London council ditches Linux plans (ZDNet)

Posted Jan 6, 2004 21:51 UTC (Tue) by sjlyall (subscriber, #4151) [Link]

London's Newham Borough Council has ditched plans to move to an open source environment and will instead concentrate on negotiating a new deal with Microsoft that could act as a model for other public sector bodies

I think the first thing others bodies can learn from the model is that that you can get a better deal out of Microsoft if they think you are still considering alternatives.

Your taxes at work.

Posted Jan 6, 2004 21:55 UTC (Tue) by laurent (guest, #7539) [Link]

I have a strange feeling about this piece of info.

I find it strange to publicy state they are dropping alternatives before going into negotiations with Microsoft. If that was the case I would say it is a really dumb way to enter negotiations...

I would rather suspect that they got a good deal from Microsoft, before that announce, under the condition that they publicize the fact that migration to Linux would pose "unacceptable levels of risk".

Posted Jan 6, 2004 22:21 UTC (Tue) by TheOneKEA (subscriber, #615) [Link]

While almost any of us would be the first to say that this is a case where Microsoft FUD succeeded, their comments about the difficulties of replacing a heterogenous environment THAT WORKS with a single homogenous environment, that while tested and known to be an excellent platform, is still a little too hairy for some, prevents me from saying that.

While software suites like Samba are a huge stride for Windows<->Linux integration, it would appear from Newham's decision not to use Linux that there are still a few more software applications to be written/rewritten/refined/ported.

Posted Jan 7, 2004 3:10 UTC (Wed) by ccchips (guest, #3222) [Link]

My company did a study to determine whether LAN's would be a good alternative to Big Iron, and found that they weren't mature enough.

Three years later, the LAN had eeked its way from the underground at our company, and become an essential business facility.

Posted Jan 7, 2004 3:19 UTC (Wed) by vblum (subscriber, #1151) [Link]

What is this "migrate all systems to OS *" idea anyway? Such a thing can be done in small steps, and better for everyone. If someone told me "Sorry, you have to migrate from Linux to Windows", I would be extremely mad - not (only) because of ideology, but really because I'd have to rewrite / retest all sorts of little utilities around me.

Now if I were some office worker 10 years into using MS Office for all sorts of tasks, and someone told me "switch to OpenOffice next year" ... well, I might be mad if I had to rewrite / retest every single one of the utilities needed in my work.

Anyway, the point is, is anyone helped by _forcing_ everyone in a large organisation to change their workplace completely? Yes, it's great publicity, but it comes at a high price. There will be a lot of disgruntled users who have a reason to be disgruntled - because they were _forced_ to abandon their working personal environment, instead of getting there themselves. And someone in that mood will likely jump at all the little flaws and defects which we tacitly tend to ignore because we are used to them, and they are off our radar.

If Linux really is the better system, switching will occur gradually and naturally. And no MS PR will stop that in the long run. But, no need to shed tears if someone doesn't turn around at once.

PS- Rant: I had a longtime Linux user today about to give up his install because of SuSE's perpetually broken X configuration tool. If such people can be frustrated like that, am I glad to not see the publicity when the same experience happens to a number of forced converts in a large organisation.

Posted Jan 7, 2004 10:13 UTC (Wed) by blades (guest, #18486) [Link]

Just to point out that the Newham trial was looking at OSS solutions at general not just Linux, in fact as the article points out groupware solutions where one of the main stumbling blocks.

The worry with this development is that whilst Newham as a single authority won't get a special pricing deal from MS what is going to happen is that a public sector group looks like being formed to get special deals from MS. This means that MS don't just win at Newham but will get an extra toe-hold into numerous more authorities, maybe with smaller revenues than they would like but possibly with a greater lockin to MS as a result, which they will be happy about.

Posted Jan 7, 2004 10:30 UTC (Wed) by Bleasdale (guest, #18487) [Link]

This article is not correct.

See the article in TheRegister at: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/34724.html

This is an accurate appraisal of the situation.