Nov 11th, 2008 at 11:14 am
A New Day
Barack Obama — our first Mac-using president? Incidentally, it seems to me that it would be very good policy for the federal government to use Linux for all its basic office computers. I should probably offer a fully-formed argument for that proposition but instead let’s hope some Linux fan reads this and leaves one in comments.
88 Responses to “A New Day”
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November 11th, 2008 at 11:25 am
So, who put the sticker Pac-Man about to eat the apple on it?
November 11th, 2008 at 11:26 am
Stallman’s freedom arguments make sense from a governmental point of view. And open standards for documents prevent a the controller of a proprietary document standard from rent seeking to view ostensibly public records.
November 11th, 2008 at 11:31 am
Yeah, good luck with that. I’ve been pushing my agency to embrace open-source software as a cost-cutting measure with no love. Laws like HIPAA and other privacy statutes make arguing the security of open-source to people who don’t know what the hell that means in the first place extremely difficult. I can’t even get the damn place to embrace Open Office.
November 11th, 2008 at 11:32 am
I’m a fan of Linux and other open source technologies, but I would think most staffers are accustomed to using the MS Office tools such as Excel, and I’m not sure the goodwill would be worth the loss of efficiency from forcing them to learn new tools, and convert everything over.
November 11th, 2008 at 11:32 am
I think using open protocols and document standards is the most important point. Linux perhaps SE (security-enhanced, develped by the NSA) Linux probably makes the most sense but I am not sure if it should be mandated since it is an accident of the market, something better could come along in a decade.
November 11th, 2008 at 11:35 am
Damn, I’m starting to regret my vote for Obama. Restoring honor and decency to the White House may not be worth it if it makes Mac users even more insufferable.
November 11th, 2008 at 11:35 am
I know people who have worked on Sr. State Dept officials’ computers and they’ve required pretty extreme security clearances to even get near the machines. Presumably the security requirements around the President’s computer is even greater.
There are “secure OSes”, but they won’t run most software that he’d want to run. OTOH, SELinux might be ideal:
http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/
(Yep, a special version of Linux from the NSA)
November 11th, 2008 at 11:38 am
“Incidentally, it seems to me that it would be very good policy for the federal government to use Linux for all its basic office computers.”
Because decreasing the efficiency of the federal government is a good thing?
Has Matthew morphed into Grover Norquist?
How ’bout Matthew uses a Linux laptop for his own job before advocating shrinking the size of effective government so he can drown it in the bathtub…
November 11th, 2008 at 11:39 am
As someone who has been in charge of IT in a company with a few hundred employees and who also worked for the federal government at one point for 10 years, I’m pretty sure that Linux for basic office computers in the Federal Government is a bad idea. The number one issue for a software implementation in any large enterprise is going to be ease of support.
The idea of using Linux has appeal. On the surface it would save money because the government would not be buying all those licenses of an OS and software. Linux can get decent performance out of older equipment. Linux is a bit easier to keep secure.
However, although Microsoft software is overpriced and has its peculiarities, people are widely familiar with it. Finding people to support it is relatively easy (compared to Linux). Finding employees with basic familiarity necessary to do daily work is much easier with Microsoft products.
Then there is the problem that Linux isn’t Linux – it’s innumerable different implementations, each slightly different, may requiring different software. And, installing software and basic maintenance tasks are harder under Linux than Vista or XP.
It is also hard to say that an employee “just” needs a basic office desktop. There is often an infinite variety of specialized software that people need when you least expect it. And then there is the issue of drivers for a wide range of hardware. In the Federal Government there is also a huge issue of legacy hardware and software.
I like Linux. I use it on some of my own computers. When I ran the IT department, we used Linux for some of our web servers, for our DNS server, and for various specialized functions. We would toy with deploying Linux for the desktop, but it just wasn’t feasible. Some versions of Linux have improved quite a bit since then.
Finally, having worked in the federal government, I don’t think that standardizing on one platform across the federal government is worth the logistical problems.
November 11th, 2008 at 11:39 am
Remarkably, Bush actually uses a Mac too. During the 2004 campaign he visited my hometown and in the local news feature about it, they clearly showed him working on a 17 inch PowerBook in the office part of his tour bus.
November 11th, 2008 at 11:39 am
OpenOffice wouldn’t be too hard to learn for people accustomed to MS Office–everything is about where a Microsoft-familiar person would expect it to be.
Linux is not quite as 1-to-1, but I think a good way to do things would be for public schools to use Linux as an operating system. Kids will still no doubt get exposure to Windows through their home computers, but they’ll know how to use Linux as well. I actually think that schools get free copies of Windows from Bill Gates as a part of his monopolist strategy, but teaching kids to at least learn both would only be healthy for the market, as it would lead to more competition.
November 11th, 2008 at 11:40 am
I’m a long time Linux and Mac user; I think it’s more or less inconsequential if people use Mac or Linux on their desktops as long as the application software they’re using is open source and built on standards based formats. The issue of open interopability is much more important than using any particular open-source solution. So, I have no particular issue with using commercial software as long as the results can be read without it.
November 11th, 2008 at 11:41 am
Heartily agreeing with James McCann. Above all else, “openness” should come in the form of open standards. This will favor free and open source software (FOSS), as it will strip away any advantage of vendor lock-in and thus level the playing field for open- and closed-source software. But it will not guarantee that FOSS will prevail in every case, as well it shouldn’t. We wouldn’t want the Stallmanites getting complacent, would we?
November 11th, 2008 at 11:43 am
Everyone’s ignoring the obvious solution: forcing Microsoft to make all its software open source. Then you get the familiarity of Office and all the benefits of open source as well. The government could also nationalize Microsoft.
November 11th, 2008 at 11:43 am
> Because decreasing the efficiency of the
> federal government is a good thing?
You might want to talk to the CIO of Virgin American Airlines about that. With the advantage of starting from scratch he has selected about 80% FOSS, including Open Office, and seems to be doing quite well (on the operations side that is; I make no claim about VAA’s overall business plan).
November 11th, 2008 at 11:44 am
I don’t have time right this second for the full monty, but the sketch of the argument looks like:
1) TCO (free software, fees for support from Canonical or Redhat or some third party linux support vendor) generally ends up lower, saving us money
2) Not basing our tech infrastructure on a specific company a) opens up what support services we will need to many more vendors and b) reduces the influence of any one company on the technology destiny of our government.
3) Worst case, some malicious company (or individual within a company) can’t stick evil (for whatever value of that you’re into) code into the black box that is a proprietary operating system like Windows or OSX. In general, the argument that all software in use by our government should be fully source-auditable by all citizens is the most philosophically compelling to me, though perhaps not the best to base a campaign on
November 11th, 2008 at 11:44 am
Petey:
Now there’s some old school FUD.
I’ve been using a Linux laptop for years. What decreases my efficiency is reading blogs, not the OS.
November 11th, 2008 at 11:46 am
I should have also mentioned that I’m an open source software developer myself. So definitely on the “true believer” side of the ledger. But even then, I have the attitude of let the best tools win as long as the standards are open. So I have no cognitive dissonance writing GPL’d software on my Mac.
November 11th, 2008 at 11:47 am
Why?
Surely it makes sense for the government to use whatever software makes their employees the most productive? (I’ve no particular reason to think this isn’t Linux beyond that I hardly know anyone who has ever used it). Also, although the governments bill for MS Office and Windows is probably enourmous in the aggregate, it’s probably not a huge portion of IT costs, which I imagine are mainly enormous service contracts, so switching might not save much money, just guessing about this part though.
November 11th, 2008 at 11:47 am
Ha! The entire government would grind to a halt, promising us that things will be done sooo much more efficiently, once they’ve got past a few bugs. I’ve been there before, “Got the command almost sorted just give me a couple more hours to tweak the code….”
November 11th, 2008 at 11:48 am
I’m pretty sure both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush are mac users. Which would essentially mean all of our computer-using presidents have been mac using presidents.
November 11th, 2008 at 11:51 am
Why not make all gov’t documents be marked-up in LaTeX, while you’re at it? I for one welcome our new Computer Modern overlords.
A move to open source would be good for several reasons.
- upfront cost of software
- interoperability *nix can run on PPC and Intel hardware
- stability
- record keeping (ODF will be good forever and not subject to the whims of MS)
- security
- centralized repositories make updating code a snap
- larger user base means the software evolves/improves faster
There’s an unavoidable learning curve to new software, but the upside is that users will be more computer literate.
November 11th, 2008 at 11:53 am
Spike at #6 wins the thread.
November 11th, 2008 at 11:54 am
I don’t know how widespread it was, but the Obama campaign office in Centreville, VA was using Linux desktops. I think the workstation pictured was being used by people doing calls and data entry.
November 11th, 2008 at 11:55 am
There’s a saying “Linux is free … if your time is worthless” … the increased cost of personnel, issues when running Linux on semi-standard hardware (try to teach your mother how to change the monitor resolution on Linux, I dare you), added time spent on training, etc, were the USG to switch to Linux does not make it a slam dunk, at all.
November 11th, 2008 at 11:56 am
Yeah, just what we need. Save a few million by not buying commercial operating systems, and blow a few billion on hiring people to support the clusterfudge.
Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing.
November 11th, 2008 at 11:56 am
I’m using Linux right now. I have Ubuntu running on a new Thinkpad, and I gotta say, it is much, much nicer and easier to use than my Vista box at work. Mac OS is a bit slicker still, but the fact is that Linux has come a long way. It really is a pleasure to use, and the latest open office is excellent. It’s fully compatible with MS Office documents, easy to use, and has every Office feature that I ever use.
Also, to be clear, plenty of government agencies use Linux today (including, most likely, the NSA for some purposes). But that’s not the point. The question is if it makes sense for average government office workers. The answer, I think, is probably not yet for a great-leap-forward-type conversion. As others have noted, the support costs, interruption, retraining, etc. would make it unwise to rush into this. However, it does make a lot of sense to:
1) Begin exploring open source systems for a subset of gov workers, perhaps with pilot programs in various settings.
2) Insist on open document standards, so that any OS and compatible office suite can be used
3) Ensure all government web sites are compatible with multiple browsers, not just IE
4) Open data access to things such as congressional votes, records, presidential orders, etc. not just by posting the info on a Web page, but by provided structured data feeds in XML, that can be incorporated into systems on any platform
The fact is that new versions of Linux are ready for prime time. This doesn’t mean that a sudden gov-wide switch is smart (nor would it be for most new technologies), but having open systems and open standards is, in general, beneficial and should be pursued.
November 11th, 2008 at 11:58 am
Linux isn’t the key change–and the legacy issues would be enormous. (OpenOffice does NOT handle expert-level Excel files at all well.)
What WOULd be a really good idea is a rule that nothing the government releases to the public can be in a non-fully-documented format. It would pressure software makers to make their output formats fully documented, and avoid the proprietary lock-in issues.
November 11th, 2008 at 11:59 am
Sorry, Matt, but Dubya used a PowerBook G3 back in the day:
http://www.theapplecollection.com/various/Celebrity/GBush.html
November 11th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
I’m all for using Linux in schools, because kids are adaptable enough to pick it up and I think it will make them more computer savvy than using Macs or Windows. However, I’m with those that disagree with putting it on all government computers now. Let’s give people a chance to get used to the system and for the UI to mature, and then get rid of Microsoft.
November 11th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
(try to teach your mother how to change the monitor resolution on Linux, I dare you)
Ubuntu has a taskbar applet for just that purpose (though to be sure I can’t remember if it is installed by default). That applet is far more accessible and intuitive than the “right-click on blank desktop space” trick in XP, let alone navigating to the control panel.
Changing the screen resolution to make text larger is 10 kinds of wrong, btw (if that’s what you were helping your mother do).
November 11th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
Oh yes! I work at a small community technology center located in a housing project in Boston and we are actively supporting ubuntu linux and teaching emerging technologies and sciences to young people using opensource software applications! All the donated computers that we refurbish and give away are loaded with linux and we require orgs and individuals to do linux training before they receive their computer. The guys who volunteer to teach linux are fantastic and I love it when they tell each person, “welcome to the world!” because linux is a global operating system being used all over the world to get people hooked up and communicating with each other on the internet. Way cool!
As far as Macs go, we have asked the great foundation that replaces our computers every three years to change over to Macs instead of PCs! They require less energy to maintain and fix and are far more dependable and less vulnerable to viruses — which are a big deal and problem for people who live with low incomes and who don’t have money, access or skills to maintain anti-virus software vigilantly!!!
November 11th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
If you use a mac, you already are using unix. Apple scrapped their OS, and “borrowed heavily” from FreeBSD for OS X’s core. I love bringing this up when some douchebag apple fanboy bashes windows, or even better, linux. It goes to show that most, or even close to all, apple users don’t have a clue about the technology their machine uses. This also partly explains why the iphone is so popular. As long as it has Apple’s aesthetic feel and look, the dimwits won’t notice deal-breaking technical flaws. (i.e. no ability to cut and paste). In the case of Apple’s computing OS, the aesthetics actually match the quality of the underlying technology. Good on them for making use of open source operating systems, it’s just laughable that their original OS sucked and had to be gutted.
November 11th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
I definitely agree that a mass conversion would be a bad idea, but then, I’m usually against en-masse changes to anything. I certainly think it would make sense to begin looking at switching over in limited circumstances, as Mr Reason suggests; also to install Linux in schools, as long as we’re not spending more money that way. (If Microsoft wants to pay for all our k-6 computing equipment, I’m not sure why we should say no).
That said, in my experience Linux is every bit as user-friendly as Windows _if you have someone else maintaining the system._ That is, the basic functions are just as accessible, but it’s easier to screw up a settings change and often harder to fix once you have. But if you, say, lock down the root and don’t let anyone mess with the system except the dedicated sysadmin (which is how the thing is supposed to work in the first place), I suspect it would work pretty well.
November 11th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
I thought everybody ran Yellow Dog Linux on those Mac things.
November 11th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
I agree with the thought that it should be started in a series of pilot programs. Particularly it can be used by government offices that require higher level security (such as the NSA already does) as Linux is much more secure than Windows.
However, the simple fact is that some professions will always need to use windows. Accountants, auditors and other officials who use higher level Excel functions will have a very legitimate gripe if they’re forced to roll over to another OS because neither Mac nor Linux have software that can handle higher level Excel functions.
To be frank, the standard should be one where high security offices use Linux, those who need massive spreadsheets use Windows, and those who use high-end media functions should use Macs. As far as the average day-to-day government worker goes… it’s hard seeing Windows supplanted, but I certainly wish you luck.
November 11th, 2008 at 12:41 pm
Thank you Yglesias for bringing attention to the need for government to embrace open source. I hope this is the type of policy we will see come out of a Tech Czar.
November 11th, 2008 at 12:47 pm
yeah. hadn’t thought of that. and what about reading 7-track tapes? and how would they handle JCL?
cripes. is this one of Xeno’s paradoxes? specifically, achilles vs the tortoise? we can’t do this until that happens and we can’t do that until something else happens so basically movement, learning, anything are impossible. And yet, startlingly, movement/learning/etc happen. how can this be? what with it being impossible and all.
November 11th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
According to netcraft.com, the barackobama.com site is running Linux and the photos.barackobama.com site is running FreeBSD. Based on this I would say that Obama is at least familiar with Open Source from a management point of view. Open source was able to handle the load of his campaign site. Other information points to the uptime for the site to be 150 days and counting.
Overall, pretty impressive.
November 11th, 2008 at 1:09 pm
Matthew, as you don’t use Linux, why do you think it would be a good idea for people in the government to use it?
I’m a techie, and I hate using Linux.
It’s just not user friendly.
I say absolutely not to using Linux.
November 11th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
Barack Obama — our first Mac-using president?
Nah. Bush was a Mac guy (PowerBook) as Texas gov, but he stopped using email when he became prez.
What needs to happen, re: tech, is some kind of coherent comms and archiving system. The state of the electronic Bush archive is going to be fucking things up for Obama, and for historians in decades to come.
November 11th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
Has McCain bought a computer yet? Just curious, while we’re on the subject.
November 11th, 2008 at 1:25 pm
Oh, and I know a fair fewpeople who have switched to Ubuntu on their laptops, including long-term Mac people. Remarkably, you can often have better hardware detection for things like 3G mobile connectivity; more importantly, there’s a lot to Mark Pilgrim’s argument about open formats and long-term data retention.
November 11th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
The ideological driven argument is pretty weak. How ’bout we just let the free market work itself out? Windows can be just as secure as Linux. Server 2008 is a pretty bitch’n O/S IMHO. If Microsoft is willing to deep discount, which it most likely is, why not? You would be surprised how low companies will go to just get a deal.
November 11th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
RE: Obama’s website, it was probably running Apache which is the best damn web server ever. Linux has its strong points. It is good for servers, although I’m not a fan of the NFS file system. But moving to open source based on some ideological argument is short-sighted.
November 11th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
People have way too homogeneous thought of what the federal government computer systems look like.
I was at the USACOE back in the late 80’s at that time we had DOS machines running wordperfect, AT&T unix machines running whatever we could find, An AT&T Unix network that was very nearly completely unsecured. A PDP11 for running engineering calcs, Macs doing desktop publishing etc.
In talking to people since that time there has been a gradual move to M$ products but there is very little top down control apart from the functional silos.
Turning the battleship takes a lot more than issueing an executive order.
November 11th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
I should probably offer a fully-formed argument for that proposition but instead let’s hope some Linux fan reads this and leaves one in comments.
I see we have the usual crew on the assault. Roughly, what you want, is for some contractor (IBM) to build you a ‘Federal’ version of one of the open Unixes (FreeBSD or Linux or NetBSD, &etc… whatever) with a nice GUI like Ubuntu or say MacOS. (In fact, if Jobs would get off the pot and give in for good to the idea of Apple being a hardware company, he could give away OS X as a freebie. Or a version, anyways. And then everybody would have an open source Unix platform, including GUI, and Apple could sell hardware. But that might make the hardware less appetizing, I suppose.) And then standardize on that.
But thinking about the comments above, I think standardizing on Linux sorta misses the point. The point is, is that there a lot of solved problems out there, like old textbooks, languishing and out of print, and the federal government spends so damn much money, that we might as well start buying copyrights on old textbooks, old books and so on, and making them available for free, much like google books, but without the hassle. Of course, publishers could them recycle modified editions of old textbooks and sell them as proprietary packages, and THAT’S FINE. Poor school districts (and poor college students) could still work off the old versions which would cost about a quarter of the proprietary versions.
So what we are looking for, is to stop wasting federal money on rent-seeking copyright owners and start spending it on correcting the damage excessive copyright restrictions have caused.
In that context, we need an open source OS of some sort to hand out to federal offices, so they can convert over and if Microsoft is smart they’ll adapt and start selling their proprietary solutions to run on top of FederalOS. We, in the meantime, can unchain ourselves from paying Bill Gates a lot of money for the right to pay a lot of other people a lot of money to constantly upgrade the programs federal workers actually use.
As for Office, and in particular, Excel, I’m not sure what the morons commenting on this thread think, but Excel is not a complicated program. We could use the cost of one year’s rent on Excel to right a clone that could do all those ‘higher-level’ functions that everyone is whining about. That’s the thing: the federal government is the 800 pound elephant, and the only reason we get bled so much is because of lobbyists.
So why not stop?
max
['It's almost as if people think the IRS isn't using thirty-year-old computers anyways.']
November 11th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
I own a PowerBook 180 that used to belong to George W. Bush. It was used in his campaign for Governor of Texas.
November 11th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
Most comments here seem to be focusing on the “end users” but the real key here is that government documents/public record be stored in an open format that does not require a specific vendor’s software to be read and maintained.
November 11th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
You would be surprised how low companies will go to just get a deal.
Following War-N: trouble is, they make the money back on support contracts, and data lock-in is part of that deal.
Look, Obama is inheriting a system that made it much too easy for people to have rogue off-the-books communications and for archives to ‘get lost’.
I think the workstation pictured was being used by people doing calls and data entry.
The data entry stuff was a webapp that I’m pretty sure runs via ASP — Votebuilder.com.
November 11th, 2008 at 2:55 pm
the simple fact is that some professions will always need to use windows.
‘Always’ is a very very long time. If by ‘always’ you mean ‘the next few/several years’, then you’re right.
And Bradford’s sneering at Apple for ditching their old OS and writing a new, modern one is really stupid. Both Apple and MS needed to start fresh. Apple did (and, let’s face it, more easily could). MS should’ve. XP is pretty good for an MS OS, but it’s still a kludge.
Max gets it: build a Gov Linux.
November 11th, 2008 at 3:24 pm
The problem I’ve run into with trying to use open source software at a government agency is that it typically isn’t certified to meet government regulations. A prime example is that software is supposed to be usable by disabled people such as the blind. Open-source software such as LaTeX is of course more compatible with accessibility software than any Microsoft crap, but Microsoft’s spent the money to certify that their software meets the government standard, while nobody’s bothered to do the same for LaTeX. Of course plenty of people in the government do use open-source software anyway, but a lot fewer than would if it were easy to show that it meets the regulations.
November 11th, 2008 at 3:43 pm
1. It appears that no-one here has heard of WINE for legacy Windows apps.
2. If I were to guess, I would say that Adobe is more of a roadblock for conversion than Microsoft. Open document standards are the way to go. Who cares what the OS is.
3. The argument that finding support for linux is too hard does
not mesh with establishing millions of government linux computers. I think some contractors may appear.
4. The best argument against the conversion is that support for MS computers and software is a huge jobs program, and right now we need more jobs – even if pointless. The typical ratio of admins to computers is far lower for linux than windows.
5. Nice to see some FUD that never dies – like Linux is right if your time is free.
6. Adrock @44: What the HELL does the free market have to do with government acquisitions? Let’s see how long the free market
in 1942 takes to develop an atomic bomb. Or let’s see how long it takes to put a man on the the moon in 1960. Or develop a new highway system in 1953?
But I do agree that YOUR ideological argument is pretty weak.
Perhaps the government DRIVES the market in these cases.
November 11th, 2008 at 3:50 pm
I’ve been down this path so many times. Yeah, you can maybe cobble something together which sort of works. But it’s going to take you months. Whereas with Windows or sometimes even MacOS you’ll be up and running in hours.
Things just work.
I remember the incredible pain we used to have back when the insurance company I worked at thought it’d be a good idea to standardize on OS/2. You end up buying two computers for half your department. One running your official OS, and the other so they can get their job done.
November 11th, 2008 at 3:56 pm
Standardization on one platform is an antiquated notion that is Microsoft Groupthink made flesh. Linux has many fine attributes and the community is robust and well-regarded. While philosophically that may be a good thing, it sandbags any and all hope for using the right tool for the job. As creative as the messaging has been from Team Obama, is anyone really surprised that Macs play heavily? I have no doubt that Windows is there too just because of ingrained technique and ubiquity, especially on the part of older, non-technical/business-oriented users.
Whither Linux? Most folks don’t choose Linux for their main computing life and who knows why. Is sure don’t but I am a creative pro and Linux doesn’t do anything for me, sorry. I also take great exception to this silliness about Mac users being technically retarded brand whores. Expecting everyone to aspire to High Geekdom is quite possibly why Linux is hovering around 0.75% operating system market share for the quarter. PS – The iPhone OS already has 0.3% and is a relative newborn. Just sayin’!
All that aside, Linux has to overcome some serious perception issues:
1. You have to be a technical expert to use it.
2. There are no applications available and the ones that are sucky me-too apps.
3. Its a hobby OS with no institutional support.
Now, because I am well-versed enough to know better, I know these things aren’t true. Still these are real world perceptions that are not getting dealt with in spite of the best efforts of specific firms and the community at large to address them. Basically it looks like this to me: Linux can’t/shouldn’t compete with Apple insofar as there’s no hardware to complete the user experience. Google’s G1 is a good example of how this. Linux has to compete with Windows and as such has become kind of a WinClone in a race to the bottom (Look, we can do everything that XP can do but for FREE). While that may be great for the emerging international market, its got no mojo here in the US.
Linux can differentiate itself, and does in the server room, but it has yet to make a compelling case for wider consumer adoption and this is what’s strangling it. There’s nothing Linux does that I cannot do with either Mac OS or Windows. That’s ME, not you. Perhaps as the rest of the world adopts the creaky desktop metaphor but can’t or won’t pay the various brand taxes, Linux will prevail. Otherwise, Linux needs to position itself as the innovator, one that can possibly even break us free from the chains of the desktop metaphor. Until then, I’m not sure things will get much brighter, even if President Obama decides to run the entire federal enterprise on the platform.
On a final note, it is easy to flame each other over computing preference but another thing to analyze the offerings of each an choose the right platform for the job. Standardization sucks because there is no true standard. There are protocols and technologies and their interpretations an implementations are seemingly endless. I do think Linux does the right thing by growing as organically as possible and fulfilling the needs of its community.
Apple is obviously informed by this and may even want to go there but simply cannot because of its highly developed communication style and the fact that almost every piece of hardware it makes is critical to its long-term success. Microsoft could care less. Even now they’ll play at being more social but its not in the corporate DNA, so they continually come off as ham-fisted. Linux has much to gain from Microsoft’s slow decline but that in and of itself is not enough.
November 11th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
max writes:
I know Obama won the election last week but I didn’t take it as a sign that Hell has, in fact, frozen over.
Apple is a hardware company not a software company – which is why its software works only on its own hardware. Microsoft, to give a counterexample, is a software company and its software works on other vendors hardware.
November 11th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
Like every other politician, he’ll use whatever is SIGs tell him to. Get over it, folks. Never forget he is a politician, got elected because he is a politician, and is a weasel just like the rest of them. He just has a prettier face than any of the opposition did — we like our evil overlords to look snazzy.
November 11th, 2008 at 6:07 pm
@54 “Things just works”? Are you f’ing kidding me? You recite a slogan like a republican hack?
@40 “It’s just not user friendly.” You don’t know what you are talking about.
and my favorite @9 ” Linux can get decent performance out of older equipment…In the Federal Government there is also a huge issue of legacy hardware and software.”
Brilliant!
“However, although Microsoft software is overpriced and has its peculiarities, people are widely familiar with it. Finding people to support it is relatively easy (compared to Linux).”
Yes! Companies like Canonical, whose entire business is based on reasonably-priced support of linux, are hard to find! On the other hand, getting support from microsoft is great! They are so responsive!
“And, installing software and basic maintenance tasks are harder under Linux than Vista or XP. ”
Sing it, sister! Package management with integrated, all-in-one apps like synaptic or adept makes things so difficult! Much better to hunt around the web and download random zips/installers! You clearly know what your talking about!
It’s so good to hear the experts weigh in, who have seen more than their share of BOTH mac AND windows commercials!
November 11th, 2008 at 6:18 pm
I love that photo. He looks like he’s our boss, giving us an assignment while displaying confidence that we’re up to the task.
November 11th, 2008 at 7:28 pm
Here’s something Dean Baker wrote on the subject back in 2005.
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/opening-doors-and-smashing-windows-alternative-measures-for-funding-software-development/
November 11th, 2008 at 9:40 pm
Windows vs. Linux vs. OS X misses the real technology problem the Federal government has — the tremendously out of date back end systems like databases and query tools they are saddled with. See, eg, this article from the NYT about attempts to bring intelligence research tools into the 21st century:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/magazine/03intelligence.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin
November 11th, 2008 at 9:42 pm
I laughed when the person above mentioned going to Latex for documents. Of course you couldn’t do that. But then again, Microsoft almost surely has implemented something very much like Latex for their word formats, it’s just that they can change it when they want. I find it very troubling that government docs have to be submitted in word format. You probably could make a word processor that is functionally indistinguishable from Word that spits out Latex, it’s just that people who write in Latex don’t really want that most of the time. Personally, I find the Latex way of doing things quite natural. But equations are very difficult and time consuming in word.
I’ve gone over to linux mainly because I can’t stand giving money to a company that spends so much money and so many of my cpu cycles making sure I don’t steal from them. I think if I were running a company, I’d try to run linux. I don’t know about the federal government.
The nice thing about linux is that you can always find out what is going wrong, this is not true with Windows. With Linux, software installation is trivial, systems upgrades are trivial, OS installation is trivial. The only stupid thing that’s not trivial is monitor setup. That could be fixed. And if the government used it, things like drivers missing because some idiot chip company will not release tech data would be over.
November 11th, 2008 at 10:06 pm
One reason to use Linux: when you buy a new computer because your current one is too slow for the new version of Windows or the new versions of programs, you can put the newest version of Linux on the old computer, and it runs better than the new version of Windows on the new computer.
Reliability, and the ability to resist most viruses and easy updates without restarting your computer are huge bonuses.
I have some experience with this. I run several internet servers running an old version of Red Hat. Last week my ISP needed to shut power off to my rack to install a battery backup. One machine had been up, without reboot for 600 days. I forgot to check the other one, but once before it had been up for almost 1000 days, then someone apparently knocked the power cord out.
Windows is completely different. Nearly every program upgrade, or install, or security update requires a reboot. The security updates come out almost daily. What a time-consuming nightmare.
If the US went with linux, their best choice would be to just use one of the many versions already managed/hardened by various scientific/research groups within government, and then pay these guys to make and maintain various end user versions.
November 11th, 2008 at 11:14 pm
I think the most important thing is that the government use open formats for storing documents and data it generates. Interoperability and freedom of platform are important. As people have mentioned, government computers everywhere are using decades-old hardware and software because the program they originally chose is no longer made, or because they can’t migrate their data to a newer, better piece of software.
Another important thing to consider is the ease of introducing new functionality on a Linux platform. If you decide that you need your Windows system to do something new, you can beg MS to develop the feature. If you need something new on Linux, you can just do it yourself (and by that, I mean hire programmers to do it according to your specifications). For example, as was mentioned above, SELinux (Security-Enhanced Linux) is a set of security policies which, added on to an already pretty secure platform, meet a very high level of security. It was created because the NSA saw a need for it, and so they built it on top of the existing software.
And to the people who think Linux has a steep learning curve for Windows users, what is it you’re trying to do? Firefox is exactly the same, OpenOffice is almost exactly the same as MS Office 2003, etc. My brother knows nothing about computers, so when his XP laptop got crudded up with malware, I installed Ubuntu and gave him a 20 minute lesson. He has asked for help once in two years.
November 12th, 2008 at 1:45 am
Disclosure: Dual-booting Windows XP and openSUSE 10.3 on six-year-old hardware, soon to be replaced by an AMD Phenom quad-core (each core 1GHz more powerful than the entire CPU in my current machine) with 4GB RAM and 1TB of hard disk running the 64-bit version of openSUSE 11 with Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 running in virtual machines.
“Whereas with Windows or sometimes even MacOS you’ll be up and running in hours.
Things just work.”
How shall I express this? Ah, yes. BILLSHIT! (Spelling is correct – bullshit from Bill Gates)
I do PC tech support. Windows is a frickin’ nightmare compared to Linux. Does Linux screw up? The kernel – rarely, in fact I’ve never seen or heard of it, although there are bugs reported in the development mailing lists. The desktops? Oh, yeah, GNOME and KDE both have bugs. And I see Firefox drag down the whole desktop once in a while.
Compared to Windows – this is a walk in the park. Windows is unreliable, insecure, slow, and a pain in the butt to update.
Try to find a comment anywhere in the Linux forums about “corrupt drivers”. You can’t. They don’t exist in Linux. “Buggy” drivers, yes. There are plenty of those in Linux, just as in Windows. The difference is that when you hear about “corrupt drivers” in Windows forums, you are hearing about a corrupted REGISTRY – the central “database” (and that’s using the term “database” lightly since it sucks rocks) in Windows which is the single worst design decision Microsoft ever made. Mess up the Registry and you’re looking at a System Restore and possibly a re-install.
Does not happen in Linux. You never have to reinstall Linux to fix a problem. Never. Unless of course you simply can’t figure out at all what the problem IS – which can happen. Usually, though, any problem that occurs has happened to someone else and there’s an explanation and solution via Google. I’ve never reinstalled Linux to fix a problem – except when an upgrade to a previous version of Linux so screwed up the system that I decided to switch to a new version.
Yes, upgrades rarely work – don’t do them. Do clean installs.
People talk about the command line. You almost never have to use the command line in any modern Linux distro. You DO have to use the command line to FIX Windows AND Linux. PC tech support people use the Windows command line all the time, especially for Windows Server 2003.
Training expenses, lack of applications, blah, blah, blah. Look – the Windows infrastructure evolved over two decades. An open source/Linux infrastructure will evolve faster, but there’s no reason to prevent it from evolving out of fear of the cost. If you plan it and take your time, you can re-engineer everything that works in Windows to work in Linux using open standards. Then you’re done and you no longer pay the Windows tax.
Otherwise you will pay the Windows tax FOREVER. And no matter how much it costs to re-engineer, it will eventually cost you MORE to keep paying the Windows tax FOREVER. Q.E.D.
And the Windows tax is not just the license fees, it’s the unreliability, the loss of productivity, the insecurity, etc., ad nauseum.
Corporations need to realize that making Bill Gates the richest guy in the world is not the best use of their capital – especially in the current economic environment.
As for re-training people, I had to learn Windows and Linux at the same time six or seven years ago. There isn’t a penny’s worth of difference between the two in terms of difficulty of use, or ease of learning. The only problem is that once you’ve learned one, you tend to be hesitant to learn another – despite the fact that once you’ve learned one, it’s FAR easier to learn a second.
Linux is currently running on everything you own that has a computer in it that isn’t your Windows PC. It runs in cell phones, it runs in NAS external storage boxes, it runs in your DSL/Cable router, it runs on supercomputers. It runs on more hardware than Windows or Mac OS X ever will. It can run in devices that have 16MB of RAM or terabytes of RAM. You can bend, fold, spindle and mutilate it to run in just about anything on any processor with almost any amount of memory.
There is NOTHING – repeat, NOTHING – that Windows can do that Linux cannot – except run proprietary apps that were designed solely for Windows. Yes, there are scores of thousands of apps – including big names like Adobe – that don’t run on Linux. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. People won’t adopt Linux because it doesn’t have the apps they are used to using, and the app developers won’t port those apps to Linux because Linux only has three percent of the market.
But Linux has a huge chuck of the server market, and will inevitably displace both proprietary UNIX and Windows from that market. At which point it will make sense to use a desktop OS that operates on the same open standards as the servers do. At that point corporations will start demanding Linux from their suppliers. Their suppliers will start demanding certified drivers from their suppliers – which will solve the problem of Linux not recognizing certain makes and models of hardware because the hardware manufacturers don’t both to develop Linux drivers.
At that point it will be game over for Windows.
Right now, thirty percent of the new “netbooks” – small form factor laptops – are running Linux. Microsoft’s efforts to position XP on those netbooks is running into the fact that Linux simply runs better on smaller hardware. Microsoft’s efforts to position Windows 7 – the upcoming version in 2010 – are ridiculous. Windows 7 needs the same hardware as Windows Vista – no way it will ever run successfully on a netbook.
And, oh yes, Windows 7 IS just a revamped Vista with some GUI changes (unnecessary GUI changes, one might add), the same core, some fixes to the stupid UAC security utility, and the like. It requires the same hardware as Vista and runs as slowly as Vista, i.e., 40% slower than Windows XP on the same hardware. It’s going to be better than Vista simply because, hopefully anyway, more manufacturers will have functioning drivers for it since the driver model presumably isn’t being broken again. But if you don’t like Vista, you won’t like Windows 7.
Get a clue. Make a plan. Switch to Linux and open source.
As I always say:
Windows is CRAP.
Linux is ALSO CRAP.
BUT – Linux is FREE CRAP.
November 12th, 2008 at 5:26 am
Eric, you’ll be pleased to know that Ubuntu 8.10 (Ibis) automates much of monitor setup. There has been an effort to reduce the complexity of xorg.conf and to gather more of the needed information automatically from the hardware.
There is also a nifty program called xrandr, which allows one to hot plug monitors.
November 12th, 2008 at 6:23 am
Federal employee here who uses Windows at work and Ubuntu at home.
There’s no excuse for the federal government not to be using (and maybe contributing to the development of) open formats for multimedia and office documents. Also, the federal government would probably benefit from more use of open-source software. A lot of Linux skeptics are comparing apples to oranges here – most employees have no idea how to set up Outlook with their company’s Exchange server, change the resolution, do a DHCP release, install a network printer, or view their computer’s security logs. That’s what IT departments are for, and they’ll be able to administer a Linux-based workplace about as well as a Windows-based workplace. Especially in an office like mine, where most of the tools are browser-based intranet sites designed to be platform independent. But then that’s because my department actually has a handful of *nix workstations.
However, OpenOffice will not catch MS Office for the foreseeable future. MS Office formats have become the de facto standard, like it or not. Migrating millions of documents to be compatible with OpenOffice would cost more money than the MS licensing fees. And no, standard MS Office files do NOT work well with OpenOffice, especially given the precisely defined formatting standards. So I’ll tolerate blue screens and viruses, knowing that it’s the least objectionable of the many shitty computing options.
November 12th, 2008 at 8:31 am
As someone working for the feds, I can say that it would be very expensive to switch over to Linux because every custom thing we use is a cobbled together mess of VB, Java and stupid, with MS Access backends.
On the plus side, Linux couldn’t possible work worse, or be harder to use. I doubt they could even make it much uglier, but I’m prepared to believe the worst.
November 12th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
Ugh. Bad choice, Mr. President.
“Damn, I’m starting to regret my vote for Obama. Restoring honor and decency to the White House may not be worth it if it makes Mac users even more insufferable.” -Spike
QFT.
November 12th, 2008 at 3:31 pm
Uh, how much has the Iraq war cost, folks? One to three trillion dollars?
And you’re saying converting to Linux would be “expensive”? Even budgeted over a period of ten years?
Please.
November 12th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
By the way, OpenOffice would catch up to Microsoft Office in a year if a) Obama forced Microsoft to open its software specs – or simply paid Microsoft to allow OpenOffice to use them, and b) the government paid for OpenOffice to make it happen.
All of which would probably be cheaper than one month of war in Iraq.
November 13th, 2008 at 2:52 am
One point here. The Bush admin spent mucho dinero converting the White House from a Lotus Notes shop to an Outlook/Exchange shop. Lots of fun ensued. Fuck knows how those PST files are going to be made into something coherent for the presidential archives, which are, post-Nixon, the property of the United States.
At the same time, you had the emergence of the CrackBerry for political staffers, with its routing through RIM in Canada. Fuck knows what kind of security audit happened there, if any.
But Obama and his staff will have a degree of say-so in how the White House shop is run. Now, there’s an assumption that the White House has to be technologically retarded for a mixture of security, archiving, and unspecified process reasons: as I said upthread, just before taking the oath of office, Bush sent a message to everyone in his email address book saying ‘you won’t be hearing from me via email for some time’. But now’s as good a time as any to reverse that, and have the EOP set an example of open-format communications with proper retention for historical, datarot-proofed archiving.
But as Misha points out, talking about modern day tech, when you’re dealing with legacy systems built from scratch that lack interoperability and aren’t too far removed from punchcards. (Until very recently, one immigration form came with three carbon sheets, so that it could be filed, in paper files, in quadruplicate.)
November 13th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
I volunteered answering phones at the main Obama office in downtown Chicago (on michigan ave). The computer we used there – to record messages and look up answers to questions, also to read Matt Yglesias when people called in and ranted for 20 minutes about Bill Ayers – were all linux. I think the distro was Ubuntu but I am not sure. in any case, they were designed to look and feel like windows xp but they were absolutely linux. No one seemed to have any problems using them.
So that’s a promising sign.
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