This AP story about California local governments suing Microsoft for monopoly pricing in their sales to city and county governments is interesting. It is not clear why any of these plaintiffs need Windows. A lot of their desktops are probably still running Win98. One can argue the relative merits of GNU/Linux versus WinXP but it is obvious that GNU/Linux and the free OpenOffice suite are more powerful than older versions of Microsoft products. In a state with thousands of unemployed programmers you’d think that these governments could have cooperated to hire 100 programmers to port some of their Windows-only applications to Web-based or GNU/Linux apps. Instead they cooperated to hire 100 lawyers so that they can shackle themselves to Microsoft for another 10 years but at a slightly lower price.
[Back in 1997, I proposed that the Federales hire Linux developers instead of using Microsoft Word to write anti-Microsoft complaints. It has been seven years and still our government prefers to hire lawyers rather than programmers. Can we blame children if they decide to go to law school rather than doing something that will add to the G.D.P.?]
What do you have against lawyers? Assuming you own property — real or intangible — where would you be without legal rights and lawyers to protect them? How would people resolve disputes?
Funny we never hear about states suing the AMA for limiting the supply of doctors, or suing the ABA for limiting the supply of lawyers (which in both cases “artificially drive up the price”).
Note-to-Dave (above): As I am currently going through a divorce, I submit lawyers are –as a group– worthless at dispute-resolution although they excel at “fleecing their clients”. That typically “somebody wins” in litigation is a misnomer (rather “the winner lost less”). Ask someone (male/female) who just “won a child-custody case” what they really “won” (such a case is easily $100K to the lawyers, presumably money that would have been spent to a large degree on the welfare of the child, and very rarely is “sole custody” awarded anyway).
Dave: Some of my best friends are lawyers (or law school professors anyway, hence the location of this blog). That said, every study by economists that I’ve seen shows that adding lawyers to an economy cuts the G.D.P. If you are believe that a primary function of the government is to promote economic growth it would be better to spend money on programming rather than litigation. Nothing against running off to court if the other party in a contract dispute stops returning phone calls and out-of-court settlement appears unlikely. But in this case it is unclear why the dispute exists. If they don’t like MSFT’s prices they can run GNU/Linux and pay nothing.
In the end, lawyers are a cost center to the economy as a whole, not a profit center (although clearly they are a profit center to themselves). Clearly, certain cost centers must exist in companies and society as a whole. However, it is wise to minimize these to whatever extent possible.
P.S. What do you call a thousand lawyers at the bottom of the sea?
Phil, to offer one of a few possible simplistic answers to your question, one reason could be retraining of the users and IT support stuffs. If you circle back to your previous post and note who sits behind those win98 desktops, and presume that the test results on their gov. job readiness tests are massaged not unlike those you reference, you’ll agree that it could weeks of training per person and many visits from tech. support folks just to get them used to a new logon sequence, a different-looking toolbar, or the absence of the start button etc etc. For this and many other reasons, the Linux desktop – and even backend – migration is a non-starter with the gov CIO’s (aka data processing managers), especially on the local level. What’s tricky is for the internal legal dep. and the “outside council” to convince the execs of a substantial enough return on investment for the cost of litigation, given the already greatly reduced MS pricing for the gov. sector.
what’s even more painful for the taxpayers, that there are simple solutions like “PC Reviver” from http://www.asterisk.co.nz/ (a rebranded thin client) that could make good use of all those junk PC’s the gov agencies tend to accumulate and cherish, crying for the lack of funds for the hardware upgrade to support new MS OS’s and being stuck with unsupported versions.
The cost of retraining can be avoided only in cases where clients boot directly in their applications required for each job function. But nontheless the cost of a state-wide migration for multiple agencies / departments could be staggering – doing it just for a few counties may not be an option. Plus, suing is in vogue; large-scale migrations done by the gov. drag for years and are often disastrous.
skeptik: If they don’t like MSFT’s current products/prices and they don’t want their hard-working staff members to break a sweat by learning some Linux desktop they can continue using what they’ve got without paying MSFT another dime. It is too bad that judges aren’t as plain-spoken as surgery attendings. One of these guys responded to my friend’s brother, a surgery resident, who complained about having been awake for several days straight and standing in the O.R. for many hours, by asking “Oh, does your pussy hurt?”
Given the existence of a completely free alternative to Windows that does everything the plaintiffs need I don’t understand why the courts would be sympathetic to this case.
Philip, with all due respect, it seems you’re trying to apply business logic to a non-business minded organizational system, IMHO. They don’t live by the rules of a performance-oriented enterprise.
the answer to your question can be quite simple. they can’t just keep using what they’ve got (which is anything prior to win2k now) because it’s unsupported – that was one of the major reasons quoted for not accepting Linux in the enterprise. Except that with Win98 there’s no community-based support either. Regarding making the staffers learn Linux without formal and expensive training – boy, I’d say >80% of them can’t add fractions. And who will explain why the pinguin is black?
As to why they’re suing, it’s not (only) to get better pricing on future purchases, but primarily to get a settlement on prior purchases – as a ROI for the litigation costs.
As to the sympathy of the courts, when the bulk of their investment in MS software was made, there was no real alternative to Windows-like desktop in the form of Linux as there’s now (even though the most frequently used Windows app there might have been the terminal emulator).
Regarding the surgery residents, I would be more concerned about the patients who live the O.R. with the instruments forgotten inside their bodies, or with the wrong operation being performed on them. Sleepless nights could be the initiation ritual of the church of modern medicine, argues Dr. Robert Mendelsohn in “Confessions of Medical Heretic”.
They hired the lawyers, because they know probably from painful prior experience, that hiring 100 lawyers will probably cost them less than hiring 100 programmers — and that court case will probably get settled BEFORE the custom code is even released for beta testing.
Government software projects in California have been notoriously over budget — and behind schedule, in terms of not months, but years.
Uh… Microsoft has recently announced that they are *not* discontinuing support for Win98, contrary to their previous plans.
All public services in Brazil are moving to open source solutions… Including a local developed version of Knoppix linux-on-CD.
Litigation is a peaceful way to resolve disputes. Lawyers don’t create the disputes. The parties to the dispute do. Some people resolve their disputes without litigation and others don’t. The goal is peace and justice — not necessarily a higher GDP. Although if people took the law into their own hands — as still happens in many parts of the world — GDP would be lower.
Linux running on Win98 boxes(500Mhz,64k memory) forget it.
The Fast-Food Syndrome: The Linux Platform is Getting Fat
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=7324&page=1