South Korean government to switch to Linux: ministry

Not exactly. When the decision to go back to Windows was announced, they were even still running Windows 2000 on some machines. [1]

The initial reason for overhauling their infrastructure was certainly due to the proliferation of outdated software, but the consultancy they hired to evaluate the situation made the more conservative recommendation to update everything to the latest version and let each department choose which operating system to use. (Since they were de facto already doing that, just without a reasonable process.)

That this turned into "100 % Windows, no compromises" was probably due to Microsoft politics, i.e. someone convinced the mayor that Linux was the cause of their infrastructure issues rather than bad infrastructure management.

I bet they still have the same problems, except now they also have a few machines running outdated versions of their homegrown LiMux distribution.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13643182

No. Please don't put words into my mouth.

The problem is that there is no specs / documentation for anything generally. Most of my time in dev has been spent dealing and finding work around for all sorts shitty bugs in applications when dealing with either web browsers or generating documents.

This is partially because of deliberate vendor lock-in and partially due to nobody being given time to actually produce specs as these are often an after thought. Customers don't care about me making proper documentation, even when they do other developers that do integrations DON'T RTFM and I have to guide them through it anyway. Customers don't pay for specs / docs etc, they pay for the product that lets them get shit done.

Fanatics of Open Source (and they are that) always argue about cost of the software, vendor lock in etc. The costs of the software are almost nothing compared to hiring people. I was on a team of 6 people doing a major rewrite (which shouldn't have been happening IMHO) and it cost the business about £500,000 just in staff. Licenses for SQL Server and Windows server was a small percentage of that and were about 1 man months worth of cost. These costs are nothing for large councils / businesses that will either recoup that cost from the software itself or will just raise taxes to cover the shortfall (which is what Gov always does).

The really good reason to use Open Source software is security, privacy and being able to run what you want on what you have purchased, but that never gets mentioned, it always the bullshit cost angle because £400 sounds a lot to the kids in University which are broke.

Also vendor lock-in is the norm for a vast number of reasons other than "M$ is the evilz, stop using Windoz". Just look at the 8bit/16bit era, almost everything was lock-in and much more expensive than today (by factors of ten). The free PC ecosystem is NOT the norm in computing.

> I really don't think I speak for the Linux community but I do think that MS is still the big evil, just in slightly nicer packaging. Fantastic PR, crappy company.

LOL. Google, Facebook, Paypal, Twitter are far more powerful than Microsoft and are much much more evil, you know why? Because they think they are the good guys. Microsoft are basically like IBM these days, they sell loads of proprietary stuff that office use because they have won in that sector, they are dominate almost nowhere else.

A great deal of the internet is now hosted on a about 5 or 6 providers, the largest being Amazon's cloud. That is far more frightening to me than Microsoft. Every single competitor (except Microsoft) uses Amazon's Object Storage API because they are the largest.

This isn't the early 2000s where Microsoft were a monopoly they simply aren't anymore because the market has changed so drastically in 20 years.

We simply have too much software that only runs on; and too much staff schooled for Windows. You’re right that we could change if we wanted to, but it’s just hard to justify such an investment in an area where it would mean that we had to fire teachers and nurses to pay for it.

We don’t even have a good business case. I mean, our total Microsoft licenses are around the same expense as 4 employees. It would be literal decades before we brought the investment home if we made a full switch.

That doesn’t really work in political organisations, and it’s likely why all the previous attempts to switch have failed. To do this, we’d need massive public support for it, so the political leadership doesn’t get cold feet during the “short” term investment, and the truth is, the public couldn’t care less.

That doesn’t mean we can’t get there eventually. We try to buy more and more open source, we set up co-operations across municipalities to define architectural standards so suppliers can’t define our infrastructure anymore. But it’ll take a long time, and maybe it’ll never make sense to leave Microsoft. I mean, what’s the open source alternative to office365?