Battle For Open Standards In Dutch Public Education 89
In his first accepted submission, pjstevns writes "The heat is on! With the rising use of online systems for school administration the battle for open and accessible solutions is here, now. Parents are forced to buy 'proper' operating systems from your favorite Redmond based supplier — just to be able to access their children's grades, or participate in classes. A petition addressed at parliament for proper implementation of the open-standards guidelines put forward by the Dutch government itself is buzzing around the Netherlands. Comply or Explain!"
It seems like a major supplier of education software in the Netherlands has written essential software in Silverlight that all students must use, claiming "...Magister is truly multiplatform because Silverlight is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux," despite it more or less being non-functional with Moonlight.
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Isn't it great that Flash is dead now? (Score:5, Insightful)
So much about .Net cross-platform.
At least with Java you have to go out of your way to create platform dependency (like hard-coding path separator as "\", and not querying it from the System object), or use 3rd party non-portable libraries with JNI bindings.
Hell, they would have faired better even if they just used some Adobe Air based solution.
Or just use ASP.Net and no Silverlight. They just choose the worst possible solution for a public facing portal.
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Yawn. Dot Net sux0rs zzzzzz. What the fuck would you know about it?
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We know that it isn't meaningfully cross platform for starters.
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". .Net is for developers who don't want to develop, just use. " .Net is fine as a technology, the problem is it's tied to MS operating systems. You get RAD tools with most commercial IDEs, even if it's for a native language.
I think
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1, Doesn't Flex and Air work through the regular Flash plugin? I know people always complained about Flash on Linux, but I think it's usable by now. Although I use a 32 bit OS.
2, Isn't it that the developers tools don't run on Linux, but the end product does?
Disclaimer: I have never developed with Air or Flex.
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Who underwrote the development?
Not new, but news. (Score:3)
Money circulates under the table, as always.
But it never hurts to let the people over "there" (wherever there is) know that people over here (wherever here is) are aware of their dependence on things that are fundamentally not dependable.
(Are you under the power of gold^H^H^H^H power?)
On the little freedoms (Score:5, Interesting)
Shoot the Schoolmaster CIO (Score:5, Insightful)
For making such a stupid decision to move away from Open Standards. If you want stuff to work on the Internet use open standards, simple as that.
Why should users have to go to a desktop computer with a specific OS in order to utilise the system? Maybe it should be made fit for purpose for the modern age.
Re:Costs. Windows is cheaper than Windows + Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
This software only needs to run on one platform, the server. I didn't read TFA but TFS says "just to be able to access their childrens' grades" which should be implementable with a static page. I'm reading slashdot with Firefox on NetBSD, here can you imagine how much effort they must have put in to support that incredible combo? I don't even enable javascript!
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Agreed. There is a very serious image problem in the open source community - the hardon for bashing Microsoft is basically a reflex now, without any reflection as to how things actually are these days with the quality of their software.
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I'm sorry, I'm a closed-source, closed-minded Mac dev, not an open-source zealot, but to me that page doesn't look too complicated for a professional HTML designer (i.e. not the boss' teenage son). All I see in that screenshot are:
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There is nothing in that UI that HTML5 couldn't replace.
...or HTML4, too.
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They should invent a language which all platforms can understand.
We could call it HTML or something like that, but that's static, so we might need to invent something that makes it dynamic and still cross-platform-readable, like say php, asp.net, jsp,js...
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If your X.org is crashing on you then you're holding it wrong.
And school application can and should be written as web, not desktop applications that work withing the browser. That's what other european countries do and it works out quite well for them.
Re:Shoot the Schoolmaster CIO (Score:5, Insightful)
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You've just named a markup language and a scripting language well done. What does that have to do with the OP's point?
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Haven't you heard? HTML5 and JavaScript are the solutions to all problems these days. Do you need to write an operating system? Just use JavaScript! Did your dog just shit on the carpet? Use HTML5 to clean it up! Did you just drive over a nail, rupturing your car's tire? You can patch that hole with WebSockets! Did you accidentally pour acid on your genitals? Use jQuery to make yourself feel better.
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Haven't you heard? HTML5 and JavaScript are the solutions to all problems these days. Do you need to write an operating system? Just use JavaScript! Did your dog just shit on the carpet? Use HTML5 to clean it up! Did you just drive over a nail, rupturing your car's tire? You can patch that hole with WebSockets! Did you accidentally pour acid on your genitals? Use jQuery to make yourself feel better.
Except don't use jQuery if your page is XHTML, as there is a bug in the latest version (bug id : #9479).
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He could demand the source, release it to the community, and end up with an open source project with community support.
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Really? I remember reading Magister has a respectable-but-far-from-monopolistic market share of 10%, and there seem to be various options available, including the web-based SOM (formerly Vocus, http://product.simaconderwijs.nl/Onze_producten/SOM [simaconderwijs.nl] ). Of course they'll differ in scope, but there certainly seems to be competition.
(full disclosure: i work for a sister-company of the company that develops SOM)
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No no no, that is not what you do when confronted with someone in a position of authority who is found incapable of making rational decisions. The right course of action is to first reward the person handsomely, treating him like a valued and honoured member of the community. Offer him (or her) a parachute so golden that it generates its own gravity. Don't ever reprimand the person, don't ever mention their incompetence. Either promote the person to a position of even more authority - put him somewhere high
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Giving away software to students only to make them buy it at full price later when they work in a company is like handing out crack in the schoolyard to make the kids addicted to it, then offering it to them at full price.
You check check an analogy to see whether or not it's become ridiculously out of proportion. To do this, simple reverse the analogy.
Handing out crack in the schoolyard to get kids addicted to it is like giving out free or heavily subsidized software to students, to later sell them full-price versions when they enter the workforce.
See?
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Sounds more like clever business to me.
In a competitive environment, it would be. In a monopoly position, it simply is anti-competitive in an area where you'd like some competition. I agree it is not "bribery", though.
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Oh please. The monopoly position doesn't hold much water these days. We're got alternatives - Linux and LibreOffice. They're freely available with no restrictions. Microsoft can offer Windows and MS Office as cheaply as they want, but they won't offer it for free because that doesn't exactly net them any money, so no matter what, t
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We're got alternatives - Linux and LibreOffice.
No we don't. They are fine alternatives in that they are almost functional equivalents, but people aren't able to use them at work or school due to MS's monopoly position.
People prefer to spend the money to keep the status quo and not have to learn anything new than try something that MIGHT work well enough for them
People spent money on Office 2011 despite having to basically re-learn the program from scratch. OpenOffice requires almost no retraining from Office 2003. People buy Office because they have to if they want to interact with the outside world in an efficient way.
They do have a huge market share though
Yeah, a 94% market share - a monopoly.
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Does Linux run Win32 binaries flawlessly? If not then it is not a replacement for a lot of organisations. Does Libre Office run VBA macros flawlessly? If not then it is not a replacement for a lot of organisations.
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They do have a huge market share though, but they can't remove the free option.
With the UEFI secure boot, they actually found a way to remove it, and then blame the OEMs for that.
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As I recall, Microsoft got into significant trouble for doing just that with Internet Explorer.
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Cheap is not free, Open Source options *can* be free, but cna cost much mor eif you want to manage a district full of Linux PCs in the same way you manage a district full of Windows PCs. Go price management solutions for 1,000-4,000 linux desktop deployments and compare that with the cost of MS-supplied and offered management tools for similar size Windows PC deplyments. Windows can be much cheaper to centrally manage - and yes, you do want to manage your school district's computers centrally.
Hiring a progr
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This could have some interesting implications under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act [wikipedia.org]. Given that school board members might very well be classified as government officials, handing out goodies might have implications that go well beyond slipping the officer of a private company, or a US official remuneration for their software choice.
On the other hand, Microsoft is smart in that they are dealing with a (private) third party supplier. Look Ma! No hands in government pockets!
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So your inabilty to penetrate the education market is based on Microsoft's success in giving away it's product. Why don't you give away your product also? Oh, because then your programmers wouldn't get paid. Interesting. I seem to recall Bill Gates making that very point a few years ago [wikipedia.org]...
Do you realize you are arguing for a platform (Linux on the desktop) that has about 1/6th the market share of Windows Vista [wikipedia.org]?
Silverlight truly cross-platform? Right. (Score:4, Informative)
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Indeed. Even worse: Moonlight has never reached that maturity to keep up with the latest-of-the latest that's being used by Schoolmaster's Magister Silverlight app. I still keep a virtual WindowsXP available to boot, whenever I need to fill in marks for the kids.
Indeed, here's an IT teacher from NL with linux at home.
Yes, conform citizen, do as you are told (Score:3)
A wise post, I will now stay on the beaten path, do as I am told by my betters and take it up the arse like you have been doing all your life.
Sheep.
Please mark me as a foe, I can't mark you because there is no option for mindless twit.
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Why do you focus on Linux? There's this other OS called Mac OSX, which happens to be used by many students who are also having trouble with this. Not to mention the government *itself* decided open standards should be preferred over propietary ones. And all this guy does it point out the hypocricy of that and that there is actually a substantial non-Windows userbase here that is being affected.
I run Linux, I expect no one to care about that and I'm fine with that, but in this case they are just screwing ove
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An excellent point of course. I didn't mention OS X because the blog seemed more focused on open source and the ideology of openness, which is traditionally more of a Linux focus than OS X, but you're still right.
Re:This is not how you change things (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot is fun. It reports news which basically doesn't exist. This is just some guy who is on an anti-Microsoft bender and wants to somehow make his ideology meaningful in a world which doesn't really give a shit (if the low Linux uptake has anything to go by).
This is not about Linux. It's about whether or not it is okay for public education institutions (and public institutions in general) to force the public to use a specific commercial product if they wish to partake. Given that there are various alternatives to said commercial product, and given that the government has adopted a policy of using open standards where they exist, I think forcing people to use a proprietary system is not okay. The fact that this system is also more expensive than many of the alternatives makes it even more odious.
His rant is way too emotional for something that the politicians and most parents won't even understand.
The story here is really simple: will we force everybody to pay for the most expensive option, or will we use standards, so that people can choose what they use?
If people refuse to understand that, that's still no reason to take the worse option.
I mean, everyone uses Windows right?
Even if that were the case, it would be irrelevant: if standards were used, then _any_ operating system would be able to participate, including Windows. It's not as if, by going with open standards, you would lock out the users who can now use the system. And that's the whole point: to not lock people out.
But they also made the decision to make life more difficult for themselves by going against the grain and choosing to use something other than Windows (an OS pre-installed on virtually all computers you can buy, so having to buy it yourself is unnecessary).
Now you're blaming the victims. It is not them who are making things more difficult, it is the people who implement systems that will only work with specific other products, rather than going with standards that can be supported anywhere.
One could argue that some fights are worth fighting for, but if so... a small petition from a bunch of geeks with too much emotion and too little tact is likely to not do a damn thing.
You may well be right there, especially considering that the government _officially_ has a policy to use open standards and even to prefer open source software - yet, in many cases, has gone for a proprietary solution without even looking into the alternatives.
On the other hand, it was also a small bunch of geeks who discovered that the voting computers we used to use in the Netherlands weren't reliable, and they were tenacious enough to eventually get them all banned - even though the initial reaction was denial, marginalization, and misinformation. It is a good example of exactly what you're up against if you want to replace a vested commercial interest with the right thing, but it also shows that you _can_ win. But you have to raise awareness, first, and that is what those guys are doing.
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Apparently 5-10% of the students have trouble with Silverlight, so 90-95% running Windows would be more accurate.
That assumes nobody using Windows will have any trouble with Silverlight.
C++/Qt? (Score:1)
Why not just use C++/Qt and recompile for each platform? Seriously, unless you are being naughty and using platform specific code, Qt is platform agnostic. All that would be required is a simple recompile and you could have a Windows, Linux and Mac OSX (OSX seems to be overlooked here). An additional bonus that you get a binary out which seems to be there preference as bytecode is easier to reverse engineer.
However, if they go with something else, I insist they go with .Net compiled as MSIL or Java as th
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It is a website. They changed it so that the website depends on a not-widely deployed plugin.
That really should not be needed, people can just use open standards HTML/JS/CSS.
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Please define "not-widely deployed plugin" - as I read TFA, Silverlight is supported on 90% of desktops (those running MS operating systems)... That seems pretty widely deployed to me.
Not available for the best-selling PC in the world (Score:2)
iPad is the best-selling PC in the world for over a year now, and there is no Silverlight there.
If you are making something that everybody needs to see, you use HTML5 or you fail. It is that simple. The whole fucking point of the Web is to be the one platform that is universal.
Tell the bozo developer to go to w3.org not microsoft.com. And tell him computing is centered in Silicon Valley, motherfucker, not Washington.
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A quick google gives me the following numbers:
iPad: about 10 million units sold first half 2011. So make that 20-25 million for the year. The total tablet market may reach something like 30 million this year.
PC's: about 350 million units sold in 2010.
iPad and other tablets may get all the press, but generic PC units outsell tablets by more than 10 to 1, and those generic PCs again come >90% with Windows pre-installed. No idea what you've been smoking but your statement is clearly nonsensical. You can
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An ipad is alot of things, a PC it is not.
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Wow, I didn't realize that HTML5 was so universal it is supported by all browsers, on all platforms.
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iPad is the best-selling PC in the world for over a year now, and there is no Silverlight there.
I'm a PC, and I object to being compared to an iPad.
Seems to me... (Score:3)
If the school system provided a terminal server for the 10% of desktop users that opt for Operating Systems which do not natively support "Silverlight" to access the school web sites this would be a non-issue. RDP clients are plentiful and work fine on nearly all platforms. Even iPads.
silverlight, lol (Score:2)
True intention of Mono and Moonlight (Score:2)