by improving its image if the software is ready, or improving the software if it's not). EDIT: Also, retraining to Windows 7 is not really an issue. The issues with going to * nix are numerous. Non-COTS applications that'd need to be ported/recreated. Email infrastructure (what's the state of support for MS Exchange in the * nix world? That is, any applications that integrate as well with Exchange servers as Outlook?). I forgot about the server side in my other post. So much is running on Windows servers. SharePoint has become the de facto document sharing system, this is nicely integrated with MS Office, any * nix equivalent? Exchange is their email server, but does far more than just email - keeping contacts up to date, calendars, shared/group inboxes. Is there a singular application that can replace Outlook in the * nix world? Would they have to switch to 4 or 5 applications to do what one application did before? Will they play well with each other and properly share information (that is, if I create a calendar event in the calendar app will it be integrated well enough with the mail app to let participants now, and then re-sync later on once they've replied? I've never tried to do that in the Linux world, what applications support this?). EDIT AGAIN: Anyone know how to insert a * next to a word without triggering italics? * <space> nix just doesn't flow right.
- paul_f 13y agoThis isn't all bad news. The money to pay support and new machines will come from their "enforcement" budget. That's a win for taxpayers.
- DangerousPie 13y agoSounds more like it is a win for non-taxpayers, doesn't it?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- anonymfus 13y agoWhat is "enforcement" budget?
- MichaelApproved 13y agoThe department that enforces correct payments. Audits.
- rolfvandekrol 13y agoThe Dutch government also failed to complete the transition from XP to more recent versions of Windows on time. First the national government negotiated a deal with Microsoft for continued support of Windows XP (http://nos.nl/artikel/631811-rijk-betaalt-miljoenen-voor-xp.html http://nos.nl/artikel/631811-rijk-betaalt-miljoenen-voor-xp....), then even the five largest municipalities negotiated a deal (http://nos.nl/artikel/633985-gemeentelijke-deal-met-microsoft.html http://nos.nl/artikel/633985-gemeentelijke-deal-met-microsof...) that allows other municipalities and provinces to join.
- sadfnjksdf 13y agoI wonder what retail companies are doing about all of their POS (point-of-sale) computers running XP.
- antsam 13y agoI believe we're doing the same thing here at the Government of Canada.
- quackerhacker 13y agoNow...I'm not sure if a $30 million cost would be considered a tax write-off, esp when it's the IRS, or will it just fall under their whoopsie daisy category on their annual budget (kinda like their failed Star Trek YouTube ad campaigns). While I understand write offs when it comes to a business for costs of doing business, there are FREE alternatives (like ubuntu) that the IRS could use. I'm not anti-Microsoft (in fact I'm deving an app for windows phone right now), but seems to me that whoever is managing the IRS' budget are idiots, and their decisions really need to be audited.
- coherentpony 13y agoCan someone explain how this is tech or startup related? It feels like a, "Haha, look! The IRS missed their deadline just like I miss my tax deadline every year!" Edit: That reminds me, I need to do my taxes.
- valleyer 13y agoDid you miss the part about Microsoft and Windows XP patches?
- feefie 13y agoSince the government has paid for the additional patches to be created, can Microsoft please send them out to everyone running XP that can't afford to buy a new computer?