CERN has started a project to replace all of the closed source, proprietary software that it uses with open alternatives.
Given the collaborative nature of CERN and its wide community, a high number of licenses are required to deliver services to everyone, and when traditional business models on a per-user basis are applied, the costs per product can be huge and become unaffordable in the long term.
A prime example is that CERN has enjoyed special conditions for the use of Microsoft products for the last 20 years, by virtue of its status as an “academic institution”. However, recently, the company has decided to revoke CERN’s academic status, a measure that took effect at the end of the previous contract in March 2019, replaced by a new contract based on user numbers, increasing the license costs by more than a factor of ten. Although CERN has negotiated a ramp-up profile over ten years to give the necessary time to adapt, such costs are not sustainable.
I always find it strange when scientific institutions funded by public money get locked in by proprietary software vendors, to the point where they are so reliant on them it becomes virtually impossible to opt for alternatives. Good on CERN – although a bit late – for trying to address this issue.
I really can’t understand why Microsoft did that. They will be the ones that lose surely ?
Dont forget Microsoft have to provide support and services for each licence. Office 365 isn’t “free”.
I think a salesman got a bit spooked by linux and over discounted. When you consider the top all singing all dancing office 365 for education costs £7 per user, they must have been paying less than 70 pence for a 10 fold increase!
What I’m reading out of this is that CERN was using the Education edition stuff, and got stuck having to switch to an Enterprise licensing arrangement, not that they had some super-special deal that let them not even have to pay as much as the regular Education edition customers.
Also, I’m 99% certain that Windows licensing is involved too, and that’s what’s going to really cost them, not Office 365.
ahferroin7,
This was my impression as well. I think that CERN’s own software is already running on a linux stack. This move is going to migrate all end users to FOSS throughout the organization.
https://web.archive.org/web/20081205055058/http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/columns/large_hadron_collider_switches_if_its_end_world_it_will_be_powered_gnu_linux
I found this, interesting to read about similar initiatives throughout the world…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_adopters
Not necessarily, especially for on-prem licenses.
The OEM licensing model they specifically avoid support.
There’s no reason they couldn’t have a no-support model of licensing for borderline “academic” licensees with enough internal knowledge to support the product themselves. At that point MS’s actual “cost” is essentially 0 (basically, the costs of the compute time required to generate/track the licenses themselves, plus either physical media or the download equivalent).
365 isn’t actually mentioned in the linked article, I suspect it’s more traditional on-prem, volume licensing involved.
Context: back in April, it was announced that Scientific Linux (RHEL clone) is discontinued and CERN will move to using CentOS instead. source: https://listserv.fnal.gov/scripts/wa.exe?A2=SCIENTIFIC-LINUX-ANNOUNCE;11d6001.1904
I wonder why Windows / Office licensing was even a major issues given CERN’s Linux-ninja IT capabilities.
(Especially if you use Office365 in position where LibreOffice is insufficient).
– Gilboa
I think about doing this from time to time… most of the stuff I use is already open source or portable, with a couple of exceptions: OneNote, and video games.
Now that Office 2019’s OneNote is basically the web app, I guess that wouldn’t be much of a barrier.
I don’t want to waste any of my limited gaming time dorking around with WINE or whatever. I guess this remains my Windows shackles, which has been the case since 2000-ish…
chrish,
Wine compatibility is much better than in the past…
https://appdb.winehq.org/
I understand the apprehension for potential problems. The list give a good indication of whether you’ll encounter issues. Games receive a lot of the attention, I’ve had worse luck with running more obscure random productivity software, but it’s really not hard to give it a try. Some distributors like steam have made a big effort to officially support linux with their titles.
Installing linux on random hardware that wasn’t specifically selected for linux won’t guaranty the best experience, yet the majority of linux users do just that, YMMV. I’d recommend KDE over Gnome if you want a more familiar workflow, too many differences might put you off.
” The list give a good indication of whether you’ll encounter issues.”
Spoiler alert: you will. With Proton it’s sure gotten easier to try though
End-user Office products aren’t really that expensive or difficult to license, you usually pay per device or per user and that’s it. It’s Microsoft’s CAL licensing terms for their server products that is the real killer. Whoever came up with the idea of needing separate licenses for each user/device accessing data from licensed servers was brilliantly tyrannical.
Windows Server and SQL Server require you to purchase licenses to run Windows Server, SQL Server, etc. AND buy access licenses for each user/device accessing that server. And those aren’t cheap, you can easily spend $250/user just to license one person to connect to an already licensed Windows Server and access a SQL Server database it hosts.
Granted, they’ve recently simplified things a bit for SQL Server 2019 by offering CAL-less Enterprise licenses…but only to new customers.
This.
MS’s licensing is sufficiently labyrinthine that in any complex environment they can pretty much always sting you for something, somewhere.
There’s so many gotchas and scenarios where things need to be double- or triple-licensed to qualify, and a lot of “Oh, that requires Software Assurance” or “Oh you just can’t do that in this situation, sorry”.
I hope no one in their art department will be forced to use the Gimp over Photoshop, or Inkscape (crash!). As far as word processing, I think I’d shoot myself in the head if I couldn’t use Word, which is mostly functional. The open source alternatives are less than functional. The main problem with open source software in user space is that no one can tell the coders they are “not done,” and “you have to make it more use-able, because we’re paying you.” Closed source shops don’t stop until something like using Word is within reach of your Mom. Closed source splashes some paint and spackle on the surface of usability and calls it … good, or something.