Robert Pogson

"We suspect that open source is practically non-existent", explains Fabio Leli, one of the activists for the Five Star Movement in the city. "This is absolutely unacceptable, for there are municipalities much smaller than ours, that are reporting significant savings by using open source."
see Five Star Movement urges Italian city of Bari to move to open source.

These guys are serious. In four years they went form nothing to 27% of the vote. The folks who resist moving to FLOSS risk losing election. The prime motivator seems to be wasting taxpayers’ money. Other cities are saving a lot by using FLOSS and the Five * movement wants Bari to do the same.

“Windows 8 joins a growing list of Microsoft’s failures and missed opportunities – instances where the software giant was either caught out, or where Ballmer pooh-poohed the competition and later had to eat his words and burn billions of dollars playing catch up. A gargantuan share of the technology sector, and accompanying revenue, that could have gone to Microsoft has been lost to Google, Apple and Samsung, a trio that has snapped up the online ads and search, and phone and tablet markets.”
see Hey, Teflon Ballmer. Look, isn't it time? You know, time to quit?

While Ballmer fiddles, M$ burns through $billions in R&D and can’t make a new product that sells. The channel is plugged with old product and it’s not moving off retail shelves. They are even going to give away the next release, fixing the gross deficiencies of “8″. From where will future revenue come? Businesses using thin clients and Android/Linux smart thingies? Cloud services? A cloud application that requires purchasing a client application? I don’t think so. Tying everything to a sinking Windows ^TM client will pull the plug on future revenue. “7″ did save the company from the Vista fiasco when they refused to fix Vista for $0 but there’s no saving M$ from the missed opportunity to expand on ARM. Moore’s Law and Intel will not give M$ back that opportunity. By the time M$ develops a new product, the world will have moved on.

In the meantime, M$ is having to reduce prices over a shrinking share of IT. In a year or two, their revenue will plunge and the cash to placate investors, OEMs and retailers will be gone.

The balance sheets and dividends do look healthy but only if you don’t look too closely. Current liabilities come to $32billion and longer-term liabilities come to $25billion. The value of the common stock at $66billion could vanish rapidly. $2billion of their net cash from operations, $9.6billion, was previously deferred revenue. A year ago that was just a few $million. Further, deferred revenue, mostly long-term volume licensing, was down $2billion. The unearned revenue for Windows was down $800million per quarter when their “hot”, “new” product “8″ should be selling like hot cakes. It’s not. That means the gravy is product customers paid for which they may never receive. That’s not a sound business plan. That’s not a way to maintain the loyalty of customers. Discounts and give-aways may not be enough.

At the same time that Ballmer is mismanaging the store, */Linux on ARM is outselling Wintel by many units per annum and */Linux is moving onto legacy PCs in a big way. 2013 has nothing but downside for the client division. The server division is stuck between the client and the cloud. The world does not need M$ taxing IT anywhere these days, not HPC, not servers, not the cloud, not mobility and not the client.

“the pace of inventory build-ups have been unable to catch up with the growth in demand for smartphones in China and other emerging markets, said the sources, noting that overall shipments of smartphones by China-based makers for domestic and overseas sales have skyrocketed to 30 million units a month recently compared to 20 million units in the first quarter of 2013.”
see China market: Several smartphone components in short supply

Eat your heart out, Wintel… While you have negative growth in shipments, stuff with Android/Linux on ARM is maxed out, limited by supplies of components to growth over 100% per quarter.

“President Josipović also expressed his "complete support" for the government plans to implement open source and open standards in the public sector’s IT.”
see Croatia's President praises creative spirit of open source community

Croatia is a small energetic country with a bright future if they keep making such good decisions.

How refreshing when the leader of a country actually leads its people towards software freedom.

Free Software comes with a licence that permits the recipient to run the software without restrictions, to examine the software, to modify the software and to redistribute the software modified or not under these terms. It’s a beautiful system and the right way to do IT for governments, organizations large or small and for individuals. To try out Free Software I suggest trying Debian GNU/Linux one of the largest and longest existing distributions of Free Software.

I was just reading an advertisement for a product which is supposed to cut the cost of IT so that more resources can be spent productively. It contained this gem:
“According to Gartner, when looking at the total lifetime cost of building or buying a new application, on average 42% of the initial cost of the application is going to be spent, year after year, to maintain that app. Application maintenance is the real problem.

Drilling into that 42% we find that it breaks down into three major buckets. The first bucket is enhancing the application. The second bucket is maintaining the application, break-and-fix, etc. And the final bucket is all the operational costs – the people who run the help desk, delivering upgrades to operating systems and storage environments, etc. These costs are real. “

That description must be describing non-free software because the reality of using FLOSS is much different:

• The initial costs are much lower as upstream/distros have done a lot of the work of integration. A package manager (software that helps install and update all the software in the system) does much of the work and they’ve already done much of the testing.
• There is no ongoing licensing cost so most of the work remaining is creating/using content/data, productive work.
• Because open standards are followed, the cost of extending applications is less because the data can always be moved to another application.

Indeed, FLOSS solves most of the problems of IT and leaves the major part of the budget to creative/innovative work. Schools where I worked had almost zero budgets but with FLOSS a lot got done, limited mainly by imagination not effort.

I recommend using Debian GNU/Linux for the base of all IT. Debian has a huge repository and the best package manager around, APT. It is trivial to create a minimal installation of a computer or cluster and by importing a package-list one can install all the relevant software and nothing else in a few minutes. No requests for quotations, no budget-meetings, no delays. Just make it happen and try it out. You can always do it on existing hardware and move the application to some dedicated/specialized hardware later if you want. Everything is allowed by a FLOSS licence:

1. You can run the software any way you want.
2. You can examine it, the ultimate documentation.
3. You can change it.
4. You can distribute it or others can distribute it to you, modified or not.

That last feature of FLOSS software is absolutely wonderful. If you integrate a system with some application you can share it with others or have it shared with you at very low cost.

The major costs of using FLOSS are hardware and actual productive use not anything irrelevant/arbitrary. That puts more of your budget to productive use and gives you time to think. One school where I worked actually had a real IT budget for the first year of operation. Because we used FLOSS, twice as much stuff was able to be installed and the cost of operation was trivial. The school increased use of IT many times with no additional costs. Visitors from other schools were amazed because they were usually limited to one PC per classroom and one lab. We had in addition, multiple PCs per classroom, multiple servers, a gigabit/s network, ready access to printers, scanners, and cameras all for the same cost as the usual solution using non-free software. Those savings are real.

HP May recommend that other OS but they are glad to sell you whatever you want:
“Operating system Preinstalled:
Windows 8 64
Windows 8 Pro 64
Ubuntu Linux
FreeDOS 2.0″
see HP 255 Notebook Datasheet

I guess they noticed the slowdown in sales of PCs with a more limited choice. This is HP’s first notebook to be shipped with Ubuntu GNU/Linux. This is part of Canonical’s plan to take over the world.