After this article I picked up on recently about the 30,000+ desktops having moved to Linux in India, we now have the news this morning that the French Paramilitary Police Force will be dumping ALL it’s Microshaft software in favour of Open Source Linux. And they are, somewhat surprisingly in my book, choosing Ubuntu rather than their own - home grown - Mandriva distribution.

Anyway, this is a pretty big story as the lead paragraph states:

PARIS (AFP) - The French paramilitary police force said Wednesday it is ditching Microsoft for the free Linux operating system, becoming one of the biggest administrations in the world to make the break.

See… I told you so

The gendarmerie’s 70,000 desktops currently use Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system. But these will progressively change over to the Linux system distributed by Ubuntu, explained Colonel Nicolas Geraud, deputy director of the gendarmerie’s IT department.

“We will introduce Linux every time we have to replace a desktop computer,” he said, “so this year we expect to change 5,000-8,000 to Ubuntu and then 12,000-15,000 over the next four years so that every desktop uses the Linux operating system by 2013-2014.”

There are three reasons behind the move, Geraud said at the Solution Linux 2008 conference here. The first is to diversify suppliers and reduce the force’s reliance on one company, the second is to give the gendarmerie mastery of the operating system and the third is cost, he said.

He also added that “the Linux interface is ahead of other operating systems currently on the market for professional use.”

And even more impressively is this comment about the savings they make by using OpenOffice.org compared to buying MS Office.

The move away from licensed products is saving the gendarmerie about seven million euros (10.3 million dollars) a year for all its PCs.

“In 2004 we had to buy 13,000 licences for office suites for our PCs,” he said, “but in the three years since then we’ve only had to buy a total of 27 licences.”

I thought of making the title of this piece:

French Police Buy 27 MS Office Licenses!

But I wasn’t sure it was catchy enough. lol.

[Update: How about this then?

Hasta La Vista Bebé

Sorry. Couldn't resist it...]

Vive la France!

(Until the Six Nations Rugby gets underway at least!)

Many thanks to Sophie on the OpenOffice.org Marketing Mailing List for pointing this out.

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Yesterday, we decided that we needed to get a new laptop for our business.

Nothing particularly staggering about that you might think. And, on the face of it you’d be spot on. However, as you probably know, our company The Open Learning Centre is focused on delivering business solutions and services based on Open Source technology.

Consequently what I definitely DO NOT WANT is to be forced to buy any Operating System with my hardware. I would like to choose for myself. I might want Ubuntu, or SUSE or Mint or something else. Or, god-forbid (and this is purely for example’s sake) I could choose to install one of the many valid, and already paid for, copies of Windows 95, 98, ME or XP that I have lying around.

So after a great deal of Googling yesterday, I found a grand total of TWO companies here in the UK that publicly offered me the opportunity to buy a new laptop on-line without an operating system.

The only other way is to buy individual components and assemble your own computer. This can end up being more expensive and is certainly not a trivial task, especially with a laptop. I do build my own desktops but wouldn’t consider doing the same for a portable PC.

I did look at Dell’s Ubuntu offerings but the spec of the machines wasn’t quite what I needed and - to be honest - all the “Dell Recommends Windows Vista” and notices about “Beware! This Computer Doesn’t Run Windows” made me feel a bit patronised. I understand to a certain degree the problems Dell face and must address; support and an audience of not-so-techy customers so I am not going to denigrate what they are doing. I just hope in a year or two’s time, I will be able to choose NO operating system on any of their computers.

But to get back to the main thread of this. Just two companies here in the UK that could offer me a laptop which I could choose to have supplied without an Operating System. That is bloody scandalous. EVERY other laptop (apart from the 2 Dell machines and some Asus EEe PCs [Update: I was a bit brief here. There are few other vendors who supply Linux pre-installed. But they do not offer the choice of "no operating system"]) would be supplied with a Microsoft Operating System. I had little or no choice; I could always have bought a Mac but that’s a somewhat similar issue.

Irrespective of the fact that I wouldn’t use their crappy and expensive software anyway, I have plenty of old discs with Microsoft’s operating systems on them that I have legitimately paid for and are not installed on any of my other computers. I’m sure there are many millions more like them. So why must I pay for another copy? This is completely unfair and should be (if it isn’t already) illegal.

The Globalisation Institute submitted a report to the EU commission last September saying just that:

Computers in the European Union should be sold without a bundled operating system, according to this submission to the European Commission. It says that the bundling of Microsoft Windows with computers is not in the public interest, and prevents meaningful competition in the operating system market.

The current situation basically means that for almost every single PC sold around the world, I believe we (you) are paying a TAX to Microsoft. We have already seen how they have done this with our schools. And we have seen Becta’s responses here and here.

I suggest that interested readers write to their MP or MEP, explain about this grievance and ask what the EU is doing about the report above.

On a positive note however, the two companies that did enable me to buy OS free computers deserve to be properly applauded, mentioned here, and please pay them a visit when you are looking for new hardware.

The first is a highly customisable offering from PCSpecialist.co.uk (http://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/). You can build desktops, towers, cubes and laptops to your own specifications and choose your Operating System or not as you wish. Removing the OS saves you anything from about £60 to £120 depending on your other choices.

The second is a more “mainstream” computer business. And was where we decided to buy from in the end as the price/spec was just a bit better for my particular requirements. That company is Novatech (http://www.novatech.co.uk). Yes, Novatech. It looks as though you can choose your operating system (or not as you wish) for any of their PCs. Be they laptops, servers or desktops. They have a good range and probably the best value we found anywhere. Choosing no OS saves you anything between approx. £50 and £300 depending on your choice of hardware.

Up to £300 quid Microsoft TAX… And it’s a fixed penalty too. Your hardware could cost £250 or £2500 - it doesn’t matter to them. Next time you are equipping your business or home with new computers please think about this first. You can have Ubuntu Linux Desktop Edition and/or Server Edition for free. You can copy, re-use, install on as many machines as you wish and they will provide much better performance with no usage restrictions either…

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Nokia buys Trolltech!

You may be thinking who? Trolltech are the company that makes the graphical toolkit which is the foundation of the “other” desktop software set for Linux - KDE. The other main platform of course being Gnome.

Another major acquisition of a big player in the Open Source ecosystem. Things are really hotting up! Rather helpfully, they have identified the “key messages” from the announcement:

• The acquisition supports Trolltech’s company vision of driving Qt adoption in the commercial and open source markets (Qt Everywhere).
• The acquisition of Trolltech will enable Nokia to accelerate the cross-platform software strategy for mobile devices and desktop applications, and to develop its Internet services business.
• With Nokia, Trolltech’s Qt technology will grow significantly in the PC and mass-volume mobile devices markets.
• Nokia plans to continue to develop Trolltech’s products and continue to drive sales to new and existing customers.
• Acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory and Trolltech shareholder approval.

Here’s the full press release.

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It’s right about time; and the time is about right…

It really does appear as though we are approaching that point of critical mass, where something other than Windows could become a dominant desktop OS.

Apple have just recorded their best ever quarter and so have the legions of converts to OS X. As there is almost no condescension about their slick and user friendly Operating System. Oh yes, the core of OS X is Open Source, built on Mach 3.0 and FreeBSD 5. But you still have to buy a MAC to run it so it is not the least expensive alternative and let’s not forget we have hundreds of millions of Intel/AMD i86 compatible PCs out there.

But now we have that bastion of conservative enterprise solutions, IBM saying

In an announcement this week at the Lotusphere 2008 conference in Orlando, IBM said that it will provide full support for Ubuntu Linux with Lotus Notes 8.5 and Lotus Symphony using its Open Collaboration Client software, which is based on open standards.

Antony Satyadas, chief competitive marketing officer for IBM Lotus, said the Ubuntu support for Notes and Symphony were a direct response to demand from customers.

Support for Ubuntu. From IBM. Just think about that for a moment…

“We’re doing pilots with customers now,” Satyadas said. “Some of the requests came from big companies” with as many as 100,000 users that are interested in moving to Ubuntu Linux on the desktop.

100,000 users moving to Linux on the desktop - wow. Just how much will that save MegaCorp Inc.? Who knows, but I bet it is a pretty sizeable truck load of cash.

IBM have endorsed Ubuntu. This is, actually, really big news. For a firm the size of IBM they don’t do things like this lightly or “just for fun”. This means there must be serious demand from their enterprise customers for a change; and it’s a big change. Their own press release for this entitled “IBM Accelerates Desktop Customer Choice With Support for Ubuntu, Red Hat and Novell Software” just shows how far we have come. Three alternative Linux operating systems. All with support from IBM.

“All the stars are lining up,” he said. “Everybody has been saying that since 2001 except IBM. We never said that, but we are saying that now.”

In the past, IBM has said Linux on the corporate desktop wouldn’t happen until the operating system was good enough to allow companies to have all the functions they need to run their businesses. At the same time, an adequate supply of critical business software that would run reliably and efficiently on Linux would be needed.

“We are putting our money where our mouth is,” Satyadas said. “We think now the time is really [here]” and the needed business applications are available to make it work for corporations.

“Linux is cool now,” he said. “We use it ourselves. We are able to offer a secure, rich and cost-effective Microsoft alternative.”

We also have seen reports of very large scale deployments happening all over the world where tens of thousands of desktops are moving to free and open operating systems. Here’s a recent one from India. This is a really good read and shows just what can be done with OSS in the enterprise, and at some speed too! I especially enjoyed his comments on the complete non-issue that anti-virus and malware problems are since their migration to Linux.

…A year later, Umashankar and his team had moved 30,000 computers and 1,880 severs belonging to some of the state’s schools to Linux — creating possibly the largest Linux rollout in India.

And here’s the very simple “why” this made so much sense:

The decision to migrate to Linux was driven primarily by cost. It was hard to escape the cold figures before Umashankar: Elcot saved Rs 5 crore¹ on every 20 servers it set up with Linux. And they had over 1,800 servers.

In addition, Umashankar says that the shift saves them about 25 percent on any general hardware purchases — and as much as 90 percent on the high-end servers.

Umashankar says that his office uses the Openoffice.org suite. This saves them close to Rs 12,000 on each desktop, he says.

“We buy Intel dual core desktops with 19″ TFT monitors for Rs 21,600 including the Linux OS. If we bought a proprietary office suite at Rs 12,000 for each desktop, the cost of commissioning infrastructure would go up to Rs 33,600 — a 55 percent increase,” he says.

55% uplift on every desktop. Just for your Office Application suite. If only more people realised this…

When you realise the kind of savings that are to be had, and knowing that there are now several free and excellent Desktop alternatives such as:

• Ubuntu and it’s derivatives (I have heard very good things about Mint recently),
• OpenSuse,
• Fedora,
• And many others. See Distrowatch for a up-to-date list of what’s hot and what’s not.

it really makes me angry that our UK government are so blind to the opportunities.

With all of these Linux desktop distributions come, literally, thousands of free applications which provide an almost total replacement for available commercial products, and also offer many more that are not present in the commercial domain at all.

We now have top quality products that fulfil most of the mainstream business requirements. I’m thinking, Firefox, Thunderbird (or Evolution), OpenOffice.org, The Gimp and Inkscape. There are multiple offerings in back-office and network/desktop management solutions, again, free and open and there are numerous excellent development environments, libraries and integration tools to enable unlimited customisation.

There are now plenty of big companies like Novell, IBM, Sun HP, and even Oracle, providing Linux desktop products and enterprise level support services. For the smaller business there are now companies that provide the support services, knowledge and skills that suit the SME sector (like our own business, The Open Learning Centre), there are huge numbers of students leaving University having worked on and engaged in the Open Source community which should help to round out the support side. And of course there is the Open Source community itself. I know of know other place where I can drop a quick email about a problem I’m having, or a question about configuration for example, which gives me consistently, fast and accurate assistance. Bugs are generally caught, logged and fixed with frightening speed and courtesy too.

Is Linux ready for the Desktop? Undoubtedly yes.

Will 2008 be the year it really takes off? I don’t know but I really do hope so. The only reasons it might not are fear and ignorance. Two issues which are easily surmountable.

Fear? Just show them, or better still give them a copy and don’t forget to tell them that they are free to copy and redistribute it too.

Ignorance? Just tell people about Open Source…

“Ignorance is bliss” the old adage goes. I think as far as OSS is concerned, that should be “Ignorance is expensive”.

1 According to the Wikipedia a Crore denotes 10 million http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crore and you get about 40 Rs to the US dollar. So they are saving a huge amount of money however you look at it.

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Rob Weir has a great sense of humour, which the automaton bloggers of Microsoft Inc. either do not themselves posses or are not “allowed” to demonstrate for fear of upsetting their legal team.

From a fairly innocuous couple of posts around the web, suddenly lots of Microsoft puppets were spouting off about how IBM now supports OOXML (of course they don’t say which version…lol).

Read Rob’s post to get a very funny riposte. And do look at the comments. There is one from Jeremy Allison (now of Google) refuting Microsoft’s claim that Google endorses OOXML.

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I noted this post on Bob Sutor’s blog and thought it definately warranted promoting.

As he says this should be obvious to everyone (it certainly is to BECTA here in the UK) but, just perhaps, some people are being misled into thinking that OXML is OOXML is OOXML….

Saving your documents in OOXML format right now is probably about the riskiest thing you can do if you are concerned with long term interoperability.

Bob goes on to say:

First, the “official” ECMA OOXML that was submitted to ISO is not what Microsoft implements in Office 2007. So unless your application reverse-engineered Office 2007’s support, you’ve got interoperability problems right there.

Second, the ECMA spec is over 6000 pages long, there were thousands of comments, and thousands of pages of proposed resolutions to those comments. And that’s just from Microsoft. Others will go to the BRM with different proposals, and further ideas may come up there. Not everything may be addressed at the BRM.

Nobody has the vaguest idea what OOXML will look like in February or even whether it will be in any sort of stable condition by the end of March. Major features may be deprecated. Completely different solutions may be proposed. And at the end, the whole thing may be rejected, just as it was done in September.

So that OOXML format that you are saving files in right now is dead and will be replaced, unless Microsoft decides it won’t bother implementing what comes out of the ISO process. Indeed, if the ballot finally fails, I’m not sure what Microsoft will do with all the suggested comments.

Nice one Bob. I thought this was pretty obvious too but it can’t hurt to explain it to the public. Microsoft certainly won’t.

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Well, I know I am a bit late on this but it is worth mentioning anyway.

Probably the world’s most popular CMS (Content Management System) has just had a major update. The Joomla! 1.5 release has been over 2 years in the making and is a vastly different product (behind the scenes at least) than the 1.0 version which has been so popular since the fork from Mambo.

Visit the Joomla! site to get the low-down on 1.5. I have just got the release and set-it up in house to start testing. Install was a total breeze and the new admin UI feels a whole lot cleaner.

It will be some time before it is as widely used as the 1.0 series, not least due to the huge numbers of extensions and plug-ins which are now only compatible when accessing the new Joomla in legacy mode. Also, there are major changes to the way templates are handled and although the changes are certainly for the better, again, it will take some time for writers to migrate their templates and for the community to start creating lots of new stuff for 1.5 only systems.

Congratulations to the Joomla! team. It is a great product, and I’m sure this release will go a long way to making it even more popular as the CMS of choice.

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So Dell are obviously having some success with their Ubuntu loaded computers then. Announcing yesterday that they are to add a new model to the line up and it arrives in Europe before the US and they add Spain to their list of supported countries. Well done Dell.

It would great to get some numbers or statistics about units sold, number of technical calls after purchase (I bet it is a shed-load less then Vista lol…).

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I’m not sure what to make of this really…

Microsoft, through ECMA (the body currently dealing with DIS29500) announced today that it is going to:

… in response to requests for even easier access to the Binary Formats, Microsoft has agreed to remove any intermediate steps necessary to get the documentation, and will post it and make it directly available for a direct download on the Microsoft web site. Microsoft will also make the Binary Formats subject to its Open Specification Promise (see www.microsoft.com/interop/osp) by February 15, 2008.

In plain English, they are basically stating that they are going to make publicly available the specifications for their legacy [Update. that was my assumption. Discussion already suggests that they are in fact ONLY releasing access to Office 2007 binary formats] Office binary file formats. There are a few questions I’d be interested in getting answers to about this statement.

• Which versions of their Office Binary Formats will be published?
• What does their OSP (Open Specification Promise) really mean? Especially in relation to the GPL.
• Why and why now…?

The published reason is that because there are so many statements in the DIS29500 spec that refer to instructions like “doLineBreaksLikeWord95″ that they really didn’t have much of an option. Either include all the old specs as part of DIS29500 or make them available elsewhere.

If Microsoft are really genuine about this, and the OSP stacks up and enables developers to use the information with GPL licenced software then, quite frankly, I applaud their decision even though I am quite amazed by it.

Of course we have just had the announcement by the EU regarding two new investigations into Microsoft’s monopoly and abuse thereof; one of which is specifically to do with Office file formats. So could this also be an attempt to deflect the EU investigators? Only time will tell I guess.

The second significant announcement they have made relates to the setting up of an Open Source project:

Microsoft have agreed to:

Initiate a Binary Format-to-ISO/IEC JTC 1 DIS 29500 Translator Project on the open source software development web site SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net/ ) in collaboration with independent software vendors. The Translator Project will create software tools, plus guidance, showing how a document written using the Binary Formats can be translated to DIS 29500. The Translator will be available under the open source Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) license, and anyone can use the mapping, submit bugs and feedback, or contribute to the Project. The Translator Project will start on February 15, 2008.

That is quite an amazing statement from Microsoft. The BSD license is an interesting choice. It is very business friendly. But what this really says to me is:

1. that Microsoft have had enough of trying to do this [manage multiple file formats, ad nausea] on their own.
2. their own converter isn’t that good!
3. there are too many requests for a platform independent or agnostic converter (Mac, Linux, OpenBSD and mobile platforms etc etc etc). Obviously Microsoft couldn’t really write a converter for Linux now could they?

There are some good comments below Brian’s post, with some confusion about OSP and GPL compatibility, but on the whole most people’s reaction seems positive.

I find myself in the strange position of having to agree. They should probably be encouraged and praised for these decisions; although I can’t help but think there is a sting-in-the-tail somewhere…

But how on earth have they managed to actually do this is what gets me - has Steve Ballmer just died or something?

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The title says it all really

SANTA CLARA, CA January 16, 2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire MySQL AB, an open source icon and developer of one of the world’s fastest growing open source databases for approximately $1 billion in total consideration. The acquisition accelerates Sun’s position in enterprise IT to now include the $15 billion database market. Today’s announcement reaffirms Sun’s position as the leading provider of platforms for the Web economy and its role as the largest commercial open source contributor.

Wow. That really makes sense for Sun and makes the chaps from MySQL nicely rich!

Sun have already shown themselves to be pretty into the Open Source thing. In the last couple of years they have Open Sourced Java and Solaris. Two of their biggest software platforms. I recall Jonathan Schwartz saying how, after giving away the software for free they made more money from it… That makes perfect sense to me, but it doesn’t seem to work for Microsoft yet.

Cool

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