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

[wizard69]

As as much as I like KiCAD I have to disagree. KiCAD, Scientific Linux and other are a complete waste of the public’s money, if the focus of CERN is nuclear research.

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).

An issue that could have been addressed with commercial software at a lower cost.

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.

I’m not really bothered by open hardware developed for a specific need as long as that hardware is justified due to the lack of Existing solutions. In fact anything developed with public money should be available to the public. What I object to is reinventing the wheel for no good reason. In other words a jobs program.

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.

I really doubt that KiCAD does anything unique here. I just see these projects as poor management on the part of the leadership at CERN.

[F.Ultra]

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..

Now? CERN begin to migrate from Scientific Linux to CentOS back in 2015. The recent news that Scientific Linux would be discontinued came from Fermilab, not CERN.

[ms178]

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.

I am more of a friend of new nuclear technology. But that conversation would go way off topic.

That said, the EP is not the most important EU institution if you ask me, that is still the Council. There is also a huge amount of lobbying efforts going on and a lot with questionable overall value for the greater society, I grant you that. But that's part of politics and is not any different on the EU level than everywhere else in democratic societies around the world.

[Almindor]

Except that most people and devices at CERN already use FOSS, so why would they want to negotiate over licensing costs for less than 1/4 of all of the devices? It makes more sense to move those to FOSS too.

No that's not how this works. If we're talking clerk-level users and their desktops/laptops with things like mail servers, printing and other admin stuff (office) they won't want to go to anything but M$ stuff. Even if there's a push it'll probably end with getting a better deal and then some arm twisting from M$ in the end.

[F.Ultra]

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.

And let me guess, they are all alien lizard people in disguise?

[F.Ultra]

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.

CERN employs 2500 people and received in total 1B EUR in contributions aggregated from 30 countries in 2019. For a "mammoth organization" that would be an extremely small kind of mammoth.

https://fap-dep.web.cern.ch/rpc/2019-annual-contributions-cern-budget

[Vistaus]

Hmm, the sceptic in me thinks this might be similar to the NHSbuntu project.

There many projects were half-developed (such as smart-card reading) to move the NHS in England away from Microsoft and towards open-source software with the goal of saving a lot of money...

... Unfortunately this was a ruse, instead this project was used to simply negotiate slightly cheaper licensing costs with Microsoft and to encourage them to keep "supporting" Windows XP for slightly longer.

I imagine the same is happening here. Hopefully not but from a business viewpoint it does kinda make sense.

Except that most people and devices at CERN already use FOSS, so why would they want to negotiate over licensing costs for less than 1/4 of all of the devices? It makes more sense to move those to FOSS too.

[Vistaus]

I guess the time has come for CERN to come up with a real opensource alternative to Skype for Linux?

Btw, I was told by someone at CERN who has seen the WIP email client that video conferencing is built-in to the email client, so video conferencing is not going to be a standalone client.

[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..

[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.