Massachusetts says Goodbye to Redmond
Massachusetts adopting open-source software!
Massachusetts Administration and Finance Secretary Eric Kriss last month instructed the state’s chief technology officer to adopt a policy of “open standards, open source” for all future spending on information technology.
The directive likely won’t completely cut out Microsoft from the state’s $80-million technology budget.
But it may be the clearest example yet of a state government taking sides against Microsoft in the software industry’s most important struggle.
I plan to get a Linux computer soon and network to my PC net. Then, I’ll gradually migrate to Linux, moving far far away from the never ending system crashes and security holes of Windows.
For those of you who haven’t worked on a computer with a real operating system, not the bloated bug-ridden Windows, you may be startled to learn that real operating systems just keep running, seldom crash, and don’t need constant attention and tweaking.
Massachusetts has launched a torpedo at Microsoft. Others will follow. Judging from the computer industry magazines I read, corporate America is already doing this. Why? Well, if you have Windows, estimate how much time you spend downloading patches, re-booting after it crashes, worrying about security. Then estimate how much time it would take to do this for a company with 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 computers running Windows…
Corporations spend million of dollars and way too much time constantly updating and fixing Windows problems and security issues — which ought not to have ever been problems at all. They are tiring of this, and are realizing Linux and Unix simply don’t have these problems.