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Norwegian Government Expires Microsoft Contract

Posted by CmdrTaco on Mon Jul 15, 2002 01:36 PM
from the good-for-them dept.
Microsoft
Jeppe Salvesen writes "The Norwegian sites are bristling with the news, and hopefully this will leak worldwide. The Norwegian Government has dropped their contract with Microsoft. Microsoft had an exclusive deal with national and regional government. Administration Secretary Victor D. Norman states that 'we feel that our contract with Microsoft in reality has given Microsoft a monopoly in a field where competition would serve us better.'. My translation. The race is on."
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  • why would governments be against microsoft. Which itself is very usefull software and a easy to use operating system. I mean a government ending a relationship with software that most of its workers use at home seems like a large expense.

    • They're not against Microsoft, they're just dropping the exclusive deal with them - i.e. whereas previously they might have had to use the Microsoft product, they can now choose what they think is the best software for the job.

    • Re:against (Score:2, Interesting)

      by mchappee (22897)
      > ...with software that most of its workers use
      > at home seems like a large expense.

      I agree with this, but someone has got to break the chain. When you think "government" you usually associate that with office buildings and bureaucracy. However, government means schools as well. The reason people use Windows at home is because they use Windows at work, because they used Windows in college, because they used Windows in high school. If the government went with Linux in grade school/high schools then more colleges would be Linux-based. More colleges means more businesses (that's what the grads know). The chain can finally be used to Linux's (and everyone's) advantage.

      Matthew

        • Re:Uhm.. (Score:4, Insightful)

          by platypus (18156) on Monday July 15 2002, @03:45PM (#3888673) Homepage
          I remember using Mac's in school for the majority of my time (from grade school on up through High School). If this chain were true, why am I not a Mac user?

          Because of the OS/Windows Environment advances.
          Ok, either you went to school in a time when the first and most intensive exposure to PCs (or Macs in your case) was in school, or you are wrong, because today nearly everybody at least knows someone being a "peecee"-guru, therefore school isn't as important as it once was in said "chain".

          If you went to school in those old days, when MS Win (>= 95) came out, it was really advantage, at least Win 95 vs. MacOS 7 (8?) - software wise, because of the price and (maybe most importantly?) because of warezing.
          So this advantage would break the chain also.

          But today, it's really hard to get a strong enough advantage to "break the chain". Even MS has trouble to raise the bar, in order to get people to desire - and therefore buy - newer versions of their software.

          So, Open Source (or whatever possible MS competitor, I just doubt there's someone else out there) finally has a good chance to level the field, to catch up. We can discuss all day if KDE/Gnome + Linux/BSD are "as good as" or "better than" as Windows XP, the truth is that people have decided, and - seemingly - they (still) prefer the latter.

          But people believe, and I'm also inclined to, that this is it, today, where the "chain" comes into action. And I also belive that in many places familiarity with an user interface just wouldn't matter much, and therefore not lead to high (re-)training costs, and that at these places "alternatives" could be used and one could rapidly see the benefits.

          So, perhaps Norway has some of those places, schools, public authorities, whatever. All I want is a small fracture in this wall of "just MS", so that people who would otherwise would never have gotten the chance to even *see* an alternative will now have a real choice.

          Really, give it some time, and *nix distibutions will be easier to install, much more liberal in usage conditions and much more trustable concerning privacy - btw. most of this is true now, but people will then have realized that.
          Fortunately, MS does what it can to strengthen these advanteges for open source.

    • Re:against (Score:4, Informative)

      by netphilter (549954) on Monday July 15 2002, @02:17PM (#3887764) Homepage Journal
      A point that seems to have been missed here is cost. I work for a pseudo-government agency that runs Windows almost exclusively, and I can tell you that it constantly irks me to watch us spend thousands of dollars to upgrade licenses for what I consider to be an inferior operating system. When you're talking about taxpayer dollers, a responsible government entity will review the more cost-effective possibilites when considering an operating system. If I can deploy Linux for free and spend $75.95/copy for Star Office 6.0 [sun.com] as opposed to $299/copy for Windows XP [microsoft.com] and $579/copy for Office XP [microsoft.com], the as a government entity I should save my taxpayers money and do it. Sure, it may take a bit more work, but it's the responsible thing to do IMO.

      • Re:against (Score:5, Interesting)

        by lrichardson (220639) on Monday July 15 2002, @02:37PM (#3887980) Homepage
        With you on that! A friend did ~300 PCs for a couple of hundred using Linux (RedHat), along with the servers. Compared to the $100,000 + doing it the M$ way would have cost.

        However, I think M$ has done one thing that is really starting to backfire in the corporate world ... intrusive software. XP, with it's online licensing was barely tolerable for most, and completely intolerable for some (you try connecting to the internet when in the Arctic doing geological work ... it involves sitting down and taking ~15 - 20 minutes to hook up the sattelite link, assuming you lugged the gear into the field. Heard similar horror stories from others who work in truly remote locations (Amazon, and huge parts of Africa). But now their software is coming with 'call into microsoft' features, which violate virtually every corporate security standard. In the security world, this is called a BACK DOOR and is something to be dreaded and/or blocked by anti-virus software. And now Microsoft is putting it in their products and claiming it as a feature?!?!

        At one place, we ran a little test using IP hijacking, with a server outside the corporate firewall. Win XP, Office XP, and the standard suite of apps ... and managed to hack the network in less than 20 minutes. Couldn't have done it without the PC automagically dialling out for 'updates'. Which, when you consider this company (which shall remain nameless) has assets over half a trillion, and the toughest security setup possible (under M$ products), is damn scary.

        We won't even get into the hassles people are running into when their software tells them it's expired, and to contact their nearest M$ rep ... especially when it hasn't.

        Sure, Word et. at are slick, but the cost of running them - in terms of money, security, and hassles - are pushing people to other OS.

      • It's actually considerably worse than that. You see with Linux you can actually move to a workable thin client solution like the folks in Largo Florida. With Linux you can easily support hundreds of users with one commodity Intel-based server. For about the same price as an upgrade to your current Windows OS and office suite you could move your entire office to thin clients and never have to worry about client side problems ever again. Imagine how much easier your life would be with one machine to configure and a whole pile of thin clients that you could simply throw away if something broke.

        Talk about low TCO.

  • Localization and language support are going to be an issue here.
    • Localization and language support are going to be an issue here.

      Not really. I don't know how good Windows Norweigan support is (pretty good I'd imagine) but KDE has been translated into over 40 languages iirc, and many other Linux apps also have Norweigan translations.

      You would never be able to tell normally as GNU gettext hides it all from the user.... in fact I just checked, and I have almost 30 norweigan translations on my machine, and I haven't installed any special language packages or anything.

      • Interesting how here on /., when discussing an alternative to MS, the first (and usually only) alternative to be discussed is Linux. As far as a desktop OS is concerned, Apple's Mac OS X may be far better suited to the task. Since the subsystem is very closely based on Open/FreeBSD and hence supports all the "information wants to be free" technologies that Linux does, the real comparison is the user interface.

        Now, I have a whole lot of respect for the GNOME and KDE efforts (I have Ximian on my laptop and KDE on one of my desktops), but they've got a ways to go to reach OS X's level of ease-of-use. I believe OS X is also localized in Norwegian, but I could be wrong on this count (if I am wrong, then that's a good reason to discount OS X :)).

        Apple's no longer *just* for creatives, designers, writers, etc. It is (at its core) a highly productive and functional operating system built on a highly stable and powerful subsystem. With OS X, you can *get things done*. For the novice computer user, OS X can be a good deal more intuitive than either Windows OR any of the Linux UIs.

        *sigh* ... this isn't a flame or a troll, just a commentary.

        Cheers.
        • Yes, but Macs have one big problem - they are proprietary hardware (and software, but the hardware is what is relevant).

          Let's assume that the Norweigan government want to junk Windows, and have 1000 machines that they wish to junk it from. The average price of a Mac (taking the mean of all the different models) is about £1000. I don't know what that is in Kroner (?), but that comes to a cool million quid. For what? New hardware, that they don't need.

          A million pounds! That's about 1.5 million US dollars I think. That's a lot of taxpayers cash.

          And before somebody rants off about how it'd cost a million dollars to support Linux, I'd like to dispell this myth that somehow nobody needs to support or administer Macs. People say "they are so easy to configure, Linux is hard". But you don't want users reconfiguring network terminals anyway, so that isn't an issue. "Software installation is hard". Ditto. All the stuff that they need, ie writing office documents, browsing the net, checking email etc Linux does just fine, and more importantly, does it without the HUGE cost of rebuying Microsoft Office (I read $500 somewhere, which is also crazy). For organisations that already have computers, Macs are uneconomic, and no amount of guesswork based on TCO will change that. Period.

            • I don't think the plan is to replace the hardware...also, compared to OS X, even Windows XP wouldn't be ready for the desktop. I think "ready for the desktop" has become the most meaningless sentence ever. I use Linux on my desktop, therefore it is ready for the desktop. Just because OS X has a nicer GUI (that's debatable) doesn't mean Linux cannot be used in a productivity environment.

              Back in the 80's, end users were stuck with DOS, Lotus 1-2-3 and Wordperfect - and yet they were productive. They knew how to use their computers. Perhaps the learning curve was a bit steeper, but somehow they managed. Have we suddenly all become so stupid that if we don't get enough eye candy we can no longer use a computer? I had a crash course in Maya at my job: that program has so many menus and options and whatnot, it's the opposite of user-friendly - and yet it's still the market leader...I find the trend to "dumb down" computers as much as possible quite disturbing, to tell you the truth. At some point we have to accept that computers must have a minimum degree of complexity if we are to have a good control of how they behave. So the hypothetical grandma can't use it? Well, that's to bad: she can't program her VCR either. But a 12-year old can learn UNIX - for him it's just a game...so why do we care so much about "usability" when the next generation is adapting itself to technology faster than we ever did? To hear the UI fanatics, you'd think that it's impossible for an average user to use Linux (which is totally false, I have had the occasion of testing it more than once). It's as if we were trying to encourage the user to be as lazy as possible...

              Oh well, I still think KDE3.02 with Crystal icons and Kermakik style looks nicer and is more usable than Aqua on OS X. Not that I care... ;-)

        • Interesting how here on /., when discussing an alternative to MS, the first (and usually only) alternative to be discussed is Linux. As far as a desktop OS is concerned, Apple's Mac OS X may be far better suited to the task.

          Hey, I'd love to give OS-X a try. And if it were $200-300 to try it out and write some exploratory apps for it, I'd snap it up in a heartbeat.

          But trying it out doesn't cost two or three hundred dollars. It costs two or three thousand. Yeah, I know, the eMac is inexpensive hovering around $800, but it's far too slow, comes with a monitor that's too small, a keyboard that I can't seem to make friends with, and a mouse with one-third the number of buttons it should have. Apple also seems to provide only set bundles: This machine comes with these accessories, period. I'd like to make the cost/performance tradeoff decisions myself and pick my own combination of components.

          In short, there doesn't seem to be a way to give OS-X a fair shake without spending a farkload of money.

          Schwab

      • Actually, Windows-support for Norwegian is not good. In Norway there are three official written languages, two forms of Norwegian (bokmål and nynorsk) and sami which a few people in the far north speak.

        Of these three, Windows (and MS-Office) supports only one - namely Bokmål. True this is used by 80% of the people or something, but that still leaves 20%. KDE in contrast supports both nynorsk and bokmål, and thereby it supports 98% or more of the people (sami is spoken by quite few)

        Especially in schools this is important -- there are laws that say you have in primary school the rigth to get all teaching-material in your language, as this law is today interpreted, this means only books, so Windows is allowed. However, in my opinion it would not be unreasonable to count the programs used on the computers (and the helpfiles) as part of "teaching materials". Afterall, the students are commonly required to use many of these programs, and I don't see what relevance it has that the text is on a screen instead of in a book.

    • Localization and language support are going to be an issue here.

      I don't know -- most Norwegians speak English better than we do [cmdrtaco.net].

      Having said that, KDE at least is pretty well internationalized.

      Steve

  • Here's what MS Norway says: (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 15 2002, @01:40PM (#3887381)
    De kommer krypende tilbake..

    Translation: They'll come crawling back.

  • Not exactly (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jaymzter (452402) on Monday July 15 2002, @01:41PM (#3887389) Homepage
    This came out a few days ago. It's not so much that Microsoft is out of the loop, it's just that now there can be some real competition here. Government is one area where I think RMS and the Peruvian [slashdot.org] legislator has it right. There is no excuse for access to government documents to be at the whim of a single company. Information does need to be free (as in speech) when it comes to public matters. I just wish the USA would figure this out.

  • This adds momentum (Score:5, Interesting)

    by stevenbee (227371) on Monday July 15 2002, @01:43PM (#3887414)
    It will be interesting to see if countries which have turned their backs on MSFT "solutions" will pool their knowledge of the alternatives.
    It would be cool to see a multinational "Knowledge Base" to be used by smaller countries wanting to go this route.

    Not as an anti-Microsoft movement, but as a pro-alternative movement.

  • The race is on... in Norway.

    • I think the proper translation from Norwegian for this announcement is:

      We don't like paying as much as we do for your products.
      pretty simply.

      The open source, liberty, GPL, anti-MS folks can get into a lather all we like, but it's really about money.

      If you've seen Service Agreement 6 terms, then you'd make an announcement like this, too. It's win-win: zealots off my back and MS might give us a price break on our crackware.

  • In related news.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by nizo (81281) on Monday July 15 2002, @01:43PM (#3887419) Homepage Journal
    The latest patch to IE no longer allows users to connect to any websites ending in .no for "security reasons". Also, future versions of M$ products will no longer support Norwegian due to "lack of market interest". So how many Linux migrations specialists will Norway be needing in the near future? :-)
    • Thought you all might like this little gem I found in my apache logs:

      tide117.microsoft.com - - [11/Jul/2002:20:21:15 -0500] "GET /signs/porktheone.jpg HTTP/1.0" 200 16076 "http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLin k=233989" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020530"

      Look at the last part identifying the browser.
  • ...Of course, that's the best way...you know, you don't want all of the PR flacks from MS having a chance to spin this in the wrong direction.....or give them a bunch of time to start blackmailing you over license violations....

    Remember all the fuss about the German government?....How about Peru? Making such a decision without letting the sales force get involved is prob. a good thing. I imagine that they (MS) would dig up every thing they could find in order to keep everyone in "lock-step" with their goals.....

    I hope that this does get played up....now that the decision is made, let the chips fall where they may. I expect that there will be a lot of "surprise" defections and I imagine that they will happen pretty fast.

  • "My translation. The race is on." (Score:3, Funny)

    by Rupert (28001) on Monday July 15 2002, @01:47PM (#3887454) Homepage Journal
    If it's accurate, Norwegian is an extremely verbose language. The article looked like it had about 250 words to me.
  • Microsoft dropping an exclusive contract with Microsoft is going to do little to increase competition, for desktops, anyways, because there's nothing out there to compete with their desktop software. KDE and GNOME are poor substitutes for the Windows desktop, which is not saying much at all. What alternatives are there for Office ? StarOffice, KOffice, and OpenOffice are still miles away. And let's not forget the many sites that won't be viewable under Netscape/Mozilla/Konqueror/Opera.

    I'm not saying I'm happy with this, and nobody would be happier to see Windows eradicated from the desktop, but that's our present unhappy state, and Norway's move isn't going to do anything to fix a problem that has been 10 years brewing. Heck, Microsoft has had a near hegemony in desktop software for AT LEAST 7 years, and it's only getting stronger.
    • ...there's nothing out there to compete with their desktop software.

      Not entirely true. Linux is not the only alternative to Microsoft. Apple springs to mind. Yes, there will be significant costs associated with change. That is unavoidable, and almost certainly already discussed by the Norwegian officals who made this decision.

      On a related note, it is not said that they are leaving Microsoft entirely, but that their exclusive contract is at an end. It is entirely possible that may try to negotiate a new, non-exclusive contract with Microsoft. DisclaimerI can't read Norwegian, so I may be missing relevant data.

    • You don't like KDE and Gnome? They both look nicer than Windows and both behave very similar to Windows, of course each has their own little quirks. After using Mozilla at home on Mandrake 8.2 I haven't found a site that won't work. Of course manually installing a flash plugin isn't for the average windows user, it's not a big deal to do. The only thing I noticed that didn't work were the DHTML menus certain sites implemented. Not a bid deal either, usually just means 2 clicks instead of one.
    • Can you please explain what these employees would need that is not available on other OS's.

      Miles away? from what? What does MSO do that is required by all. You would be quite surprised what people think they need and what they truly need.

  • I will not buy this record, it is scratched!

  • New slogan (Score:5, Funny)

    by micje (302653) on Monday July 15 2002, @01:51PM (#3887512) Homepage
    Just Say .no
  • This is a computerized translation so I can't promise anything ... plus I don't speak Norwegian :) Commonwealth said up Microsoft - agree Commonwealth has said up agreement along with Microsoft as donated dataselskapet ace at to contribute shareware at computers at statlige offices. Debattcentralen: Neat and IT work and Ad administrasjonsminister Overcome D. Norman H ) considers contract of sale along with Microsoft has been adverse. He believing bigger competition able afford cheaper dataløsninger both for commonwealth and consumer. We fancy that it agreement we have had along with Microsoft in actuality rendered Microsoft a monopoly of a ambit how we're served along with to a few competition , say Norman at NRK. Norman believing denunciation at agreement along with Microsoft not only that shall afford cheaper dataløsninger , but also qualitative better solutions. (NTB)

  • Microsoft Slashdot Division (Score:5, Insightful)

    by andreaha (593114) on Monday July 15 2002, @01:54PM (#3887530)
    You know, sometimes I think that Microsoft might have their own "Slashdot division" for l33t Microsoft haX0rs who post to stories like this in Microsoft's defense. No, the opposite of Microsoft is not "Linux". And no, there is no logic in claiming that "people will just use Windows anyway" or what you're saying. What just happened is not necessarily a defeat for Microsoft or a win for Linux. It's just that government employees in Norway have the right to choose Pegasus or Eudora or Opera, instead of the God Forsakened Outlook. It about a freedom of choice, which encourages competition. Yes, maybe someone will still use Microsoft products. Heck, most will! But they can choose not to, and that's IMO a big step in the right direction. Andy
  • It seems to me that most governments would do more for furthering the independence from proprietary software by increasing dependence on open standards. For instance, if I were President for a day (mwahaha!), the first thing I woudl do is issue an executive order stating that no agency, department or NGO may use .doc formatted texts. Where documents are purely text, they must be sent in plain ASCII or rtf formats. Suddenly the "need" for Word is lessened considerably. Need spreadsheets? Send tab-delimited files everywhere. I don't have all the details worked out but it seems to me the reason why governments and the like are so dependent on MSFT is because they are dependent on what the software produces not how the software performs.

    • Re:The key is standards, not software (Score:5, Insightful)

      by IamTheRealMike (537420) on Monday July 15 2002, @02:11PM (#3887686) Homepage
      Nah, I'd use my new godlike powers to force MS to document the formats properly. There's nothing intrinisically wrong with the .doc format as far as I know, certainly forcing the use of ASCII or RTF (even xhtml) would be a step backwards in some respects. The problem isn't Microsoft technologies some of which are good, the problem is that people get locked in to them
      • There's nothing intrinisically wrong with the .doc format as far as I know

        Sure there is. Any decent format should be both reverse & forward compatable. If you take a version 4 file and load it into the version 3 program, then any new features should be ignored (probably with a warning). This allows people who haven't yet upgraded to handle files which have been saved by those who have. Going the other way should be totally transparent, except perhaps if you try to save the new version - Have you tried to open a Word 2.0 document in the latest version of Word?

        I'd also say that a good file format for text heavy data (word processors, spreadsheets, presentations etc) should be text based. This makes convertors easy to write. I wrote a program to convert Wordstar documents to HTML. A very easy program to write, because the wordstar format was basically plain text with extra formatting information. It would be impossible to write a similar program for Word in reasonable time.

    • Good idea, bad implementation. RTF and TSV are not the best formats. What happens to the formulas, graphs, drawings, and formatting (yes formatting matters) in an Excel document when you save it as .TSV? They disappear.

      There need to be open, documented formats for this stuff, that open source apps use [mostly] correctly, for such a switch to work. Otherwise you're left with proprietary = productivity vs. open = time waster. Guess which one makes more business sense in the short term (which is all that bean counters ever look at anyway)?

  • Translation (Score:5, Informative)

    by enigma971 (593043) on Monday July 15 2002, @02:00PM (#3887586)
    The article is translated at desktoplinux. http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS6576907451.html [desktoplinux.com]

  • Bork! Bork! (Score:3, Funny)

    by r_j_prahad (309298) <`moc.liamtoh' `ta' `daharp_j_r'> on Monday July 15 2002, @02:00PM (#3887587)
    Vell, dey got de lyingMonopoly outta de gobernmint, now if dey cud only get de lye outta de fish.
  • One Degree of Separation!

  • Victor Normann WANTS competition (Score:3, Informative)

    by hta (7593) on Monday July 15 2002, @08:28PM (#3891111) Homepage Journal
    this is the same minister who bought a million dollars' worth of airline tickets from an airline that hasn't started yet, just to make sure he had an alternative to the (partly government-owned) semi-monopoly called Scandinavian.
    It'll be fun to see what happens next.
    • Okay, lets see. They realized they wernt getting the cost-savings they could have in a truely robust, competative market. So they are biting the hand of their drug dealer.

      And then everybody complains - hey, they're the only ones that sell suitable drugs! Well, DUH - because nobody's bothered asserting their desire to purchase drugs from another dealer.

      Has the concept of 'investing in your future' totally gone out the window? Short term pain, long term gain? Hello, is anybody listening to how stupid people sound when they're saying that MS is the only suitable thing? Isn't it self-evident that the kind of attitude like, "Well, what else is there," is *why* there isn't much else in terms of choice?

      On what planet do people live when they think, for some reason, MS is the only company *capable* of producing an OS with the 'ease of use' Windows has?

      (As an aside, but related to the 'Well, what else can they use' quotes, does ANYONE realize how much sweeter life would be had MS not been able to squeeze beOS out of existence?)
    • Lets see... who you gonna call when Open Source stuff breaks? IBM? HP/Compaq? Sun? Redhat? SuSE? Caldera? One of the thousands of consultancy companies that would love to sell you time? And, you know, if one of them wont solve it, you can call another one.

      So... who you gonna call when Microsoft stuff breaks and Microsoft refuses to fix it? The DOJ?
    • Or do they go...Open Source ? Who you gonna call when stuff breaks?

      Um, how about any of hundreds of enormously competent consulting firms who specialize in open source, have competitive rates, actually answer the phone and can actually fix the problem rather than tell you to wait for a service pack which may or may not do the job.
      • Wrong, on slashdot bad news from Microsoft's point of view are rarely posted because everyone is busy whining about monopolies and being afraid.

        You don't win a war with whining and being afraid.

        XBox will end the myth of Microsoft being invincible and will end the whatever-vaporware-they-put-out-it-will-be-the-sta ndard talk.

        Bill Gates and all other high execs are selling as much shares as possible, Microsoft owes their own employees tens of billions in outstanding stock options and Microsoft will make losses as soon as they will have to pay taxes (either because their stock-option house of cards break down or the government closes this loophole, whatever happens first).

        I don't know why everybody is so pessimistic these days.

        The big days of Microsft are over, they will be the next Novell.

    • I believe that this is the first Western country to take this stance. The German government seems to be under the influence of free software zealots, but they haven't ditched Microsoft yet. Norway might be the best test of what happens when avoiding Microsoft products becomes government policy.
      • Norway has opted not to prolong an exclusive contract with microsoft. No statement regarding of what that may mean for what they buy in the future.
      • Germany has made a deal to buy Linux systems in a major way and on an important location - for the IT structure of their parliament.
      Methinks Germany is far ahead of Norway.

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