> González Waite said that all of the large proprietary software companies ""are big bullies"". He has been called into the US embassy and been threatened because Mexico was using technology that was not from the US; those threats were dialed back when he explained that the government also used software and services from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Various companies use the US government to bully other countries, but they also use license audits as a reaction to projects that move to open-source software. Every time a successful switch happened, ""six months later there was an audit""; having the right legal team helps defend against those tactics, he said.
It matches also what I heard from someone working for the Dutch government. He said that whenever they needed a new software system, that Microsoft would send multiple consultants for "free" which all could "help" the transition to a new service from Microsoft.
There was an interesting story with the LiMux[1] ( Linux & Munich) project. The local government in Munich used it for quite some time. But than Microsoft came and installed there German Headquarters in Munich. With that new headquarter and enough lobbying, LiMux was forced out by the then new government just the moment it got "successful".
LiMux always gets mentioned in such topics... it's an interesting story and as I've actually worked there early in my career I've written a few times about what the actual issues were and why it failed - you might read through [1].
tl;dr: LiMux didn't just fail due to politics (although politics did play a large role and I will forever dislike Dieter Reiter for a multitude of reasons, LiMux being among them), it was set up for failure from the beginning, mostly budget related.
I worked for a very old school manufacturing company based in Switzerland.
We wanted to roll our own IoT platform for sensors in the factory.
We spoke to MS, what they had was a load of garbage, so we decided to carry on as we were.
I later found out that the MS CEO called the CEO of this company and from then on we were fighting every day as to why we weren’t using MS. This was a private company, not even a big spend, yet they got the CEO involved on sales calls? That’s when I realised how corrupt it was an org.
CERN (also in CH) made a half-effort to switch away from MS a few years ago. MS had started charging them a crazy amount of money. They got a few people working on it and even switched a few of the back end services. And actually the open source stuff worked amazingly well!
Then like a year later they doubled down on MS products (right after a new IT head came in). The IT people I spoke to had no idea why this happened but no one seemed to think going back to MS was a good idea.
When I was involved in high-energy physics (doing some pretty pedestrian software stuff), CERN switched from its beloved Hypernews system to something based on MS Sharepoint. Everybody was baffled about why they would do that and hated the new system.
It seems like Hypernews was only turned off in 2021, much much later than planned, but they did do it.
The CERN experiments and CERN IT have contributed quite a lot to open source. Part of this is necessity: when your experiment draws thousands of collaborators from hundreds of institutions and dozens of different funding agencies it's really difficult to deal with licensing fees.
Scientific Linux is discontinued, though. A few experiments went to CentOS and (when that was moved to CentOS Stream) to AlmaLinux. But practically speaking the OS the experiments are using is a RHEL-like base with almost everything important overwritten via LD_LIBRARY_PATH, PATH, etc. and pointing to a fuse-mounted file system called cvmfs
For better or worse this allows O(weekly) releases that change what would normally be core components of the OS.
It's kind of weird how all the interesting stuff at CERN is linux and open source, and then all the IT infrastructure is outdated MS services and Windows.
Small companies matter because the transition to non proprietary tech is potentially simpler and thus more likely to succeed. Add a few success stories from small players in the same market, making them more competitive might raise the attention of bigger players.
Meanwhile, all major OEMs, and OS vendors routinely use BSDs and Linux distributions in some form, yet it is the same business as usual as 30 years ago, reverse engineering hardware support.
The only "Linux Desktop" ready desktops and laptops to find at local shopping mall for normies are Android and ChromeOS devices, likewise in out-of-the-box experience for hardware support for peripherals.
The government could order Linux ready hardware in bulk. Also, 30 years ago, normies were able to handle DOS, which is perfectly sufficient for bureaucratic applications. They'd be able to do so after two weeks of training even nowadays.
> Also, 30 years ago, normies were able to handle DOS (...)
"Normies" from the 80s do not represent the dissemination of personal computing we experienced in the last 10-15 years. So far we have one or two generations whose experience with personal computing is limited to downloading apps from app stores and ,at best, check webpages. That is very far from what people used DOS for.
While my DMV and TSA use some kind of green on black terminal system, I think this is still kind of optimistic for work more complex than sequential entry. Maybe something like q4os could be employed for a stable GUI. From what I’ve seen in government work, groupware and chat systems are a definite force multiplier over a locked dumb terminal
You’re right let’s call them muggles, which has the added double-elitism of “I understood that reference” as well as the in-story elitism of the wizards. /s
Most of these companies are absolutely total bullies. They’ll go to your board, CEO, governor, senator, mayor, audit firm, wherever. Punish your friends and elevate your enemies.
A big part of being a CIO or CTO is having and maintaining relationships with key suppliers. This is especially true with SaaS/IaaS, where your business is valued based on whatever bullshit churn metrics the company cooked up. Your $2M deal may have way bigger impact on a Sales VP bonus than you think. You have to be a different kind of asshole to maintain control of these guys than in the old software world.
"Economists who have studied the software industry concluded that the value of a software business is about equal to the total costs of its customers switching out to the competition; both are equal to the net present value of future payments from the customers to the software vendor. This means that an incumbent in a maturing market, such as Microsoft with its Office product, can grow faster than the market only if it can find ways to lock in its customers more tightly. There are some ifs and buts that hedge this theory around, but the basic idea is well known to software industry executives. This explains Bill G's comment that `We came at this thinking about music, but then we realized that e-mail and documents were far more interesting domains'."
He did, but the light blue touchpaper website is still up for me. It is the collective blog of the security group at Cambridge university, so I would guess likely to continue.
> Another part of the project was to move away from Oracle and to PostgreSQL. That change led to various threats and intimidation from the company when it learned of the change, González Waite said. "They told me that the entire passport system of the country was going to fall down" and that it would be his fault that Mexico could not let anyone into or out of the country. "Guess what? That didn't happen."
Larry Ellison, never change. It'll be interesting to see how they ruin TikTok if their bid succeeds.
The article uses the phrase "no brainer" but then explains why it very much requires brainer when making IT decisions.
License costs are a factor, yes, but they are not the only cost, and in most cases not the significant one.
In some cases the offerings are similar enough that it moves the needle. PostgreSQL for example is a good candidate- Oracle is expensive, and the number of people interacting with it is limited. Plus the fundamentals of Oracle and PostgreSQL are more-or-less the same.
On the other extreme the cost of training and support dwarfs the license cost. If all staff come with knowing how to use say Windows and Excel,but require training and support for say Linux Desktop and Libre Office, then the "free" thing costs more.
It's no accident that OSS has done better on the backend than the front end.
Success for OSS means putting the right product in the right place, taking all things (not just license cost) into account.
(Aside: corruption is a red herring, corrupt officials and companies can be corrupt regardless of software license.)
Training is another cash cow from big tech, on many levels. It is a bonus for resellers and partners, binding the ecosystem together. And the maze of certifications that expire every other year or so makes big tech corps even more money, and has everybody invested. It is also a useful sales tool, because they don't cost much and can be thrown in as a discount. You can also achieve a kind of vendor lock in on the career skills more easily with certifications. Legions of Microsoft technicians are pretty much stuck in the ecosystem, because if they switch their certs and experience don't mean anything anymore. Not everybody has the technical chops to switch ecosystem every year. Even more pressure to not move to open source (or another vendor).
If you think Microsoft makes it sales because its buyers are putting the right product in the right place, then you haven't seen a lot of Microsoft sales. This is absolutely not how it works. And it doesn't have a lot to do with corruption either.
The people making the decision to buy an IT product are often not its users, and often not that much concerned with making the best short/mid/long term deal in the interest of the business. They are very much concerned in making the best deal for their own careers, and as these are the people who buy the thing some companies have competently specialized in optimizing sales given that fact. Oracle has a reputation for this, and Microsoft as well, but all big tech does it (just some do it better than others). Of course, there's some nuance, you can't get away with it if your product doesn't work.
For a lot of software in megacorps, it makes more sense if you look at 'trained in X' as a kind of magic spell that has no real relation with the ability to do a job.
If the end user says: I have no training in X, that mostly means they don't want to work with X or don't want to accept extra workload related to X. The company then provides training in X, another magic spell meaning money was spent so the company officially did something, and the excuse about not being trained won't work anymore. Blame has now been shifted from the company to the worker or even the end user. So training being expensive has better optics.
Big tools like MSOffice have the ability to be put in hiring contracts: Everyone is assumed to know how to use it, so the company is allowed to deny the no training excuse without spending money.
Actual training for the whole company is more like a networking event, and if you ignore the trainer and read the manual or watch some youtube, you may actually learn what you're supposed to. Once in a while, you get a trainer who knows what they are talking about. But all that is secondary.
> If the end user says: I have no training in X, that mostly means they don't want to work with X or don't want to accept extra workload related to X.
This has largely been my experience working in IT as well. I think folks in the tech world take for granted how "normal" continuous learning is for us, and how undesirable it is for others in the workplace. Your average office drone very much does not want to learn something new. They want to use what they always have, and keep the same workload.
Even just attempting a switch from Windows to macOS, when their workflow is almost entirely a web browser, damn near caused a full on worker revolt at one organization I worked at. Training didn't fix it, because the desire to learn wasn't there in the first place.
That's the kind of inertia that needs to be overcome for something like open source adoption at the end-user level. It's comparatively simple for the back-end to transition, but without an already willing user-base, the front-end average office worker is not going to achieve the same level of productivity for a really long time.
> Big tools like MSOffice have the ability to be put in hiring contracts: Everyone is assumed to know how to use it, so the company is allowed to deny the no training excuse without spending money.
I would claim that if you haven't worked in the finance or insurance industry (or some related industry) for quite some time, you very likely don't know how to use Excel (I have a feeling that a similar points holds for Word and Powerpoint with respect to some industries, but I think for these applications this phenomenon is a little bit less pronounced).
Indeed, I'd claim that most books about how to use Excel are simply crap. To just give you a glimpse how to use Excel, here some internet classic on this topic:
You Suck at Excel - Joel Spolsky
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxBg4sMusIg
Really understanding Excel is life task, similar to really understanding modern C++.
It is much more economical to invest in local open source people to take care of the tech need than big corp. Big corp are notorious unreliable over long period of time, their incentives are NOT aligned with the customers, only with profit and/or 3 letter agencies.
In a developing country, you really want to be careful with your dollars/imports. Local labor is almost certainly cheaper and more abundant. The question is, can they do it all. If they can you save dollars and you build local skills that transfer, a double benefit. If they can't, yes you might be forced to buy and import the tech.
"Third, there are often large costs to users from
switching technologies, which leads to lock-in.
Such markets may remain very profitable, even
where (incompatible) competitors are very cheap
to produce. In fact, one of the main results of
network economic theory is that the net present
value of the customer base should equal the total
costs of their switching their business to a com-
petitor [19]."
> All this talk about having to train users... then the companies change the interfaces so much that even power users get confused.
I don't think this is a realistic assessment of the problem. Windows 11 slremains very much recognizable since the Windows 7 days, and the transition from Windows 10 to Windows 11 was seamless. Moreso with walled gardens like macOS.
In the meantime you can't sneeze in the direction of a mainstream windows manager for Linux without it introducing radical changes, not to mention how all distros are heavily fragmented and sometimes even customized.
"corruption is a red herring, corrupt officials and companies can be corrupt regardless of software license."
Corruption implies that somebody is making enough money to pay bribes. Therefore, corruption will naturally be to the advantage of those that make the most money from the least quality offering.
Not really. The company's not really paying bribes out of their own money though. They're paying it out of the revenue flow from that sale.
In other words "give me this govt contract and I'll route n% of it back to you".
n% has to be "reasonable" or there's no commercial point in offering the bribe to begin with.
If there's a cash-flow issue (you gotta pay the bribe before getting the contract) then I guess it favors deep pockets.
And liability, as mentioned in the OP, is a big issue. When you find a bug in Oracle that kills your DBMS, you open a ticket and Oracle has to provide a fix (or at least a workaround) based on the SLA.
Postgres developers, as the license says, have NO OBLIGATIONS TO
PROVIDE MAINTENANCE, SUPPORT, UPDATES, ENHANCEMENTS, OR MODIFICATIONS. This means you have to do one of three options:
- hire Postgres experts into every ministry. Not very efficient.
- create a single government agency that provides support to the rest of the government. Might easily lose efficiency, as any other bureaucracy
- create a commercial support provider that has to earn money by selling Postgres support to private enterprises. Again, there's a risk that it will start charging the highest possible price for its services.
I actually managed to get Oracle to fix a bug once. This in quite a big organization, with a huge amount of money going to oracle. I could explain them exactly what was wrong, how to fix it, and still they denied the very existence of the bug (and cited the expensive half-working workaround other companies used at the same time). Then they ignored what I told them and fixed it in a way that did not fix it. Then they fixed it, and did not allow us to use the fix until it was officialized in a real service pack.
The whole process took multiple months, reading all contracts I couldget my hands on, answering the phone at 3AM, a lot of patience, and treating Oracle as a student who was 2 weeks late with their homework. After that, all oraclies at the organization were completely awed because I was the first person ever who managed to get a usefull new patch out of oracle's service.
If you want results, get Postgres. If you want someone to blame, get Oracle.
> If you want results, get Postgres. If you want someone to blame, get Oracle.
I've twice offered fixes to Oracle (didn't even get a thank you); countless times I've had to find workarounds; and I've lost endless hours working with support to get things fixed.
I have no respect for Oracle software. It gives me nothing but headaches. I can't really just blame Oracle, because I have to keep my organisation working. I just wish I could get rid of it.
> If you want results, get Postgres. If you want someone to blame, get Oracle.
It's the someone to blame part that's important in big corporate bureaucracy. It's being able to tell your boss "We've done everything we can, it's in Oracle's hands now" limits your own liability vs. "We need to fix this ourselves, and haven't solved the problem yet."
Now circle back to the main thread - you invest some multi-million budget yearly to have support, but you get just an excuse.
People are expensive, but not "oracle expensive". Plus there are many smaller shops that sell support for opensource databases, I'd you don't want to hire senior people.
Yes, we have received reasonable and timely help when a wild ORA-600 appeared (with an Oracle engineer arriving on site to diagnose and apply the fix), but you are right, we had an 80-core POWER machine running this database.
It is not bureaucracy vs magical efficiency. There is the same issue in any large organisation, even corporations. In practice I don’t think it would be as bad as you suggest. Having an agency focused on providing support instead of sending money to shareholders also limits other kinds of inefficiencies.
> Again, there's a risk that it will start charging the highest possible price for its services.
That is exactly the situation we’re in, where governments are tied and dependent on single providers (be it Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, or others). This solution would create competition opportunities by opening a market, it does not need to be a monopoly.
> Again, there's a risk that it will start charging the highest possible price for its services.
So you switch to a different commercial service provider, problem solved. The software is open source, they can't lock you down in a predatory contract. Worst-case scenario, you can always choose to fork it yourself.
“ create a single government agency that provides support to the rest of the government. Might easily lose efficiency, as any other bureaucracy”. As opposed to huge corporations that are known to be the pinnacle of efficiency…
You missed one: hire one of the many existing providers of Postgres support services. Postgres have a big list of these providers. [0]
I can't comment on how well they perform in practice compared to the conventional monopolised support model that closed-source software tends to offer - perhaps better, perhaps worse - but at least in principle, the solution is there.
I think at this moment all governments should start funding the open source foundations so that the foundations can train as well as retain good programming talent to keep the important open source software maintained. I think it will serve better in the long term to the government departments as well as the citizens.
Damn. I was aware US technology companies were parasitic, but this article really sheds light on the extent of it. No wonder they hate free software so much.
This was a pleasant and encouraging article to read.
I do think that open source is slowly growing in traditional enterprises, although I think recent interest in cloud computing and artificial intelligence has pushed a lot of software contracting out of the company. Open source migrations might become harder in the future when the enterprise no longer controls their own databases and models.
Question I ask my self a lot, how much my government spends a month for Microsoft stuff. This money could go to education and health care, which both are in terrible shape. Friend who works for government tell me that it’s almost impossible to find out this number. That’s how “transparent” it is.
> The team took advantage of the shift to restructure the database ""because we found that our storage provider was being a little bit naughty"", storing the data three or four times in order to charge more money
Uh... Without knowing the exact details, my first thought that "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing"
My slogan for using FOSS for govt is "citizen owned software".
At one time, I anticipated the rise of FOSS consortiums. Jurisdictions with similar needs would join together to share the cost and risks.
Canada, Mexico, USA each have 1,000s of juridictions. Surely at any one time there's a handful planning a technology refresh of some domain.
One easy example I know of is property tax administration. There's a bunch of counties of similar size all doing the same thing, but all running off in separate directions. Vendor options are complicated, expensive, and have lock-in. Surely it'd be beneficial to pool their resources and own their stack?
Another is election administration. US counties used to do all it themselves. Candidate filings, voter registration, poll books, yadda, yadda. Now it's all outsourced. Lower service for higher prices. (The "certification" process was captured, serving to protect incumbents. Natch.)
Any way.
I was a grunt for a member of a consortium FOSS project. It was awful. "The Logic of Collective Action" explained a great deal of the pathology. Also, Byran Cantrill's quote (wrt Open Solaris) about "having the freedom but not the power to fork" was spot on for our project.
Any way.
Does any one have examples or game plan or vision for realizing more FOSS in govt? I'm not quite ready to give up on the dream.
> It turned out that various contracted companies had corruptly put the software licenses they bought for the government into their own names, leading to a lock-in for their services.
This is a dirty trick I ran into in [US] state procurement, in a state known for widespread corruption. It's basically a no-show job where you just hold a bunch of long-term contracts for the state, and claim a monthly "support" fee for doing it. Even worse, you got to negotiate those contracts (and set up your kickbacks or self-dealing.) Bonus points for needing to call the contractor in order to have the contractor call support, and the contractor taking a fee for doing it.
Endless avenues for corruption with a setup like this.
> The team took advantage of the shift to restructure the database "because we found that our storage provider was being a little bit naughty", storing the data three or four times in order to charge more money.
This is the worst kind of graft and should result in criminal charges. The software development industry is still in a nascent stage and our tools are great but professional standards are still undeveloped.
> Technology is often seen as the problem, he said, but he generally found that the problems were due to using obsolete technology and a lack of knowledge about the data being handled. There is often no documentation of the data and its structure, coupled with no understanding of that by the people in charge of it. Poor leadership in the agencies is another barrier; there needs to be a champion for a change of this sort, who understands what needs to be done and properly assigns people to work on it.
> storing the data three or four times in order to charge more money.
Given that they’re not disputing that it was being stored that many times, then it’s plausible the vendor was using replication as their error recovery strategy which isn’t an invalid choice. Erasure coding is a more difficult alternative to implement. This is too short a sentence with too little detail to draw any actual conclusion from. Heck, maybe the software even had a configuration option but there was no in-house expertise to configure it properly.
I found this part interesting:
> González Waite said that all of the large proprietary software companies ""are big bullies"". He has been called into the US embassy and been threatened because Mexico was using technology that was not from the US; those threats were dialed back when he explained that the government also used software and services from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Various companies use the US government to bully other countries, but they also use license audits as a reaction to projects that move to open-source software. Every time a successful switch happened, ""six months later there was an audit""; having the right legal team helps defend against those tactics, he said.
It matches also what I heard from someone working for the Dutch government. He said that whenever they needed a new software system, that Microsoft would send multiple consultants for "free" which all could "help" the transition to a new service from Microsoft.
There was an interesting story with the LiMux[1] ( Linux & Munich) project. The local government in Munich used it for quite some time. But than Microsoft came and installed there German Headquarters in Munich. With that new headquarter and enough lobbying, LiMux was forced out by the then new government just the moment it got "successful".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
LiMux always gets mentioned in such topics... it's an interesting story and as I've actually worked there early in my career I've written a few times about what the actual issues were and why it failed - you might read through [1].
tl;dr: LiMux didn't just fail due to politics (although politics did play a large role and I will forever dislike Dieter Reiter for a multitude of reasons, LiMux being among them), it was set up for failure from the beginning, mostly budget related.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I worked for a very old school manufacturing company based in Switzerland. We wanted to roll our own IoT platform for sensors in the factory. We spoke to MS, what they had was a load of garbage, so we decided to carry on as we were. I later found out that the MS CEO called the CEO of this company and from then on we were fighting every day as to why we weren’t using MS. This was a private company, not even a big spend, yet they got the CEO involved on sales calls? That’s when I realised how corrupt it was an org.
CERN (also in CH) made a half-effort to switch away from MS a few years ago. MS had started charging them a crazy amount of money. They got a few people working on it and even switched a few of the back end services. And actually the open source stuff worked amazingly well!
Then like a year later they doubled down on MS products (right after a new IT head came in). The IT people I spoke to had no idea why this happened but no one seemed to think going back to MS was a good idea.
Discussed more here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41717607
When I was involved in high-energy physics (doing some pretty pedestrian software stuff), CERN switched from its beloved Hypernews system to something based on MS Sharepoint. Everybody was baffled about why they would do that and hated the new system.
It seems like Hypernews was only turned off in 2021, much much later than planned, but they did do it.
They even published Scientific Linux, a CentOS like RHEL fork.
The CERN experiments and CERN IT have contributed quite a lot to open source. Part of this is necessity: when your experiment draws thousands of collaborators from hundreds of institutions and dozens of different funding agencies it's really difficult to deal with licensing fees.
Scientific Linux is discontinued, though. A few experiments went to CentOS and (when that was moved to CentOS Stream) to AlmaLinux. But practically speaking the OS the experiments are using is a RHEL-like base with almost everything important overwritten via LD_LIBRARY_PATH, PATH, etc. and pointing to a fuse-mounted file system called cvmfs
https://github.com/cvmfs/cvmfs
For better or worse this allows O(weekly) releases that change what would normally be core components of the OS.
It's kind of weird how all the interesting stuff at CERN is linux and open source, and then all the IT infrastructure is outdated MS services and Windows.
> We spoke to MS,
They are out to lock you in to ensure sustained cashflow, not solve your problem in the most impartial and cost efficient way for you.
Classic example of this was when Dell use WebObjects for their shop-front --- Microsoft was so put out that they threatened their licensing deals.
Small companies matter because the transition to non proprietary tech is potentially simpler and thus more likely to succeed. Add a few success stories from small players in the same market, making them more competitive might raise the attention of bigger players.
This is absolutely the reason. This is why startups exist, new things are easier in small orgs for a variety of reasons.
Meanwhile, all major OEMs, and OS vendors routinely use BSDs and Linux distributions in some form, yet it is the same business as usual as 30 years ago, reverse engineering hardware support.
The only "Linux Desktop" ready desktops and laptops to find at local shopping mall for normies are Android and ChromeOS devices, likewise in out-of-the-box experience for hardware support for peripherals.
The government could order Linux ready hardware in bulk. Also, 30 years ago, normies were able to handle DOS, which is perfectly sufficient for bureaucratic applications. They'd be able to do so after two weeks of training even nowadays.
> Also, 30 years ago, normies were able to handle DOS (...)
"Normies" from the 80s do not represent the dissemination of personal computing we experienced in the last 10-15 years. So far we have one or two generations whose experience with personal computing is limited to downloading apps from app stores and ,at best, check webpages. That is very far from what people used DOS for.
unless you're saying they are significantly stupider, they can learn
they can, if someone takes their smartphones away for a while.
While my DMV and TSA use some kind of green on black terminal system, I think this is still kind of optimistic for work more complex than sequential entry. Maybe something like q4os could be employed for a stable GUI. From what I’ve seen in government work, groupware and chat systems are a definite force multiplier over a locked dumb terminal
people who used computers in the 80's/early 90's were not "normies" at all
[flagged]
I guess, makes you happy?
Do you think that calling people "normies" is at all useful?
normie is just online slang for normal people
It is to me.
Being called normal is hardly a slur.
You’re right let’s call them muggles, which has the added double-elitism of “I understood that reference” as well as the in-story elitism of the wizards. /s
Most of these companies are absolutely total bullies. They’ll go to your board, CEO, governor, senator, mayor, audit firm, wherever. Punish your friends and elevate your enemies.
A big part of being a CIO or CTO is having and maintaining relationships with key suppliers. This is especially true with SaaS/IaaS, where your business is valued based on whatever bullshit churn metrics the company cooked up. Your $2M deal may have way bigger impact on a Sales VP bonus than you think. You have to be a different kind of asshole to maintain control of these guys than in the old software world.
Economic network theory:
"Economists who have studied the software industry concluded that the value of a software business is about equal to the total costs of its customers switching out to the competition; both are equal to the net present value of future payments from the customers to the software vendor. This means that an incumbent in a maturing market, such as Microsoft with its Office product, can grow faster than the market only if it can find ways to lock in its customers more tightly. There are some ifs and buts that hedge this theory around, but the basic idea is well known to software industry executives. This explains Bill G's comment that `We came at this thinking about music, but then we realized that e-mail and documents were far more interesting domains'."
Ohhh - do you have a link ? That is interesting…
Also it strikes me that as a developer my investment of learning is more in code d So it’s easier to switch
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/archive/rja14/tcpa-faq.html
Quote from here and the idea is from this https://www.researchgate.net/publication/200167344_Informati...
This is tangential, but seeing a Ross Anderson article reminded me...
Does anyone know if <https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/> is permanently gone or just temporarily down?
He died last year, so it is gone I guess.
He did, but the light blue touchpaper website is still up for me. It is the collective blog of the security group at Cambridge university, so I would guess likely to continue.
> Another part of the project was to move away from Oracle and to PostgreSQL. That change led to various threats and intimidation from the company when it learned of the change, González Waite said. "They told me that the entire passport system of the country was going to fall down" and that it would be his fault that Mexico could not let anyone into or out of the country. "Guess what? That didn't happen."
Larry Ellison, never change. It'll be interesting to see how they ruin TikTok if their bid succeeds.
The cockroach is one of the most resilient species. Some of them are even resistant to fire and can survive for several minutes without oxygen.
Humans can survive for several minutes without oxygen as well.
The article uses the phrase "no brainer" but then explains why it very much requires brainer when making IT decisions.
License costs are a factor, yes, but they are not the only cost, and in most cases not the significant one.
In some cases the offerings are similar enough that it moves the needle. PostgreSQL for example is a good candidate- Oracle is expensive, and the number of people interacting with it is limited. Plus the fundamentals of Oracle and PostgreSQL are more-or-less the same.
On the other extreme the cost of training and support dwarfs the license cost. If all staff come with knowing how to use say Windows and Excel,but require training and support for say Linux Desktop and Libre Office, then the "free" thing costs more.
It's no accident that OSS has done better on the backend than the front end.
Success for OSS means putting the right product in the right place, taking all things (not just license cost) into account.
(Aside: corruption is a red herring, corrupt officials and companies can be corrupt regardless of software license.)
Training is another cash cow from big tech, on many levels. It is a bonus for resellers and partners, binding the ecosystem together. And the maze of certifications that expire every other year or so makes big tech corps even more money, and has everybody invested. It is also a useful sales tool, because they don't cost much and can be thrown in as a discount. You can also achieve a kind of vendor lock in on the career skills more easily with certifications. Legions of Microsoft technicians are pretty much stuck in the ecosystem, because if they switch their certs and experience don't mean anything anymore. Not everybody has the technical chops to switch ecosystem every year. Even more pressure to not move to open source (or another vendor).
If you think Microsoft makes it sales because its buyers are putting the right product in the right place, then you haven't seen a lot of Microsoft sales. This is absolutely not how it works. And it doesn't have a lot to do with corruption either.
The people making the decision to buy an IT product are often not its users, and often not that much concerned with making the best short/mid/long term deal in the interest of the business. They are very much concerned in making the best deal for their own careers, and as these are the people who buy the thing some companies have competently specialized in optimizing sales given that fact. Oracle has a reputation for this, and Microsoft as well, but all big tech does it (just some do it better than others). Of course, there's some nuance, you can't get away with it if your product doesn't work.
For a lot of software in megacorps, it makes more sense if you look at 'trained in X' as a kind of magic spell that has no real relation with the ability to do a job.
If the end user says: I have no training in X, that mostly means they don't want to work with X or don't want to accept extra workload related to X. The company then provides training in X, another magic spell meaning money was spent so the company officially did something, and the excuse about not being trained won't work anymore. Blame has now been shifted from the company to the worker or even the end user. So training being expensive has better optics.
Big tools like MSOffice have the ability to be put in hiring contracts: Everyone is assumed to know how to use it, so the company is allowed to deny the no training excuse without spending money.
Actual training for the whole company is more like a networking event, and if you ignore the trainer and read the manual or watch some youtube, you may actually learn what you're supposed to. Once in a while, you get a trainer who knows what they are talking about. But all that is secondary.
> If the end user says: I have no training in X, that mostly means they don't want to work with X or don't want to accept extra workload related to X.
This has largely been my experience working in IT as well. I think folks in the tech world take for granted how "normal" continuous learning is for us, and how undesirable it is for others in the workplace. Your average office drone very much does not want to learn something new. They want to use what they always have, and keep the same workload.
Even just attempting a switch from Windows to macOS, when their workflow is almost entirely a web browser, damn near caused a full on worker revolt at one organization I worked at. Training didn't fix it, because the desire to learn wasn't there in the first place.
That's the kind of inertia that needs to be overcome for something like open source adoption at the end-user level. It's comparatively simple for the back-end to transition, but without an already willing user-base, the front-end average office worker is not going to achieve the same level of productivity for a really long time.
I don't want to learn something new either but you have no choice if you want to stay employed.
> Big tools like MSOffice have the ability to be put in hiring contracts: Everyone is assumed to know how to use it, so the company is allowed to deny the no training excuse without spending money.
I would claim that if you haven't worked in the finance or insurance industry (or some related industry) for quite some time, you very likely don't know how to use Excel (I have a feeling that a similar points holds for Word and Powerpoint with respect to some industries, but I think for these applications this phenomenon is a little bit less pronounced).
Indeed, I'd claim that most books about how to use Excel are simply crap. To just give you a glimpse how to use Excel, here some internet classic on this topic:
Really understanding Excel is life task, similar to really understanding modern C++.And then MS makes changed like the ribbons for MA Office and you start training again.
Most people don’t know much about the OS or Office, so you have to train them anyway for the companies use cases and non standard programs.
MS just seems convenient, but isn’t. In large companies every update brings problems.
Things like Teams change the UI quite often which leads to support questions.
So for me the training costs don’t differ that much.
It is much more economical to invest in local open source people to take care of the tech need than big corp. Big corp are notorious unreliable over long period of time, their incentives are NOT aligned with the customers, only with profit and/or 3 letter agencies.
I still hate the new ribbon.
Look up balance-of-payments-constrained growth.
In a developing country, you really want to be careful with your dollars/imports. Local labor is almost certainly cheaper and more abundant. The question is, can they do it all. If they can you save dollars and you build local skills that transfer, a double benefit. If they can't, yes you might be forced to buy and import the tech.
"Third, there are often large costs to users from switching technologies, which leads to lock-in. Such markets may remain very profitable, even where (incompatible) competitors are very cheap to produce. In fact, one of the main results of network economic theory is that the net present value of the customer base should equal the total costs of their switching their business to a com- petitor [19]."
All this talk about having to train users... then the companies change the interfaces so much that even power users get confused.
And why? Because the designers need to prove that they so something?
> All this talk about having to train users... then the companies change the interfaces so much that even power users get confused.
I don't think this is a realistic assessment of the problem. Windows 11 slremains very much recognizable since the Windows 7 days, and the transition from Windows 10 to Windows 11 was seamless. Moreso with walled gardens like macOS.
In the meantime you can't sneeze in the direction of a mainstream windows manager for Linux without it introducing radical changes, not to mention how all distros are heavily fragmented and sometimes even customized.
"corruption is a red herring, corrupt officials and companies can be corrupt regardless of software license."
Corruption implies that somebody is making enough money to pay bribes. Therefore, corruption will naturally be to the advantage of those that make the most money from the least quality offering.
Not really. The company's not really paying bribes out of their own money though. They're paying it out of the revenue flow from that sale.
In other words "give me this govt contract and I'll route n% of it back to you". n% has to be "reasonable" or there's no commercial point in offering the bribe to begin with.
If there's a cash-flow issue (you gotta pay the bribe before getting the contract) then I guess it favors deep pockets.
> uses the phrase "no brainer" but then explains why it very much requires brainer
The structure of the phrase is [[no brain]er], not [no [brainer]].
See https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-er , sense 7/8.
It's word play.
Exactly, that's the whole point of the article. The second sentence says that,
> While open source seems like a "no-brainer", it turns out that governments can be surprisingly resistant to using FOSS for a variety of reasons.
Did you mean to reply to someone else?
And liability, as mentioned in the OP, is a big issue. When you find a bug in Oracle that kills your DBMS, you open a ticket and Oracle has to provide a fix (or at least a workaround) based on the SLA.
Postgres developers, as the license says, have NO OBLIGATIONS TO PROVIDE MAINTENANCE, SUPPORT, UPDATES, ENHANCEMENTS, OR MODIFICATIONS. This means you have to do one of three options:
I actually managed to get Oracle to fix a bug once. This in quite a big organization, with a huge amount of money going to oracle. I could explain them exactly what was wrong, how to fix it, and still they denied the very existence of the bug (and cited the expensive half-working workaround other companies used at the same time). Then they ignored what I told them and fixed it in a way that did not fix it. Then they fixed it, and did not allow us to use the fix until it was officialized in a real service pack.
The whole process took multiple months, reading all contracts I couldget my hands on, answering the phone at 3AM, a lot of patience, and treating Oracle as a student who was 2 weeks late with their homework. After that, all oraclies at the organization were completely awed because I was the first person ever who managed to get a usefull new patch out of oracle's service.
If you want results, get Postgres. If you want someone to blame, get Oracle.
> If you want results, get Postgres. If you want someone to blame, get Oracle.
I've twice offered fixes to Oracle (didn't even get a thank you); countless times I've had to find workarounds; and I've lost endless hours working with support to get things fixed.
I have no respect for Oracle software. It gives me nothing but headaches. I can't really just blame Oracle, because I have to keep my organisation working. I just wish I could get rid of it.
> If you want results, get Postgres. If you want someone to blame, get Oracle.
It's the someone to blame part that's important in big corporate bureaucracy. It's being able to tell your boss "We've done everything we can, it's in Oracle's hands now" limits your own liability vs. "We need to fix this ourselves, and haven't solved the problem yet."
Yeah, the difference between being a child and being a man.
> you open a ticket and Oracle has to provide a fix (or at least a workaround) based on the SLA.
Have you received reasonable help in reasonable time that way? How big was the investment on your company's side to make that happen?
It was a meme on every DBA team I worked with.
"Oracle has to provide a fix" also means that you can tell your boss that you're doing your best and it's up to Oracle now.
It's not just about fixing the problem, but about protecting your own career. "No one ever got fired for buying IBM".
That's an obvious, typical mechanism. A sad one.
Now circle back to the main thread - you invest some multi-million budget yearly to have support, but you get just an excuse.
People are expensive, but not "oracle expensive". Plus there are many smaller shops that sell support for opensource databases, I'd you don't want to hire senior people.
The reality matters far less than the vaguely worded promises CEOs think they hear when they're sold on switching to Oracle.
Yes, we have received reasonable and timely help when a wild ORA-600 appeared (with an Oracle engineer arriving on site to diagnose and apply the fix), but you are right, we had an 80-core POWER machine running this database.
> as any other bureaucracy
It is not bureaucracy vs magical efficiency. There is the same issue in any large organisation, even corporations. In practice I don’t think it would be as bad as you suggest. Having an agency focused on providing support instead of sending money to shareholders also limits other kinds of inefficiencies.
> Again, there's a risk that it will start charging the highest possible price for its services.
That is exactly the situation we’re in, where governments are tied and dependent on single providers (be it Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, or others). This solution would create competition opportunities by opening a market, it does not need to be a monopoly.
> Again, there's a risk that it will start charging the highest possible price for its services.
So you switch to a different commercial service provider, problem solved. The software is open source, they can't lock you down in a predatory contract. Worst-case scenario, you can always choose to fork it yourself.
“ create a single government agency that provides support to the rest of the government. Might easily lose efficiency, as any other bureaucracy”. As opposed to huge corporations that are known to be the pinnacle of efficiency…
You missed one: hire one of the many existing providers of Postgres support services. Postgres have a big list of these providers. [0]
I can't comment on how well they perform in practice compared to the conventional monopolised support model that closed-source software tends to offer - perhaps better, perhaps worse - but at least in principle, the solution is there.
[0] https://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_support/
I think at this moment all governments should start funding the open source foundations so that the foundations can train as well as retain good programming talent to keep the important open source software maintained. I think it will serve better in the long term to the government departments as well as the citizens.
Damn. I was aware US technology companies were parasitic, but this article really sheds light on the extent of it. No wonder they hate free software so much.
This was a pleasant and encouraging article to read.
I do think that open source is slowly growing in traditional enterprises, although I think recent interest in cloud computing and artificial intelligence has pushed a lot of software contracting out of the company. Open source migrations might become harder in the future when the enterprise no longer controls their own databases and models.
Question I ask my self a lot, how much my government spends a month for Microsoft stuff. This money could go to education and health care, which both are in terrible shape. Friend who works for government tell me that it’s almost impossible to find out this number. That’s how “transparent” it is.
I live near the Pasadena/LA area and wish I had heard of SCALE22x earlier!
> The team took advantage of the shift to restructure the database ""because we found that our storage provider was being a little bit naughty"", storing the data three or four times in order to charge more money
Uh... Without knowing the exact details, my first thought that "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing"
My slogan for using FOSS for govt is "citizen owned software".
At one time, I anticipated the rise of FOSS consortiums. Jurisdictions with similar needs would join together to share the cost and risks.
Canada, Mexico, USA each have 1,000s of juridictions. Surely at any one time there's a handful planning a technology refresh of some domain.
One easy example I know of is property tax administration. There's a bunch of counties of similar size all doing the same thing, but all running off in separate directions. Vendor options are complicated, expensive, and have lock-in. Surely it'd be beneficial to pool their resources and own their stack?
Another is election administration. US counties used to do all it themselves. Candidate filings, voter registration, poll books, yadda, yadda. Now it's all outsourced. Lower service for higher prices. (The "certification" process was captured, serving to protect incumbents. Natch.)
Any way.
I was a grunt for a member of a consortium FOSS project. It was awful. "The Logic of Collective Action" explained a great deal of the pathology. Also, Byran Cantrill's quote (wrt Open Solaris) about "having the freedom but not the power to fork" was spot on for our project.
Any way.
Does any one have examples or game plan or vision for realizing more FOSS in govt? I'm not quite ready to give up on the dream.
> It turned out that various contracted companies had corruptly put the software licenses they bought for the government into their own names, leading to a lock-in for their services.
This is a dirty trick I ran into in [US] state procurement, in a state known for widespread corruption. It's basically a no-show job where you just hold a bunch of long-term contracts for the state, and claim a monthly "support" fee for doing it. Even worse, you got to negotiate those contracts (and set up your kickbacks or self-dealing.) Bonus points for needing to call the contractor in order to have the contractor call support, and the contractor taking a fee for doing it.
Endless avenues for corruption with a setup like this.
> The team took advantage of the shift to restructure the database "because we found that our storage provider was being a little bit naughty", storing the data three or four times in order to charge more money.
This is the worst kind of graft and should result in criminal charges. The software development industry is still in a nascent stage and our tools are great but professional standards are still undeveloped.
> Technology is often seen as the problem, he said, but he generally found that the problems were due to using obsolete technology and a lack of knowledge about the data being handled. There is often no documentation of the data and its structure, coupled with no understanding of that by the people in charge of it. Poor leadership in the agencies is another barrier; there needs to be a champion for a change of this sort, who understands what needs to be done and properly assigns people to work on it.
Oh. Well. Precisely.
I don’t disagree with the other points but:
> storing the data three or four times in order to charge more money.
Given that they’re not disputing that it was being stored that many times, then it’s plausible the vendor was using replication as their error recovery strategy which isn’t an invalid choice. Erasure coding is a more difficult alternative to implement. This is too short a sentence with too little detail to draw any actual conclusion from. Heck, maybe the software even had a configuration option but there was no in-house expertise to configure it properly.