Schools In Portugal Moving To OSS

New submitter thyristor pt writes "In light of massive national budget cuts, the Portuguese government will force public schools to move to free/open source software (Google translation of original in Portuguese). Schools with some 50,000 outdated computers won't see their software licenses renewed, the main reason being the cost of hardware upgrade inherent to mostly Microsoft software updates. Will the Euro debt crisis be a driving force to the spread of open source software?"

Waiting for MS to underbid

[Mathinker]

We've seen this over and over again. Microsoft will just offer to give the software for free. They know that it's not in their best interest for it to become general knowledge how functional open-source alternative have become.

Re:Not likely

[ozmanjusri]

Open Source can only spread by being objectively better (in ways customers care about).

Have you tried Libre Office lately?

Most people I've set it up for like it a lot better than the current ribbon-infested Microsoft version.

Re:Waiting for MS to underbid

[Compaqt]

Yeah, you said it, and beat me to it.

Remember when "Blah moves to Linux" used to elicit thoughts of "Yippee! The Year of the Linux Desktop Advances"?

Now these kinds of stories are just a kind of parody of themselves.

Also the Linux Desktop has basically just jumped the shark (Gnome3, Unity), so I don't think there's any real joy from the geek corner for Linux Desktops anymore.

Also, it's hard to wish a Linux desktop on anyone because instead of fixing old bugs, they've taken to creating 100s more.

Re:Think Ninite...

[Hymer]

"The real question is, can Windows 7 run properly?"
Nope, it keeps asking me for admin password all the time. ...and on Windows servers it became next to impossible to use a browser.

Re:Brazil

[Anonymous Coward]

Portugal has had for years a company marketing a linux distro - caixa mágica. The national "one laptop per child" project already shipped with a linux installation. The IT world is already entrenched in linux. There is absolutely no need to look at brazil for linux support.

Re:Administrative support? Culture change? Ploy?

[icebraining]

I went to a (public) High School here in Portugal around eight years ago; at the time, all the machines we used in IT classes already dual-booted between Windows and a Portuguese GNU/Linux distro ("Caixa MÃgica") and we had to learn how to get around on the Gnome desktop.

Re:Not likely

[Super_Z]

But in all my life I have never heard of a business choosing F/OSS software purely on the basis of price. There's always a degree of pragmatism involved - "cheap and adequate" is usually how it pans out. As soon as you have to interact with someone else who's using MS Office, there's a good chance it ceases to be adequate.

There are lots of world class open source projects out there that gets picked because they are simply better than their closed source equivalents - linux, apache, postgresql, spamassassin, varnish, ruby, python, gcc/llvm, webkit, postfix, dovecot etc.

I have used Word for years, but after having been forced to write a 50 page user manual in it, I stopped using it. I have never looked back.

Re:Waiting for MS to underbid

[tqk]

The other problem is bad attitude, which in a way reminds me of the way online shooters have become. go to ANY forum and ask for a non CLI way to solve a simple problem and what do you get? Most likely a wave of pure hatred, with every filthy name in the book, ending with "RTFM or go back to Winblowz noob LOL!".

What a crock of !@#$. Have you even looked at the Ubuntu forums? BS like that is not allowed at all! That crap doesn't even fly in debian-user, and anything and anyone can post to it without even subscribing. Usenet and IRC used to be like that, but that stuff hasn't flown for years (which is a shame because I enjoyed stamping on those jerks' heads and teaching them civility).

What's wrong with CLI ways to solve problems? You can't type? Could'a fooled me. Why are you looking for non-CLI progs in the first place when simpler, quicker solutions already exist? Just because you're used to Windows Explorer doesn't mean GUI file managers are the right way to do things. They even decided to hide filename extensions from you, despite the dangerous security implications (in Windows) that raises.

Stop spreading FUD. It makes you look like a fool. And buy yourself a cheap sandbox machine so you can try out modern installs without fscking up your working machine. Go to Distrowatch [distrowatch.com] and find some ISOs to burn. Run the install over and over again and learn their potential. Pretty soon, you'll be able to build a fully functional box in half an hour.