Madness with lots of Zeroes at Robert Pogson

An article on ZDnet caught my eye, “Vienna Hobbles Open Source”. Sheesh! Vienna was in the process of migrating to GNU/Linux with OpenOffice.org from 2000. They had about 1000 machines of 32000 migrated when a decision was taken to migrate to Vista/2007. Madness! The rationale? They needed IE to access a particular web app that will have support for FireFox in 2009. They could have paid a fraction of the cost of Vista to accelerate the support for FireFox. Madness! Madness with lots of zeroes.

The original article is here with babelfish’s (strange) version here.

Such is politics. Politicians have the power always but sometimes not the wisdom to wield power well. Anyone who says IEness is not lock-in should read these articles. This is how M$ makes tons of money giving away a product for $0 and violating standards. TFA seems to suggest Vienna is only accounting for licences. What will they do when they find that other OS crawls on their current hardware, add another zero to the cost? How many new toys could they buy or how much of the taxpayers’ money could be saved with those zeroes? If your taxes go to Vienna, you should complain before it is too late.

My Mission

My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. I do not care whether my solution is the same as yours. I like to think for myself.

My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. I have been blessed by working in schools where students and school systems have benefited by good, modular software easily installed in most systems.

I have shown GNU/Linux to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers over the years and will continue in some way doing that until I die in spite of the opposition.