
No more desktop Linux systems in the German Foreign Office - bjonathan
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/No-more-desktop-Linux-systems-in-the-German-Foreign-Office-1191122.html
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rm-rf
One factor likely at play here is the low cost of licensing MS products under
the enterprise/volume licensing agreements. Where I'm at it's costing well
under $100/person/year to license Windows, Office, Exchange, SharePoint and a
few other odds & ends. IIRC, for just under $50/person/year, we get Windows &
the basic Office suite, add another $10/person/year to get client access
licenses for Exchange & SharePoint; add another $10 for Visio, Project...

It's hard to carry the FOSS banner at that price.

~~~
mkr-hn
I've never had a good sense of why people are so desperate for Linux to take
Windows' desktop market share. Linux already clobbered Windows on the server,
and probably will in perpetuity because of its momentum, price, and developer
support. It's a good place for Linux. No one can legitimately call open source
unviable at this point.

I can understand it from an ideological perspective, but many of the people I
see talking about it aren't ideologues.

~~~
kenjackson
I actually don't think Linux is clobbering Windows on the server. Here's a
year old story, but I doubt things have changed much in a year:
[http://blogs.computerworld.com/15675/idc_windows_dominates_l...](http://blogs.computerworld.com/15675/idc_windows_dominates_linux_in_servers_not_just_the_desktop)

With that said, I do think Linux is clobbering Windows on mobile devices.

~~~
cabalamat
I call bullshit on IDC's figures. If you take public-facing websites --
something that can be checked -- MS has a 20% market share[1]. Some of these
are multiple sites on one server, and some are multiple servers on one site,
which probably cancel each other out so c.286M sites is roughly the same
number of servers.

By contrast, IDC's figures are for a total of less than 2M servers sold per
quarter. If each server lasts for 5 years, that means there are a total of 40M
in use worldwide, which is way too low.

1\.
[http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2011/02/15/february-2011-w...](http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2011/02/15/february-2011-web-
server-survey.html)

~~~
kenjackson
I don't see Linux share on that? I ask because we use Apache on WS08. I'm sure
we're not the common case, but it would be useful to know if Apache==99% Linux
or 75% Linux.

~~~
cabalamat
I don't have figures either. I would guess that Linux' share of apache
deployments is >75% but less than 99%.

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stcredzero
Word and Excel. For non technical users, you need at least these two. If Open
Source is serious about the desktop, interoperability with these two
applications is job one.

EDIT: Some company should create a bounty for developing and implementing a
process for achieving and maintaining 100% Microsoft Word compatibility for
year. You'd have to put up a million dollars for something like that, but it
would be worth it.

~~~
neutronicus
Don't forget Outlook/Exchange - the scheduling capabilities are awesome. I
could figure out when the people I wanted to meet with were free, find out
what rooms were free, invite the people I wanted to meet with (and then see
whether they RSVP'd), and reserve the meeting room for a desired time slot,
all through Outlook. I don't really know of an open source solution that does
this quite so well.

~~~
RockyMcNuts
And spend days trying to explain to people how to not screw invites up on
their Blackberries and then have fits that their meeting vanished.

People don't understand that they have to manage their calendars and that
meeting requests are a convenience feature. They think there's a central
calendar and everything gets updated automatically.

Have fun when the CEO misses an important call or meeting from his calendar.
This stuff is like crack, it makes people think it's easy and magical, but
it's a support nightmare.

[http://blogs.technet.com/b/outlooking/archive/2010/03/29/som...](http://blogs.technet.com/b/outlooking/archive/2010/03/29/some-
best-practices-when-working-with-outlook-calendar.aspx)

~~~
neutronicus
All I can say is that, where I worked, it was easy and magical and I never had
a problem.

Obviously your mileage varied.

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moeffju
For those who can read German or use Google Translate, here's the original
article: [http://www.oliver-kaczmarek.de/2011/02/bundesregierung-
zemen...](http://www.oliver-kaczmarek.de/2011/02/bundesregierung-zementiert-
mit-software-umstellung-im-auswartigen-amt-monopolstellung-eines-anbieters/)

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nivertech
1\. I have a feeling, that even if MSFT will open-source all their SW products
- people still will be complaining ;)

2\. Office is de-facto industry standard. The only way to beat it is to
innovate into new paradigms, i.e. something like Prezi vs. PowerPoint. Or if
somebody will find new better way to do electronic tables - they will beat
Excel, etc.

3\. How can one expect to make open-source desktop better, when most open-
source hackers using proprietary Macs with OSX?

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pwelch
I'm a huge fan of Linux and want to see it succeed but it still has a ways to
go for the enterprise desktop market. The one biggest problem is Microsoft
Office. I use OpenOffice on Linux and iWorks/NeoOffice on Mac often but I
still find myself using Microsoft Office or Visio when I have a lot of work to
do. There are just so many things that can be done quickly in Word or more
advanced in Excel that I have yet to find in the other options despite all my
googling. Regards of how you feel about Windows, IMHO Microsoft still has the
edge when it comes to Office Suites.

~~~
trezor
_The one biggest problem is Microsoft Office._

I'd say Microsoft Office, everything else Microsoft which integrates
seamlessly and most of all Active Directory. Getting anything equivalent to
Active Directory up on Linux is an absolute nightmare, or at least so it was
last time I tried. Making something as basic as making a Linux machine join a
domain and authenticate against the DC work cost me a full weekend, and yet in
the end I just had to give up.

That's really not a user- nor computer-management strategy that scales.

~~~
munchhausen
> Getting anything equivalent to Active Directory up on Linux is an absolute
> nightmare, or at least so it was last time I tried. Making something as
> basic as making a Linux machine join a domain and authenticate against the
> DC work cost me a full weekend, and yet in the end I just had to give up.

I feel that your account of making a Linux machine play nicely with AD
deserves a 'YMMV' addendum. In my experience it is not common that this should
be so difficult to implement with a reasonably up-to-date Linux system. It
also doesn't hurt to use a distribution that has undergone testing for this
usage scenario, which is definitely true for the "enterprise" distros - both
RHEL and SLES should give you very little trouble when it comes to joining a
domain and authenticating against AD. It is indeed mostly a "just works" type
of thing in the majority of cases.

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buster
I am wondering what hardware they use that they have do develop printer and
scanner drivers..

~~~
Roritharr
They have specialised scanners that allow them to scan passport booklets and
other special formfactors without the need of manualy opening and lying them
down on the scanner.

The german Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Archives has special setups that
allow them to enter bags of torn apart papers to scan... so i wouldn't wonder
if they really need to write special drivers for their hardware.

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beagle3
"Savings were limited" but they decline to say how much. Also "Users
complained of compatibility problems" -- all the more reason to switch; a
proof of the MS lock in.

I wonder if they write something like "We were only able to save
$5K/year/person, but we didn't want to inconvenience our workers for such a
paltry sum", what the response would have been. I can assure you it is very
far from the $100/year licensing that people mentioned in other threads. If
that were the case, no one would switch on one hand, and Microsoft wouldn't be
the behemoth that it is today on the other.

It's $100/year/person for their desktop software, + tens to hundreds of
thousands for the server software that goes with it (to microsoft), plus a
$2000/year/person for lost time due to viruses, spam, and being able to play
WoW on their work computer, plus $2000/year/person when you look at the
administration cost -- windows shops everywhere I've seen have a much lower
admin/user ratio (e.g. 1 in 10 or 1 in 20) compared to unix/linux (1 in 50 or
1 in 100), and even more so when the end users are doing just word
processing+spreadsheet work.

Also, what the hell were they doing writing printer drivers? I've been using
linux on the desktop since 2005, and didn't have to install a printer driver
once.

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bnastic
Lesson on how not to perform due diligence?

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mikerg87
ouch.

I almost bet we wont see this posted on slashdot....

~~~
angus77
It's there now.

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berntb
Why does an administrative office write device drivers instead of buying
printers etc with Linux support?

Is there a missing capability in the Linux supported hardware, somewhere?

~~~
mkr-hn
Can't get a passport scanner at Office Depot.

