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City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software

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Re: City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software

#21

Post by _lbaq »

adwhit wrote: post #19

I kind of amazed that Microsoft are still successfully charging SO MUCH for their absolutely run-of-the-mill OS and Office products. Office, in particular, brings in something like $25bn/year revenue with presumably very healthy margins. For a product that has hardly changed in 20 years. It's a good product, sure. But a clean-room reimplementation of the bits that people actually care about surely couldn't cost more…

Problem is that you wont complete any RFPs without that "junk" that "nobody" uses, even if its just 1 percent that uses those functions of the users, those 1 percent is spread out on all the big companies that pay a big part of those $25B.

Re: City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software

#22

Post by blowski »

adwhit wrote: post #19

I kind of amazed that Microsoft are still successfully charging SO MUCH for their absolutely run-of-the-mill OS and Office products. Office, in particular, brings in something like $25bn/year revenue with presumably very healthy margins. For a product that has hardly changed in 20 years. It's a good product, sure. But a clean-room reimplementation of the bits that people actually care about surely couldn't cost more…

You wouldn’t believe the number of workflows hardcoded to Excel and Outlook. Those two products alone guarantee that Office is here to stay for years.

Re: City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software

#23

Post by leadingthenet »

wastedhours wrote: post #20
criddell wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to come up with technical reasons for picking one OS over another for general business use. All of the operating systems are good enough. They have been for a long time. What drives OS choice is (and always has been) application support and cost. Despite Linux being free, it can be expensive to support or even an impossible choice if you need, for example, Microsoft Office or Final Cut. More often than not,…

You need to start in education - MS has had that locked down for decades. It'll be really interesting to see whether ChromeOS will have any impact in the future when an entire generation has been using it daily for schoolwork.

That's only true in the US. Practically nobody in the EU has heard of / uses ChromeOS. Or maybe I'm just out of touch.

Re: City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software

#24

Post by pirocks »

wastedhours wrote: post #20
criddell wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to come up with technical reasons for picking one OS over another for general business use. All of the operating systems are good enough. They have been for a long time. What drives OS choice is (and always has been) application support and cost. Despite Linux being free, it can be expensive to support or even an impossible choice if you need, for example, Microsoft Office or Final Cut. More often than not,…

You need to start in education - MS has had that locked down for decades. It'll be really interesting to see whether ChromeOS will have any impact in the future when an entire generation has been using it daily for schoolwork.

I don't think that a switch from mostly MS to mostly chromeos would be a good thing. Chromeos forces everyone into google products far more than windows forces everyone into ms products.

Re: City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software

#25

Post by icc97 »

dogma1138 wrote: post #2

Hopefully it would work out better than in Munich.

It actually gives strength to what Munich did. They proved that it was possible to swap. So Barcelona doesn't have such a political tricky situation as there is a pre-existing example.

Let's hope that more follow Barcelona.

Barcelona is possibly taking an easier approach. That is, replace the easier things like Office and IE.

I've done similar things. So where as my software has to use IIS and Windows servers, I use Firefox, Thunderbird and Libre Office for everything with the odd exception. It means for me having a dual boot machine is fairly easy as all software usage is the same.

You occasionally do have compatibility issues with Office but it doesn't have to. The more using it the better.

Re: City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software

#26

Post by mtgx »

EspadaV9 wrote: post #6
dogma1138 wrote: post #2

Hopefully it would work out better than in Munich.

Munich was pretty good. It's been deployed for 4+ years and won't be replaced until the end of 2020 (assuming everything goes to plan) so that will be at least 7 years of use. It seems that the reasons to move back to Windows weren't completely technical either.

If they had chosen something more mainstream like say Ubuntu or Debian, I don't think there would've been as many complaints. You can't have each city develop or maintain its own custom version of a Linux distro, I think that should have been obvious from the start.

If anything, there should be an EU-version of Linux that's stripped of all American backdoors and constantly audited, because I think this is also a national security issue, not just an issue of vendor lock-in and long-term costs for taxpayers. But certainly it wouldn't make sense to have anything less than that, even a country-specific Linux distro doesn't make sense.

I do think ultimately it was Microsoft's politics that convinced the city to move away from LiMux, but I think the problems were also real, which pushed them over to Microsoft more easily. If it had been an EU-backed Linux distro, I don't think they would've switched nearly as easily.

Re: City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software

#27

Post by criddell »

wastedhours wrote: post #20
criddell wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to come up with technical reasons for picking one OS over another for general business use. All of the operating systems are good enough. They have been for a long time. What drives OS choice is (and always has been) application support and cost. Despite Linux being free, it can be expensive to support or even an impossible choice if you need, for example, Microsoft Office or Final Cut. More often than not,…

You need to start in education - MS has had that locked down for decades. It'll be really interesting to see whether ChromeOS will have any impact in the future when an entire generation has been using it daily for schoolwork.

I think education as an influencer is overrated.

At my kids' school, they really don't care what hardware you use, as long as Google Docs works on it. If you don't have your own computer, the school will rent you a ThinkPad for $70 per year (including the summer) but they are really awful machines. A lot of people buy their own hardware.

Re: City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software

#28

Post by snvzz »

I'm Catalan. Catalonia has always been big on open source, and if anything I'm surprised this took so long to happen. The mindshare in universities and such is particularly high, and this isn't limited to computer science (my background). Even my high school did at the very least run a Linux server (running at least samba and squid) and had a few Linux workstations. This was 20 years ago. Back when I lived there, I worked in many companies, all of which had near 100% of workstations running Linux, something I now realize is not the case elsewhere.

A strong argument nobody's mentioned in the thread yet is that free software support for our language (Catalan) is very good, whereas Windows/OSX support for it is terrible when it exists at all. There's the fact that we do still remember a previous effort where Microsoft released some version of windows in Catalan, I'm not sure if it was 98 or XP era, which was very broken; Microsoft never handled the issues back then, or released any more versions in Catalan, and it left a very bad taste in our mouths.

We do care massively about our language, so it'll be very hard to sway anybody in here unless this fact radically changes.

Re: City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software

#29

Post by saiya-jin »

leadingthenet wrote: post #23
wastedhours wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to start in education - MS has had that locked down for decades. It'll be really interesting to see whether ChromeOS will have any impact in the future when an entire generation has been using it daily for schoolwork.

That's only true in the US. Practically nobody in the EU has heard of / uses ChromeOS. Or maybe I'm just out of touch.

nah, same here (IT person). it's that 'another' option when you actually are deciding between different 2, if deciding at all.

and google's privacy approach has soured their portfolio for me a bit (albeit some of them are exceptionally well done and useful)

Re: City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software

#30

Post by adwhit »

blowski wrote: post #22
adwhit wrote: post #19

I kind of amazed that Microsoft are still successfully charging SO MUCH for their absolutely run-of-the-mill OS and Office products. Office, in particular, brings in something like $25bn/year revenue with presumably very healthy margins. For a product that has hardly changed in 20 years. It's a good product, sure. But a clean-room reimplementation of the bits that people actually care about surely couldn't cost more…

You wouldn’t believe the number of workflows hardcoded to Excel and Outlook. Those two products alone guarantee that Office is here to stay for years.

For sure. I've seen complete trading systems written in Excel macros.

MS have played their hand very astutely and have managed to capture a large fraction of the enormous gap between cost-to-producer and value-to-user. Keeping things that way is worth $100bn market cap to them, and challenging them is worth relative peanuts to anyone else. Of course they're going to win every time.

Our best hope is that someone like Google pours money into a fully-compatible fully-featured desktop replacement out of sheer spite.

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