5 ms·

Good 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?

by na85 13y ago

Igglyboo 13y ago
I 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 ago
  It 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 ago
    The 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.
    - Igglyboo 13y ago
      Addressing the Exchange part, no they're really aren't any good nix applications capable of using exchange. Thunderbird can do it with a plugin but you aren't getting contacts or calendars and you'll only get email if the guy who setup the exchange server allows IMAP.
    - piyush_soni 13y ago
      I tried the HTML code for asterisk before 'nix': * but it seems it doesn't process them. Too bad, might be a bug.
  - mpyne 13y ago
    LibreOffice and Calligra are not the only thing stopping the switch. For instance, smartcard support is big within the government, and while it can be done with enough effort on Linux, paying for "enough effort" would make the switch impractical almost by itself. And it's not as if KDE 4 (or God forbid, GNOME 3) is so similar to Windows XP as to minimize retraining costs.
    - zanny 13y ago
      http://i.imgur.com/ipHo50B.png http://i.imgur.com/ipHo50B.png I just booted a live Kubuntu and just switched the launcher, removed the activities / show desktop / virtual switcher widgets, switched the desktop from widget to folder mode, and added a quicklaunch widget. Looks and feels exactly like XP at that point. The only exception would be the file manager. And it is not like you wouldn't be deploying custom images to all your machines - you could tweak all the theming to use MS Windows styles. Hell, some people even got KDE looking like 7 years ago: http://www.lirent.net/2009/05/windows-7-transformation-pack-for-linux/ http://www.lirent.net/2009/05/windows-7-transformation-pack-...
      - mpyne 13y ago
        > Looks and feels exactly like XP at that point. Did you remember to remap Alt-F2 for Krunner (which looks nothing like on XP...) to Win-R? Did you fix the Lock Screen to look exactly like XP? I can tell you as a KDE dev myself that although you can do amazing things regarding look-n-feel, there is still a big difference. Even on things that are not very different between the two, that simply becomes an "uncanny valley".
- na85 13y ago
  Excel is great to be sure, but it's only the really advanced features that LibreOffice Calc is missing. Things like advanced macros or embedded VB scripts. I really doubt that people in most government agencies are using these features. And if they're intelligent enough to use these features, learning to use Unity would not be a huge hurdle.
  - cls59 13y ago
    These things get used all the time --- especially when statistical, economic or engineering analysis is being performed. Also, most users aren't using these features directly, they're using a template created by someone who did know how to use them. Most of what the end user does is punch in this years data and interpret the output. For a specific example: unless LibreOffice or Google Sheets develops a solid equivalent to the Solver add-in, replacing Excel will be a non-starter in any department that deals with Engineering data.
Jtsummers 13y ago
1. Momentum. 2. Custom Windows-only applications 3. Really, really good price on support contracts - which they'd insist on getting if they switched to any *nix. Oracle (formerly Sun), IBM, RedHat (?). Are there any other major players in the OS world that can offer anywhere near the level of support that the government has come to expect? 4. And as Igglyboo said, MS Office. So many workflows in corporate environments depend on that damned suite, it'd be difficult to move away from it at the moment. --- There are many offices that could make the transition. They use all web applications and various office suite tools (Excel, Word, PowerPoint mostly). The other applications they use would be things like Acrobat (but office suites can generate PDFs directly these days) and software to fill out forms (not handled as DOC/DOCX files or PDFs). The latter may be able to transition to signed/fillable PDFs. But these aren't the majority. Too many offices (particularly anything involving project management or inventory management) just depend too much on custom desktop applications that would take too much to port over or rewrite. It's like trying to modernize the avionics systems of an aircraft: in theory it'd be great, in practice your developers will kill themselves.
nivla 13y ago
Because Linux or BSD is not a drop in replacement for Windows XP. It comes at a cost of rewriting their existing working applications and not to mention the time and money required to retrain the existing employees. Does anyone know how good the corporate support is for Linux/BSD distributions? Does it match upto what Microsoft provides? >How is this a responsible use of taxpayer money? The same way the govt decides to purchase Cisco's $25,000 wifi routers for city libraries.
Sanddancer 13y ago
At the scale the IRS is running, a copy of Windows is a few tens of dollars, which is about the cost of the necessary replacement keyboards over the lifespan of the computer. Ongoing patch support, however, is where MS actually shines here. Windows XP had support available for 13 years, with subsequent OSes being supported for 10+ years. In comparison, for OSes with support lengths as long as windows, like RHEL, the per-year support seat costs start at $49, which would lead to support costs of near $500 per seat over that same lifespan. So even with the IRS botching the rollout and needing to pay MS an extra year, they're still cheaper than the few Unix offerings that provide the duration of support MS does.
eitally 13y ago
Because you have to understand the context. For nearly everyone one earth, a computer is a physical tool that exists for the sole purpose of helping them accomplish other tasks. In many cases, the most complex tasks people tackle are those they're being paid to work on. Those people just want a tool that works, that works they way the expect, that is supported and supportable by a vendor and internal IT, and is replaceable with something similar enough that things don't break. Look, I'm a programmer turned engineering manager and I totally get where you're coming from with this comment, but you just don't seem to get how and why things are the way they are. Speaking personally, I managed a project a few years ago to replace MS Office 2003 with Libre Office 4.0 (we actually started with OpenOffice but when Oracle acquired Sun and The Document Foundation was created to house the OO.o fork, we switched out of antipathy for Oracle). The mission was to remove MSO from as many machines as feasible, and the decision of what was feasible was, for the most part, left to me. We managed to convert about 20% of users, and these were composed of about 75% machines that never executed any Office app anyway and about 20% of machines whose users were just consumers of files other people created. Only about 5% of the machines converted belonged to creators. We found that most macros and custom formatting and blahblahblah were fairly straightforward to convert to work in LibreOffice, but the UI/UX was horrific, sometimes things just didn't work, and productivity was adversely affected far beyond the cost of the licenses. We migrated to Gmail and Google Apps from Exchange+Outlook at the same time and saw similar adoption issues with Google Drive ("Docs" at that time -- in 2008). We (I) didn't make the mistake of forcing the issue this time and relied on coercion and organic growth to build the foundation for broad support. Today we are seeing about 1500 Sheets and ~500 Docs & Presentations created weekly (~22,000 users). Most of them still have MS Office on their machine, too. Because, guess what, the right tool for the job is important. (another commenter noted the haphazard and often ridiculous release schedule and evolution of RedHat / Fedora, BSD and Ubuntu over the past ten years or so. In my company, the Linux guys are mostly on their own to build their own environment because it became too unpleasant for corporate IT to create and maintain a standard image that worked well enough for most people most of the time. The devs these days tend to prefer Arch and Ubuntu and the sysadmins often run Fedora (our prod servers are almost always RHEL ... because guess what -- support is kinda important to most companies, especially big ones that aren't technology companies and where internal support is often understaffed and underequipped to DIY everything.) This probably comes off rantier than I had hoped, and for that I apologize. Perhaps I'm just getting to CIO'y in my old age. :(

Good 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?

by na85 13y ago

Good 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 ago

I 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 ago
It 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 ago
  The 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.
  - Igglyboo 13y ago
    Addressing the Exchange part, no they're really aren't any good nix applications capable of using exchange. Thunderbird can do it with a plugin but you aren't getting contacts or calendars and you'll only get email if the guy who setup the exchange server allows IMAP.
  - piyush_soni 13y ago
    I tried the HTML code for asterisk before 'nix': * but it seems it doesn't process them. Too bad, might be a bug.
- mpyne 13y ago
  LibreOffice and Calligra are not the only thing stopping the switch. For instance, smartcard support is big within the government, and while it can be done with enough effort on Linux, paying for "enough effort" would make the switch impractical almost by itself. And it's not as if KDE 4 (or God forbid, GNOME 3) is so similar to Windows XP as to minimize retraining costs.
  - zanny 13y ago
    http://i.imgur.com/ipHo50B.png http://i.imgur.com/ipHo50B.png I just booted a live Kubuntu and just switched the launcher, removed the activities / show desktop / virtual switcher widgets, switched the desktop from widget to folder mode, and added a quicklaunch widget. Looks and feels exactly like XP at that point. The only exception would be the file manager. And it is not like you wouldn't be deploying custom images to all your machines - you could tweak all the theming to use MS Windows styles. Hell, some people even got KDE looking like 7 years ago: http://www.lirent.net/2009/05/windows-7-transformation-pack-for-linux/ http://www.lirent.net/2009/05/windows-7-transformation-pack-...
    - mpyne 13y ago
      > Looks and feels exactly like XP at that point. Did you remember to remap Alt-F2 for Krunner (which looks nothing like on XP...) to Win-R? Did you fix the Lock Screen to look exactly like XP? I can tell you as a KDE dev myself that although you can do amazing things regarding look-n-feel, there is still a big difference. Even on things that are not very different between the two, that simply becomes an "uncanny valley".
na85 13y ago
Excel is great to be sure, but it's only the really advanced features that LibreOffice Calc is missing. Things like advanced macros or embedded VB scripts. I really doubt that people in most government agencies are using these features. And if they're intelligent enough to use these features, learning to use Unity would not be a huge hurdle.
- cls59 13y ago
  These things get used all the time --- especially when statistical, economic or engineering analysis is being performed. Also, most users aren't using these features directly, they're using a template created by someone who did know how to use them. Most of what the end user does is punch in this years data and interpret the output. For a specific example: unless LibreOffice or Google Sheets develops a solid equivalent to the Solver add-in, replacing Excel will be a non-starter in any department that deals with Engineering data.

Jtsummers 13y ago

1. Momentum. 2. Custom Windows-only applications 3. Really, really good price on support contracts - which they'd insist on getting if they switched to any *nix. Oracle (formerly Sun), IBM, RedHat (?). Are there any other major players in the OS world that can offer anywhere near the level of support that the government has come to expect? 4. And as Igglyboo said, MS Office. So many workflows in corporate environments depend on that damned suite, it'd be difficult to move away from it at the moment. --- There are many offices that could make the transition. They use all web applications and various office suite tools (Excel, Word, PowerPoint mostly). The other applications they use would be things like Acrobat (but office suites can generate PDFs directly these days) and software to fill out forms (not handled as DOC/DOCX files or PDFs). The latter may be able to transition to signed/fillable PDFs. But these aren't the majority. Too many offices (particularly anything involving project management or inventory management) just depend too much on custom desktop applications that would take too much to port over or rewrite. It's like trying to modernize the avionics systems of an aircraft: in theory it'd be great, in practice your developers will kill themselves.

nivla 13y ago

Because Linux or BSD is not a drop in replacement for Windows XP. It comes at a cost of rewriting their existing working applications and not to mention the time and money required to retrain the existing employees. Does anyone know how good the corporate support is for Linux/BSD distributions? Does it match upto what Microsoft provides? >How is this a responsible use of taxpayer money? The same way the govt decides to purchase Cisco's $25,000 wifi routers for city libraries.

Sanddancer 13y ago

At the scale the IRS is running, a copy of Windows is a few tens of dollars, which is about the cost of the necessary replacement keyboards over the lifespan of the computer. Ongoing patch support, however, is where MS actually shines here. Windows XP had support available for 13 years, with subsequent OSes being supported for 10+ years. In comparison, for OSes with support lengths as long as windows, like RHEL, the per-year support seat costs start at $49, which would lead to support costs of near $500 per seat over that same lifespan. So even with the IRS botching the rollout and needing to pay MS an extra year, they're still cheaper than the few Unix offerings that provide the duration of support MS does.

eitally 13y ago

Because you have to understand the context. For nearly everyone one earth, a computer is a physical tool that exists for the sole purpose of helping them accomplish other tasks. In many cases, the most complex tasks people tackle are those they're being paid to work on. Those people just want a tool that works, that works they way the expect, that is supported and supportable by a vendor and internal IT, and is replaceable with something similar enough that things don't break. Look, I'm a programmer turned engineering manager and I totally get where you're coming from with this comment, but you just don't seem to get how and why things are the way they are. Speaking personally, I managed a project a few years ago to replace MS Office 2003 with Libre Office 4.0 (we actually started with OpenOffice but when Oracle acquired Sun and The Document Foundation was created to house the OO.o fork, we switched out of antipathy for Oracle). The mission was to remove MSO from as many machines as feasible, and the decision of what was feasible was, for the most part, left to me. We managed to convert about 20% of users, and these were composed of about 75% machines that never executed any Office app anyway and about 20% of machines whose users were just consumers of files other people created. Only about 5% of the machines converted belonged to creators. We found that most macros and custom formatting and blahblahblah were fairly straightforward to convert to work in LibreOffice, but the UI/UX was horrific, sometimes things just didn't work, and productivity was adversely affected far beyond the cost of the licenses. We migrated to Gmail and Google Apps from Exchange+Outlook at the same time and saw similar adoption issues with Google Drive ("Docs" at that time -- in 2008). We (I) didn't make the mistake of forcing the issue this time and relied on coercion and organic growth to build the foundation for broad support. Today we are seeing about 1500 Sheets and ~500 Docs & Presentations created weekly (~22,000 users). Most of them still have MS Office on their machine, too. Because, guess what, the right tool for the job is important. (another commenter noted the haphazard and often ridiculous release schedule and evolution of RedHat / Fedora, BSD and Ubuntu over the past ten years or so. In my company, the Linux guys are mostly on their own to build their own environment because it became too unpleasant for corporate IT to create and maintain a standard image that worked well enough for most people most of the time. The devs these days tend to prefer Arch and Ubuntu and the sysadmins often run Fedora (our prod servers are almost always RHEL ... because guess what -- support is kinda important to most companies, especially big ones that aren't technology companies and where internal support is often understaffed and underequipped to DIY everything.) This probably comes off rantier than I had hoped, and for that I apologize. Perhaps I'm just getting to CIO'y in my old age. :(