UK.gov issues internal 'ditch Oracle NOW' edict to end pricey addiction Whitehall bean counters have ordered government departments to find fresh ways to end their reliance on Oracle. The Cabinet Office is understood to have formally contacted central agencies within the last month and asked them to look for ways to “get rid of Oracle". No. 10 is believed to be concerned about the amount civil …
And fighter aircraft not that I would not do the same type of thing if I had the boodle
Oh well, Google just rented the Valley of Temples in Sicily for their own party - maybe they didn't try to buy it because if wasn't on sale (anyway, it was rented for a mere 100,000 euro, pocket money, for them).
Guess megalomania is becoming a typical job-related illness for many CEOs...
Ahh someone who has not come into 'conflict' with the Oracle licensing proposition. It is not as simple as 'one licence per user' - it can be anywhere from that up to 'one licence per user per customised app per application per oracle install per process cores per colour of CTOs underwear' and other variations on the theme.
It is tempting to suggest that the licences were agreed by legal beetles (actually not beagles have more sense) without projecting costs with increased system complexity, growth in the user group, and expansion of database applications.
It makes TP & NG's cry for sanity look simple....
“Along with the standard computer warranty agreement which said that if the machine 1) didn't work, 2) didn't do what the expensive advertisements said, 3) electrocuted the immediate neighborhood, 4) and in fact failed entirely to be inside the expensive box when you opened it, this was expressly, absolutely, implicitly and in no event the fault or responsibility of the manufacturer, that the purchaser should consider himself lucky to be allowed to give his money to the manufacturer, and that any attempt to treat what had just been paid for as the purchaser's own property would result in the attentions of serious men with menacing briefcases and very thin watches. Crowley had been extremely impressed with the warranties offered by the computer industry, and had in fact sent a bundle Below to the department that drew up the Immortal Soul agreements, with a yellow memo form attached just saying: 'Learn, guys...”
This reminds me of a bit out of Good Omens:
Along with the standard computer warranty agreement which said that if the machine
1) didn't work,
2) didn't do what the expensive advertisements said,
3) electrocuted the immediate neighborhood,
4) and in fact failed entirely to be inside the expensive box when you opened it, this was expressly, absolutely, implicitly and in no event the fault or responsibility of the manufacturer, that the purchaser should consider himself lucky to be allowed to give his money to the manufacturer, and that any attempt to treat what had just been paid for as the purchaser's own property would result in the attentions of serious men with menacing briefcases and very thin watches.
Crowley had been extremely impressed with the warranties offered by the computer industry, and had in fact sent a bundle Below to the department that drew up the Immortal Soul agreements, with a yellow memo form attached just saying: "Learn, guys..."
Oracle probably employs the same people (for licensing and/or selling your soul. My understanding is that they're roughly equivalent)
The number of licenses Oracle require for their systems is ridiculous and, probably intentionally, very confusing. They probably get less customers because of the difficulty but those they get usually end up paying vastly more than they should so Oracle's happy.
Here in Denmark, an Oracle-based database was used for a traffic information system while expanding one of the main highways around Copenhagen.
Oracle initially tried to license it "per user", meaning every car that could potentially pass by one of the electronic information signs. With roughly 1 million cars in the greather Copenhagen area, this would have contributed nicely to some Oracle serfs' bonus account.
They tried the same stunt on the database behind (at the time) one of the biggest e-commerce sites in the country until we told them to go forth and multiply. They wanted to count each unique visitor as a licensed user with thousands visiting per month.
Move away from each and every proprietary piece of junk you're running, switch to FS.
Get PostgreSQL on GNU/Linux, switch all desktops to Linux ...pay a flatrate for support, I am sure they would end up paying 1/1000 of the price for licensing, compared to what they pay now.
They would have to train everybody for Windows 8/10 anyway, might as well train them to use Linux.
Instead of actually running Linux desktops, an even better plan would be to switch users to remote Linux desktops. Easier to manage, and you avoid the hardware compatibility hell of installing Linux on diverse desktops and laptops, whose manufacturers care less than nothing about Linux compatibility. The clients could in fact be cheap "landfill" Windows laptops, because the only application of interest is the remote client (VNC or similar) that requires very little memory or CPU power. If the machine breaks, it is simply recycled and the employee goes to get a new one at the office depot. Support costs would plummet.
To be fair Libre/Open Office isn't as good as MS Office, I've been trying for years to reconcile the issue but it doesn't come out in the wash. I did recently spend two years using mostly Google Docs, it justifies the lack of features because the document collaboration is so immensely good but the formatting and working options aren't nearly as good.
But in contra to my own argument my mother has been using Linux as a desktop for the past few years and is barely concerned that it isn't Windows.
Who cares how well internal government documents are formatted? Let them use plain text.
...but then how will the legions of civil servants while away their days, without those halcyon hours spent mindlessly stabbing at [B] and [I] buttons and fighting with autoindentation, you psychopath?
"...but then how will the legions of civil servants while away their days, without those halcyon hours spent mindlessly stabbing at [B] and [I] buttons and fighting with autoindentation, you psychopath?"
Put'em to useful work! Are there no streets that need cleaning? No chimneys that need to be swept?
"But for 99% of users it is perfectly adequate"
In any sort of normal work environment, I think you mean more like for 9.9% of users it is perfectly adequate.....
For starters there is no VBA support, very flaky ODF support, loads more bugs, it is much slower, and is missing lots of features and integration options compared to MS Office.
Ok so LO is not perfect - but the quantity of cash governments are throwing at $CORPS, it could be fixed using target funding.
The central problem is there is a vested interest in having gigantic companies run these contracts, so the middle manager machinery justifies its existence.
Having an enterprise Linux installation with customisation as necessary funded from the deployment costs, returned to the software packages.
Let's stop paying for problems that were solved decades ago, and the whole boat rises....
P.
"ODF was invented in Libre/Openoffice"
Nope, OpenDocument is not the same as the older OpenOffice.org XML format and these formats are not directly compatible. ODF was actually developed by OASIS.
"It's MS'es implementation of it which is flakey."
Nope - MS have by far the best ODF implementation that is currently available - and it fully support the latest ODF version - even in Office 365. If you look through LO support forums and bug trackers you will see that there are loads of issues with it's implementation of ODF. For instance crashes saving a file that can be opened / saved in other Office packages.
Just a few examples:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libreoffice/+bug/1292360
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libreoffice/+bug/1412448
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libreoffice/+bug/1072033
Also there are vast numbers of bugs when handling MS Office formats - that most businesses rely on.
The malware part is true, but a lot of organizations rely on heavily "programmed" document templates, especially in the spreadsheet world. I've seen banks with programmers dedicated to it - and those templates generated document to manage a lot of money. I guess in many government departments is more or less the same.
Do you really believe saving some dollars/euro to get rid of MS Office, lose those functionalites and need to re-implement them, looks a good move for them?
Sure, maybe not every office needs them, but as long as some offices need them, to simplify deployment, management and interoperability you choose a single product.
Open/LibreOffice needs to cover this requirements also, if it aims to become a full replacement for MS Office.
"But for 99% of users it is perfectly adequate."
It's that statement which has Microsoft shitting housebricks.
Word and their ilk weren't as good as WordPerfect. But they were good enough - and cheaper.
Postgresql isn't as good as Oracle - but its good enough for 99% of usage cases.
And the raw facts are that Oracle make a great database, but _everything_ else they touch turns to a steaming pile of shit - ESPECIALLY their financial packages. My employer just moved from a terrible Oracle product to an even worse one.
Oracle, lilke other big companies in the same arena, suffers from the "Indian syndrome" - applications built out of a lot of Java (or the like) code written by lame Indian programmers paid a few rupees, while the applications are sold for many $$$$$.
Not that our SAP system is built by more competente programmers...
To be fair Libre/Open Office isn't as good as MS Office, I've been trying for years to reconcile the issue but it doesn't come out in the wash.
I beg to differ. It is nothing but a matter of what you have grow used to. I have mostly been using OpenOffice and LibreOffice for years, and now trying to MS Office for some project is driving me nuts. LibreOffice just fits my way of working better, and gives more support for producing a consistently formatted document. Maybe there are some places where MS Office wins, but I don't know of any other than being more compatible with the MS Office file formats. This advantage would disappear if more people used OpenOffice, LibreOffice or other tools that properly process OpenDocument formats.
Maybe some day...
Only if you absolutely have to have the dancing bear at the bottom of evey page. Everyone learns some "cute" trick in MS office and then pesters the world. I simply want text and some MINOR formatting for readability If you are saying MS is better because it has more "features" then you are right, but if you are claiming to be better because the product produced is clear and presentable you are far from correct.
OpenOffice Writer is great. I had to start using it a few months ago for a course I'm doing and it suddenly made so much more sense having the same application on my MacBook and my Windows desktop.
Running Office 2011 on my MBP, Wordpad on my Windows desktop (on the few occasions I needed to write something) and MS Office at work was just horrible. If I could use Writer at work I would, it doesn't randomly f**k up my document formatting like Word does.
You fail to notice that a lot of those Oracle instances already run on Linux, for which both Red Hat and Oracle itself make you pay happily. Also Oracle makes maybe more money from "mandatory" support than the licenses themselves.
The GPL doesn't enforce any price or support model - what make you believe if everybody switch to FS you will be offered only cheap flatrate support?
Once you get locked in some "enterprise" supported version of Linux/Postgres/whatever you like from which you can't simply switch away easily - and being FS doesn't make it easier at all (unless you're Google, maybe) - do you believe you will still get a cheap flat rate support price? Do you have ever read Red Hat support agreement, for example?
I guess they will start to make you pay per seat, per user, per processor per whatever they like to make more money - most people like money, a lot of them. And less competition, the more you can charge - that's why Oracle can charge so much and still be able to sell obscenely priced products.
@Hans 1.Yes indeed, Oracle moved to Linux desktops internally years ago. I have worked in fairly big and fairly well run IT companies and I know it's a hell of a problem to keep track of all the licenses used. Invoices are cleared by people who don't know enough about it. And developers/programmers feel it's not their job to report on what's in use and what has been scrapped years ago. It's not just Oracle it's all of it including even hardware. The more people involved the more difficult it gets, and the invoices just keep coming.
"Get PostgreSQL on GNU/Linux, switch all desktops to Linux"
Oooh! The boom in consultancy for re-inventing all of the unique functions that have been created for the various government departments, and the training at the desktop.
"They would have to train everybody for Windows 8/10 anyway, might as well train them to use Linux."
a) what makes you think that they are going to move off XP/7?
b) The few that i am aware of are/have already decided that ClassicShell is the way to go.
Sure, but replace it with what ?
I cannot imagine the sheer volume of data stored and managed in a government-level group of Oracle databases, even taking into account the fact that there is no oversight or global planning of any kind (good one there, way to ensure economies are impossible).
You don't just get rid of Oracle. You need to find a suitable substitute, redesign the applications, create a parallel environment, migrate the data onto said parallel platform, design a test suite to validate the transfer and test the new environment and validate it.
When all that is done, you can start migrating the users. You'll be doing that bit by bit, so as not to have everything blow up in your face with the inevitable unexpected complications that will arise.
Just planning this kind of thing will be a major project which will require external expertise.
Hmm, do I smell the presence of yet another pork barrel for yet another vast, government-wide IT failure ahem, project ?
Some databases may be easy enough to migrate to other RDBMS. Others could be very, very difficult - a lot depends on how they were implemented, and what Oracle features they use. It is true Oracle is absurdly expensive and its licensing is close to blackmailing, but it is also true it offers some very advanced features other databases often lack, and you can't easily replace if your rely on them.
Also, moving to another database may mean to redesign the applications built upon it because transaction/concurrency model are often not identical, and if you don't care about it, bad things will happen.
It is also true there are also DBAs so worried about upgrades they would still run Oracle 6 on a VAX system if they only could find the hardware - forcing you to buy even more expensive support (and Oracle knows it and doesn't make upgrades as easy as you could wish...).
Moving away may not be easy, and Oracle takes advantage of it. An effort from some big customers to move away from Oracle is welcome, maybe someone there will rething its licensing strategy - but I'm afraid if someone else just believe to slap a Postgres/<put your preferred RDBMS here> database here and there and import data, it could become soon another expensive bloodbath.
Moreover, it looks what they really need is a good database to manage licenses to avoid buying millions they don't need...
"expensive bloodbath" - a touch alarming!!!
If there are problems, write a RFP for modifications for $RDMS or $OFFICESUITE to address them.
Look at the software that runs on supercomputers, that has been funded to solve very complex problems.
It can be done, and *stays* done.
P.
Guess you never saw - and thereby worked on - a large, complex database with a lot of complex data types used (which may not be easily mapped to other platforms types), a lot of data logic (correctly) implemented as packages/stored procedures, and a lot of highly optimized complex queries using often some database specific SQL features. And that without speaking of some advanced features which may be available on some high-end databases and not on others - and could require third party tools or be reimplemented maybe at the application leve.
Trying to move this kind of databases to a different engine is a very long, complex task. Sure, if you have small "data dumps" - data written in simple tables, and nothing else - and simple CRUD applications, porting could be easy enough.
Software that runs on supercomputer has nothing to do with large databases - but maybe some big data analytics that work on data *extracted* from a large database in a format suitable for processing.
But if you believe IT is an OS and an office suite, well, believe me, there is far far more to learn.... one day, maybe, you'll learn by experience...
"Just planning this kind of thing will be a major project which will require external expertise."
This is why oracle will be safe for a fair few years, I bet they will ultimately decline like IBM, because of current business model of screw all the current customers. Larry doesn't care about that far in the future, he wants his boats today.
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