17 companies sue Switzerland over Microsoft contract

[goddog]

ssj12 said:

Kasz216 said:
Why would a government want to use something else? That'd be stupid.

Government computers need to "just work"... you aren't going to train government officals to use linux... and you aren't even going to be able to train them how to modify their files so they'll be readable elsewhere.

It only makes sense for governments to use windows.

Furthermore it'd be stupidly expensive to transition over all the stuff to Linux/Mac OS anwyay.

Government computers dont just need to "just work." They need to be secure and efficient enough to handle whatever tasks are at hand from monitoring governmental activities to being able to handle video conferences with other national leaders. Also tell me where you understand the costs of transitioning between OS to OS because the move for any government or company who refused to move to Vista are going to have a hell of a time moving from XP to 7 since it cannot simply upgrade the OS like the installer for Vista does. Expenses for these upgrades will be way cheaper even during the initial transition as no one has to upgrade PC hardware as they might have to moving from one Microsoft OS to another. Linux does not take half the resources needed to run even XP.

Linux does not offer quite the selection of custom tailored applications that goverments have paid for over the years either

 

Im a mac fan so dont take it too hard i have heard all these arguments before... it comes down to cost, and its not beneficial at the moment see my prior post for more...

 

edit there are still free licenses for NeXTSTeP out there, I feel they should run those, its CPU independent (depending on release your working with )