back to article Microsoft and Oracle are 'not your trusted friends', public sector bods

Software providers such as Microsoft and Oracle are aggressively targeting public sector customers with licence "audit reviews" in a bid to plug falling subscription revenue, according to research. Over one-third of the 436 councils surveyed across the UK have been subject to at least one software licence review in the last 20 …

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  1. oldcoder

    So, give them the boot - use open source.

    Much cheaper in the long run.

    And it can be fun when you tell them you converted to open source. Them turning purple should be quite entertaining.

    1. wolfetone Silver badge

      Re: So, give them the boot - use open source.

      I would love it, LOVE IT, if they did.

      However, in my office I run Linux while the rest of the (large) office run Windows, and the experience I have with LibreOffice opening/saving Office 2007+ documents isn't brilliant, but would be fixed if everyone saved it in ODF!!!!!!

      We can but dream and live in hope.

      1. Roger Greenwood

        Re: So, give them the boot - use open source.

        +1 for ODF

        https://www.gov.uk/government/news/open-document-formats-selected-to-meet-user-needs

        Even the Gov agrees. I suppose it must be like giving up smoking - longer you have been hooked harder it is to give up.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: So, give them the boot - use open source.

          "+1 for ODF"

          And the best implementation of the latest version of ODF? Microsoft Office by a long way....

          "using a mail server other than Exchange for handling mail accounts, etc"

          LOL. Good luck with that. There really isn't any viable competition in that space in the OSS world. Even paid for options that are serious competitors are few and far between. It's a very good, solid and historically secure product with a vast range of functionality, and it's not very expensive in real terms.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: So, give them the boot - use open source.

            "And the best implementation of the latest version of ODF? Microsoft Office by a long way...."

            Bullshit. I've tried many times and it ain't pretty.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: So, give them the boot - use open source.

      I love this argument.

      Linux - because, well that's what you're referring to really, on the desktop. 23 years and waiting.

      Enterprise backend services. OSS written by whom with what support? If it was so fucking easy, why hasn't it happened yet?

      And yes, I know I'll be downvoted but I don't care. Get your head out of your arse. Which companies can afford to take a chance to migrate backend services to unknown, probably incompatible systems?

      Point to me anywhere that uses OSS for, taking one example, managing council tax payments?

      You don't just have to convince finance, IT, users and management you also have to convince third parties to rewrite their software. Or find a completely new alternative. And given local governments, literally thousands of applications might exist, a large proportion of which are far out of date, never updated, never replaced because they 'just work' and the vendors no longer exist.

      This is the real world, not utopia!

      1. SolidSquid

        Re: So, give them the boot - use open source.

        I think it's more the idea of switching to Libre Office for document editing, using a mail server other than Exchange for handling mail accounts, etc. Switching to Linux for everything is a pretty big hurdle, and an OS change wouldn't have much of an impact on actual costs while increasing difficulties for users

        Also, things like taking council tax payments will usually be developed in house or contracted out specially due to the complex business logic, so aren't really an accurate comparison since there's not really a *closed* source option either

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: So, give them the boot - use open source.

          Frankly bollocks...councils prefer COTS. Or they outsource. Mostly to Capita: http://www.capita-softwareandmanagedservices.co.uk/software/pages/revenues_and_benefits-council_tax.aspx

          Go ahead and show me an OSS mail platform that can do everything Exchange does and as well (calendars, free/busy management/email of course/tasks/journaling/archiving etc etc)

          As I look around the average office space...oh look...all those people that have used the Office ribbon for the last 8 years don't seem to be complaining. Or about Office in general, actually.

          When will you lot realise Linux/OSS/LibreOffice is of very little interest to anyone other than a very special kind of person. Average non-IT, non-Geek want something they can just use. If they can use the same as at work, even better.

          1. hplasm
            Gimp

            Re: So, give them the boot - use open source.

            Oh, it's you. Again.

            "When will you lot realise Linux/OSS/LibreOffice is of very little interest to anyone other than a very special kind of person."

            When will you and your whiny cohorts realise that MS 'products' are of no interest to anyone at all; like the shiny toilet paper of old- nobody wanted it, but it was foisted upon all. A few fetishists still buy it for the pain, but to everyone else it is an increasingly unnecessary pain in the arse.

            So take your MS crapware and use it in the same way- there are alternatives now, and they are quilted.

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: So, give them the boot - use open source.

              Oh it's you. Again. And again, and again.

              I am sorry you are so invested in software that it makes you foam at the mouth.

              However I would encourage you to get out from under your rock occasionally and meet real humans. You know, the people who have to use these products day in and day out.

              Ask any number of them and they'll undoubtedly be able to point out failings in the stuff they use. From whichever vendor. I'm sure they will have suggestions.

              But. And this is the thing you keep missing. They come into work. They do their job and they are usually reasonably productive - at least enough so they don't get fired. Then they go home.

              They don't WANT to learn something new because that takes time, effort and causes frustration.

              And I challenge you to find me any single piece of software that doesn't cause some kind of frustration for some user(s) somewhere.

              They sure as hell don't want software where they have to, for example, edit text files to make changes to configurations.

              Anyway enjoy your beard and sandals.

              1. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Re: So, give them the boot - use open source.

                "They sure as hell don't want software where they have to, for example, edit text files to make changes to configurations."

                I bet they don't want to fiddle with the registry either (even us technical folks find it a terrible mess), so a very poor example to back up your claim.

          2. Tom 13

            Re: So, give them the boot - use open source.

            Go ahead and show me an OSS mail platform that can do everything Exchange does and as well

            Yep, even Google, who in theory ought to be able to afford to pay better and more programmers than MS don't have a product that works nearly as well. Not that that stopped our big cheese from moving our agency to GMail. While there are small problems everywhere, the most glaring weakness is in calendar visibility and the free/busy scheduling tools.

            1. wayward4now

              Re: So, give them the boot - use open source.

              "While there are small problems everywhere, the most glaring weakness is in calendar visibility and the free/busy scheduling tools." I use Thunderbird, and added the calendar to it, then added the Google calendar extension. Piece O cake! Now I have a live calendar that updates our Google calendar which pops up directly on our website via linking html script. NEXT!

          3. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

            Re: So, give them the boot - use open source.

            "(calendars, free/busy management/email of course/tasks/journaling/archiving etc etc)"

            and how much of that is the mail platform and how much is bolted on extras? That's part of what creates the lock-in in the first place. It also creates a mindset that the only way out of the Exchange lock-in is to find an exact clone of Exchange.

            Sometimes, it's more about looking at other ways of working instead of just a different back-end capable of maintaining the existing way. Installing email in the first place was a revolution in the work-place involving changing working methods and investing in training, so why should it be such a "pain" to change again all these years later just because someone can't see a short term gain and only sees a short term cost?

            It's not as if many of these organisations haven't already transitioned through mainframes/terminals, Novel, Lotus Notes et al in the past for long term benefits at a short term cost.

            1. TonyJ

              Re: So, give them the boot - use open source.

              "(calendars, free/busy management/email of course/tasks/journaling/archiving etc etc)"

              From that list, I believe all but archiving is part and parcel.

              1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

                Re: So, give them the boot - use open source.

                "(calendars, free/busy management/email of course/tasks/journaling/archiving etc etc)"

                From that list, I believe all but archiving is part and parcel.

                Maybe I should have said welded on in the factory as a default added-extra which you have to pay for in the price, even if you don't want that particular add-on over and above the basic email function.

        2. jonathanb Silver badge

          Re: So, give them the boot - use open source.

          Council Tax is basically the same in every council except for the rate set by the councillors. Slightly different in Wales because they have more bands, slightly different in Scotland because the valuation bands are at different levels and the charge includes a water precept, and completely different in Northern Ireland.

          You could write a Council Tax program and sell it to every council in England, and in Wales and Scotland with minor adjustments. I don't know whether that does happen, but having every council develop their own one in-house seems very wasteful.

      2. Smoking Gun

        Re: So, give them the boot - use open source.

        Harsh number of down votes, clearly not been anywhere near an NHS Trust.

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: This is the real world, not utopia!

        "Which companies can afford to take a chance to migrate backend services to unknown, probably incompatible systems?

        I've heard that argument straight from the horse's mouth. As anyone, user or support, EVER who has to suffer Windows day in day out knows, the worst incompatibilities are between differing versions of Windows, Outlook, Office and IE. Really Macs and Linux servers should have cleaned up if they weren't so darn expensive up front.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: This is the real world, not utopia!

          Please do expand and explain.

          Access - granted. It's a pile of shit for inter-version compatibility.

          IE? Not so much. Not since about v7 anyway.

          Office - download any of the free packages from MS that allow you to read in newer file formats which to be fair haven't changed that much since 2007.

          Anyway I go back to point 1 - migrate from Exchange to....? And that's just one example.

      4. The Real Tony Smith
        Linux

        Re: So, give them the boot - use open source.

        "Which companies can afford to take a chance to migrate backend services to unknown, probably incompatible systems?"

        Ummmm, let me think, The White House, Ernie Ball, The US Navy, The French Parliment, The Czech Post Office, The Dutch Police, Peugeot, The London Stock Exchange...

        It's a big list!

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_adopters

        1. TonyJ

          Re: So, give them the boot - use open source.

          That is actually a considerably bigger list than I'd have bargained even taking into account Wikepedia as the source.

          Still tiny by comparison to Microsoft though, I imagine.

      5. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: So, give them the boot - use open source.

        "Which companies can afford to take a chance to migrate backend services to unknown, probably incompatible systems?"

        Oh let's see, Google, Facebook, Amazon for starters. London Stock Exchange. The ISS. DreamWorks seem to do pretty well with it on both their desktops and servers.

        Nice to have a bit of diversity isn't it?

    3. Roland6 Silver badge

      Re: So, give them the boot - use open source.

      Whilst increased usage of open source might be the desired outcome of some, the key outcome of organisations being hit with a highly visible cost that hadn't been budgeted for, will be to encourage them to look more seriously at alternatives. Products that don't need you to track license usage in near real-time and allow for some vagueness in actual numbers will probably gain favour.

      So it seems that MS has set it's heart on creating a mountain - similar to the one it created with XP et al., that it will need to climb in circa 2020 if it is to successfully move organisations off Win7 et al. on to whatever their replacement product set then is and not have those customers move to third-party product sets.

      So yes MS are giving the open source movement yet another sales opportunity - who said that MS were anti open source?

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: So, give them the boot - use open source.

      " So, give them the boot - use open source.

      Much cheaper in the long run."

      It really isn't if you need support and have to consider to total cost of ownership. It's actually far moe expensive at least than Microsoft for the market leaders like Red Hat and SUSE. Not to mention the considerable cost and failure risk of migration. Possibly you have a case for some Oracle products, but that's probably not the primary cost here.

      For instance Munich Council spent itro €50 million (subsidised by IBM) just getting a working Open Source stack. Then about €12 million migrating (more than the cost of updating their original licences!). And over a decade later they still haven't been able to migrate ~ 20% of their stuff - so now have to support both environments. And the user experience with Open Source has been so diabolical that they are now actively investigating the options to migrate back again!

      Open Source sounds nice buts it's not generally cheaper in terms of TCO - unless you don't need support and your time and user experience are of no value...

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: So, give them the boot - use open source.

        "It really isn't if you need support and have to consider to total cost of ownership."

        I bet a lot of folks leave out the cost of license management (not just the raw cost of the licenses) with MS and Oracle when looking at this. Hint: it isn't trivial.

        FOSS doesn't solve everything - I imagine many specialist apps will always remain proprietary or custom-built. Running them in a FOSS platform saves huge dollars. The best part is that you don't need to run to the pricier Red Hat and SuSE either - there are a multitude of independent companies out there providing excellent support for many FOSS platforms and I've had great experienced with this. Sure there's some risk, being able to choose the best for your mission rather than being stuck with a single incumbent is really hard to put a value on.

        Assuming Microsoft have the best answers for every enterprise problem out there is just ignorant and more risky.

        1. wayward4now
          Linux

          Re: So, give them the boot - use open source.

          "FOSS doesn't solve everything" It DOES solve the $50,000 license issue effectively. I haven't used Windows since Win95 came out and have never looked back. :) Ric

    5. JeffyPoooh
      Pint

      Re: So, give them the boot - use open source.

      The Open Source threat is how you have the invoice for £50,000 reduced to £5,000. One does not pay such invoices without spanking them back with a "Not Worth The Future Risk - BANNED!!" boycott.

      In any case, you then switch at least the Office Suite to something free while perhaps retaining Windows. Even my wee feisty children are now perfectly Office-agnostic (they hardly notice which one is running), but they still prefer Windows to Linux.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Re: So give them the boot - use open source

    As a former LG and current HE employee. Getting people weaned off the MS and Oracle beasts is not a trivial exercise. You try to persuade the finance department to ditch Excel for LibreOffice Calc and see where you get!

    Office365 is now the mail of choice - Google can't guarantee to keep the data within the EU apparently.

    Sad but that is where you are.

    AC because - well I am a a coward really.

    1. HmmmYes

      Re: So give them the boot - use open source

      The lack of floating point and integer accuracy in Excel ought to be enough to get your account time fire never mind moving to Libre Office.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: So give them the boot - use open source

        "The lack of floating point and integer accuracy in Excel ought to be enough to get your account time"

        99.9% of trading floors with vast values at risk seem to not have any issues in using Excel...Do tell us more?

        1. hplasm
          Windows

          Re: So give them the boot - use open source

          "99.9% of trading floors with vast values at risk seem to not have any issues in using Excel...Do tell us more?"

          So that's the cause of recessions pinned down then.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: So give them the boot - use open source

          "99.9% of trading floors with vast values at risk seem to not have any issues in using Excel...Do tell us more?"

          eh? Who's trading floor are you working on? It's all C++/Python with web front ends round 'ere. Pfft, Excel indeed.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: So give them the boot - use open source

            "It's all C++/Python with web front ends round 'ere. Pfft, Excel indeed."

            Well speaking as someone who has worked numerous trading floors in investment banking and commodities: It's certainly a bit of Python these days - but more C# / C++ (on the desktop at least) but pretty nearly always fronted by Excel. I can't recall seeing a single trader position in the last decade that didn't use Excel to some degree...

        3. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: So give them the boot - use open source

          @ anonymous troll (the only reason for going AC)

          "99.9% of trading floors with vast values at risk seem to not have any issues in using Excel...Do tell us more?"

          IIRC Didn't both the NYSE and LSE dump MS solutions in favour of Linux solutions due to it being crap not fit for purpose ?

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: So give them the boot - use open source

            "IIRC Didn't both the NYSE and LSE dump MS solutions in favour of Linux solutions due to it being crap not fit for purpose ?"

            Nope - they both built MS based systems in house that successfully met the design specs and were used for some time. And they both worked well bar a couple of 'network' failures.

            What happened was that someone based in India wrote a better system - that happened to be on another OS platform. Because it was a commodity resource that ended up used by multiple exchanges instead of a separate development effort, it was cheaper to adopt than to continue to develop in house...

            1. Richard Plinston

              Re: So give them the boot - use open source

              > Nope - they both built MS based systems in house that successfully met the design specs and were used for some time. And they both worked well bar a couple of 'network' failures.

              While it is true that they had network failures with the Windows servers, it is not true that they 'met the design specs':

              """He claimed that Windows typically has larger latency times than that of Linux, and noted that in 2009, the London Stock Exchange tried and abandoned Windows servers."""

      2. jonathanb Silver badge

        Re: So give them the boot - use open source

        =ROUND([xxx],2) deals with that.

    2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: So give them the boot - use open source

      "Office365 is now the mail of choice - Google can't guarantee to keep the data within the EU apparently."

      Neither can MS if a NY judge says otherwise.

      Try again.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: So give them the boot - use open source

        "Neither can MS if a NY judge says otherwise."

        Yes they can. Or to be more specific, you can ensure with Office 365 that Microsoft can't take your data outside the EU, or even access it at all:

        https://www.thales-esecurity.com/msrms/cloud

        "Thales nShield HSMs ensure that your key is always under your control and never visible to Microsoft"

        1. Roland6 Silver badge

          Re: So give them the boot - use open source

          "Thales nShield HSMs ensure that your key is always under your control and never visible to Microsoft"

          However, that doesn't mean that the French authorities don't have access...

          But not really a problem, just as long as you don't do anything to antagonise them, as they won't release the information to the UK/US authorities because it seems the French get a lot of satisfaction from thumbing their noses at the British authorities...

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: So give them the boot - use open source

            "However, that doesn't mean that the French authorities don't have access"

            Actually yes it does - in terms of conventional access anyway.. Clearly you don't understand how an HSM works. It's sort like the TPM module in a laptop. Unless they take the device apart and extract the key by electron microscope to the silicon it's not happening without your permission.

            An EU entity would have access to your data via the courts should they have proper cause anyway...

      2. Gordon 10
        FAIL

        Re: So give them the boot - use open source

        @Doctor Syntax

        Since the outcome of that case and its various appeals is still pending - you're a little premature.

        1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

          Re: So give them the boot - use open source

          @Gordon 10

          Indeed so. But the current state of play is that they can. I've said here a couple of times that MS need to put in a clearer fire break, for instance by having the service run as a franchise in order to be sure.

  3. Vetis

    I dont know why these organisations seem surprised they need to buy the software they are using.

    1. SolidSquid

      I think it's more that they lose track of the number of licences currently installed, and without an easy way to track it (which I don't think they come with), you end up with people thinking they have valid licences to spare when they're actually short

      1. Roland6 Silver badge

        Agree MS license tracking could do with much improvement. Whilst it is a different league a small business customer uses a Microsoft Account, which whilst it does provide a single place for all the activated licenses, it doesn't do away with paper records, because it just lists licenses without providing any real information about which product the key is for and which user/systems have been using particular licenses.

        1. wayward4now
          Linux

          "Agree MS license tracking could do with much improvement. " Where's the economic incentive to do that when they can haul you into court and pick up another $50,000?? I doubt that the original cost of licenses came anywhere near to that bit of sheer profit. That was the point of this article. :)

      2. The Crow From Below

        If you log into your MSDN account it tells you exactly how many licenses you have used.

        It's not like MS don't provide these people with easy to use tools to track the activation rates. The problem probably came from the accounts department refusing to renew the licenses because they cost too much and simple cancelled them as they didn't know what they were for, which would have triggered the audits.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          "If you log into your MSDN account it tells you exactly how many licenses you have used."

          Firstly, no it doesn't and secondly, even if it did, then MSDN licences can't be used in production or with production data...

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