CERN Is Working To Move Further Away From Microsoft Due To License Costs Going Up By 10x

[IreMinMon]

The Commission is usually more progressive and wants to bring things forward. But there are other stakeholders (Council, EP) to please as well, and I don't like the copyright directive either. On the other hand, the reliance on Microsoft products is a result of the 90s and they really should change their internal position here and move things into the open source direction. The ecosystem is much more mature now and investing the same amount of money as they pay for licensing fees would provide more benefits for the world.

The commission is corrupt, anything else is just daydreaming. Do you know what the agenda for Germany + entire ALDE, greens and S&D is? They want to use ECB and EIB to fund their private sector "green tech" companies in western Europe (mostly Germany). It will make many people rich, mostly those who are rich already and have good political connections. Basically a wealth transfer from periphery to the core. Then the Germans plan to license intellectual property that comes from investments from our money and basically become a "green Microsoft".

I've had some data somewhere, would have to find it again - don't get fooled by EU budget spending - EIB and ECB investments are much larger in € value and most of them go to western Europe.

[oiaohm]

https://lwn.net/Articles/786422/

You have to wonder if Microsoft idea to put license cost up by a factor of 10 are linked to the end of scientific linux.

[carewolf]

But if CERN isn't an academic instution what is? Do they only count instituations with full master programs or what?

[down1]

https://lwn.net/Articles/786422/

You have to wonder if Microsoft idea to put license cost up by a factor of 10 are linked to the end of scientific linux.

Nonsense, there is no noticeable difference between scientific linux and centos, so nothing of value was lost.

[CochainComplex]

Nonsense, there is no noticeable difference between scientific linux and centos, so nothing of value was lost.

maybe it was picked up as "we are loosing interest in Linux"

[down1]

maybe it was picked up as "we are loosing interest in Linux"

Well it shouldn't be. There's so much nonsense in this thread. As far as I'm aware there is no corporate conspiracy. CERN is simply looking to avoid a price rise in their basic infrastructure software, there aren't interested in developing off the shelf business software when a million other companies and organisations can do a better job.

They prefer the flexibility and freedom of open-source (all the actual research is done with gnu+linux tools) but if there's a cheap off the shelf product they don't mind going with closed source. Simple as that.

[spykes]

I’m not even sure how they managed to be called an educational institution at all.

However CERN is a perfect example of massive government waste. They are spending more r have spent way too much money on things not associated with their research efforts. Somethings like KiCAD simply should not have been developed at CERN as it just leads to a mammoth organization that isn’t always working directly on nuclear research. In the end they spend far too much money on stuff that isn’t advancing science. I suspect this is why some of the national labs lost interest in Scientific Linux.

By the way I'm not saying that labs should do open source but rather that open source should be directly focused on the science. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that some of these projects end up costing tax payers more than simply buying the software to begin with. Buying could mean a Linux service contract or a more traditional licensing of a CAD program.

It's perfectly OK for me to spend more on OSS development than on licensing. OSS is not just about costs, it's about empowerment and technology ownership. I'm very happy the CERN developed KiCAD. They did it to fill their need, and now everybody can profit of that. That's not a waste of public money according to me, all the contrary.

[tuxd3v]

Can you share screens with Ekiga? I mean a true alternative.

There are a lot of applications for sharing screens and such..
For chat and such, you also have Telegram , riot , slack

[doragasu]

However CERN is a perfect example of massive government waste. They are spending more r have spent way too much money on things not associated with their research efforts. Somethings like KiCAD simply should not have been developed at CERN as it just leads to a mammoth organization that isn’t always working directly on nuclear research. In the end they spend far too much money on stuff that isn’t advancing science. I suspect this is why some of the national labs lost interest in Scientific Linux.

I do not agree about the KiCAD complaints. CERN is a gigantic institution, and has a very big number of sections. The really impressive enhancements KiCAD has seen since CERN started working on it, have been developed IIRC at the Hardware Timing section (BE-CO-HT). This section designs and builds a lot of hardware (like boards to implement their in-house designed White Rabbit sub-nanosecond timing synchronization protocol). From this department also come some of the most important contributions to the Open Hardware ecosystem, like the CERN OHL license. They are open source minded people, and the motivation behind the work in KiCAD, was to replace the dependency on privative hardware design tools such as Altium. Having open tools that you can modify to suit your needs (that in the scientific world are often non conventional), is important for the scientific world.

[tuxd3v]

Nonsense, there is no noticeable difference between scientific linux and centos, so nothing of value was lost.

There are some differences, and they *Really matter*!
One of the problems with CERN is that now, they will become a target on prices for products, since they are dumping Scientific Linux..
They are at Market mercy..

And they are starting to realise that now..