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Red Hat Sues Switzerland Over Microsoft Monopoly (eWeek)
eWeek Europe reports
that Red Hat (and 17 other vendors) have filed suit against the Swiss
government in response to no-bid contracts which have been awarded to
Microsoft. "'It's not just Switzerland who have been getting away
with this kind of nonsense,' said Mark Taylor of the UK-based Open Source
Consortium, adding that much of the credit for this action should go to the
Free Software Foundation Europe, led by Georg Greve."
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Red Hat Sues Switzerland Over Microsoft Monopoly (eWeek) Posted May 23, 2009 18:22 UTC (Sat) by pranith (subscriber, #53092) [Link]
I thought this was the norm everywhere. Microsoft has this *monopoly* which makes it difficult for other vendors. It would be good if they could make the gov's call a public tender before awarding these contracts. Wish you all the luck.
Easy to solve Posted May 23, 2009 21:58 UTC (Sat) by sladen (subscriber, #27402) [Link] This sort of thing is incredibly easy to remedy;
Easy to solve Posted May 24, 2009 10:33 UTC (Sun) by MathFox (guest, #6104) [Link] Your proposed wording will not fly in front of a judge unless you add "... or functional equivalent."Vendors of AMD systems have won lawsuits against governments that specified Intel processors only in their tenders.
Easy to solve; there are reasons they might WANT MS Posted May 25, 2009 5:51 UTC (Mon) by ringerc (subscriber, #3071) [Link]
So add something Intel-only and fairly defensible:
"supporting vPro management or compatible equivalent"
You know full well that there isn't, and really can't be, a "compatible equivalent". You just required Intel boards and CPUs, but if you actually use vPro it's hard to argue you did it just to lock the other guys out - even if that's your true intent.
It's actually fairly defensible to require "interacts with SharePoint" or the like, too. A business or department that has existing business processes and systems built around a tool like SharePoint can't easily just move to another platform for things like mail, desktops, file services, etc. While awfully convenient for MS, that's also just a fairly natural consequence of tightly integrated systems with features well beyond any open standards.
Now, one might then argue (reasonably IMO) that some sort of interop facility with SharePoint is desirable, be it through improvements to SharePoint allowing better access using existing standards, the implementation of gateway systems, or better documentation about SharePoint's protocols and services to enable others to talk to it. It's hard, though, to tell the business it should throw out something it's built quite so much on - even if building their business processes on SharePoint was in retrospect a poor decision that's locked them in to one vendor's products and services.
Even MS Exchange has a similar effect, albeit not so severe.
For that matter, federated identity management, desktop management, etc a-la Active Directory isn't really found outside the MS world; there's no real equivalent to things like Group Policy, for example. Even if you just want desktops, it's *not* easy or necessarily even desirable to drop a bunch of Linux boxes into a Windows network, and it's not all because of lock-in features. Sometimes it's just because of better features in Windows that are helpful or even necessary.
Personally, I operate a mix of Windows desktops, Linux thin clients at my office (about 30 machines total). I find managing the Linux thin clients more time consuming overall, because of ongoing bugs and problems like issues with the Flash browser plugin (which FlashBlock only helps with, not eliminates), Linux-only IMAP bugs in Thunderbird, etc. The Windows desktops are easier to manage - and if something DOES go wrong, I can just re-image them and log the user back on to their domain account.
My point? Don't assume that preference for MS is just prejustice. Sometimes it's genuinely better, and may be cheaper when network management and the like is considered. Other times, though, it makes very little sense to choose MS over OSS options; it depends a lot on your needs and situation.
For example, we use OpenOffice on all new systems here, because we have absolutely no need for MS Office. We use Cyrus IMAPd and Thunderbird because we don't need the features of Exchange/Outlook (but if we did, I'd be hard-pressed to find a good alternative that wasn't a buggy PITA).
There are reasons they might WANT MS Posted May 25, 2009 11:14 UTC (Mon) by MathFox (guest, #6104) [Link]
I agree with you that some organisations are locked in by their choice for Microsoft applications and if an organisation has requirements for compatibility with specific software it should (properly) mention them. [Irrelevant comments on the competence of SharePoint addicted management redacted.]
I have worked with Unix systems for more than 20 years; with centralised user administration for a cluster of workstations, via NIS, Kerberos and others. (Active Directory is based on Kerberos, but in an incompatible way.) The tools are there, also on the Linux side; the packages are not installed because you only need them in specific settings (and the administrator will know).
I agree that expecting Linux systems to smoothly integrate in a Windows network is trying to push the square peg into the round hole; however integrating Windows systems into a Unix integrated network is like pushing the round peg into the square hole.
Red Hat Sues Switzerland Over Microsoft Monopoly (eWeek) Posted May 24, 2009 8:39 UTC (Sun) by greve (subscriber, #8385) [Link]
We may be getting a bit too much credit on this particular case, I'm afraid.
FSFE is not part of this lawsuit, although we have been vocal about procurement issues in general and were involved to some extent in the background discussions around this particular case.
But maybe Mark wanted to be kind on the basis of our antitrust work that has been going on for years (including the ongoing browser investigation) and may have laid the groundwork to use it in cases such as this one.
Regards,
Ruh roh. Posted May 25, 2009 16:28 UTC (Mon) by leoc (subscriber, #39773) [Link] I suppose there is always the hope that their opponents will miss this press release while defending themselves in court.
Ruh roh. Posted May 26, 2009 18:04 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
This is a matter of principle of providing all the vendors an opportunity to participate via public tenders and not limited to Red Hat vs Microsoft. Even assuming it is, do you really think the competition with Microsoft is only limited to consumer desktop? They have playing in server and embedded systems as well for quite sometime now.
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