The federal government hasn't had a budget for four years until less than a month ago[0]. Up until then, our government was funded with a variety of appropriations bills as stop-gap measures. When a large organization doesn't have a budget, how do they make long-term investments in their IT infrastructure? So, the IRS can't very well execute a major migration when they don't have a budget and they aren't going to do so a few weeks before April 15th.
Yes, this is wasteful, but what else could the IRS have done without approval from congress?
but what else could the IRS have done without approval from congress?
Patching the security issues themselves? I know this can be complex in many cases but the security and reverse engineering community have this knowledge, probably not fixing the whole issue but at least blocking it.
What are the reasons for the government not to switch to linux? I'm not trying to be snarky; it really seems like there are a huge number of benefits and very few downsides.
I understand that the government has a contract with MS, but it seems like it might actually be costing the government more to take advantage of the contract.
At their scale, they will need to pay someone for support no matter what, whether that "someone" is Microsoft, Red Hat, Canonical, etc.
So, you can't just look at the consumer price tag on a Linux distribution ($0) and compare that to what the IRS is paying Microsoft in support contracts - you have to compare it to the total costs of enterprise Linux support.
And if the IRS is having a hard time migrating off of a version of an OS that was released 12+ years ago to its more recent version, I imagine they'd have a hard time migrating to a completely different operating system altogether.
Even if the incremental costs of upgrading LTS versions of a Linux distro ended up being smaller, they simply don't have the up-front capital to cover the costs of migrating to Linux in the first place.
(Oh, and don't forget that even if they did manage to procure that somehow, as soon as Microsoft gets wind of it, the price for Windows support contracts will magically fall).
To be honest, I don't see how migrating to Linux would actually solve the problem the IRS is having. If anything, it would make the problem worse. Ubuntu LTS is only supported for 5 years on the desktop. RHEL goes up to 13 years, which is about how old Windows XP is right now. Windows or Linux, the IRS would have run into migration pain as support for its outdated operating system ended. Yes, if they'd used Linux, they would have had the possibility of backporting fixes. Realistically, though, very few organizations outside of the distros themselves backport kernel fixes. Instead of hearing about the IRS making extra payments to Microsoft, we'd be hearing about them making extra payments to Canonical or Red Hat.
I think it would be great for them to switch but I can think of 2 huge reasons they wouldn't.
1. Retraining the users, very few people use linux so it would be a massive undertaking to retrain their thousands of mostly non-technical workers to use a new, unfamiliar, operating systems.
2. Microsoft Office. Say what you want about LibreOffice and OpenOffice but when it comes to enterprise grade software MS Office is unrivalved, especially concerning Excel.
Presumably if they had could switch OSes easily, they would have switched from Windows XP to Windows 7 by now.
XP was released in 2001. If they'd adopted Red Hat they'd have adopted 7, and upgraded 22 times, changing distro once to be on Fedora 20. If they'd adopted Ubuntu they'd have had to wait 3 years for the first release (confusingly numbered 4.10), and now they'd be on release 13. Even Red Hat Enterprise Linux didn't become available until 2002, and you'd be on version 2.1, unsupported since 2009.
If you suck at upgrading and want something that will be supported for 12+ years, Linux is not for you.
In my federal government research lab, we have 15+ years of Excel scripts behind a huge amount of our ongoing analyses. Whether this route was the best or not is a bit moot now (Excel dependence grew by individual choices on the local level); currently the expense of the switch would be very high. Also, in any interaction with the outside world (like Universities), Office is still the de-facto standard. An attempt of mine to lead a co-authored study in a Latex document, with several scientists at universities, caused mass confusion (as opposed to just 'track changes' in word).
We're slowly creeping to R, python, etc., and Linux is allowed as a choice (about 10% of us choose it). That said, my lab made it over to Win 7 about 2 years ago now...
I like the linux alternative, but I like even more that decisions like this are made at a local level, rather than through a massive top-down disruptive push.
There have been billions of dollars poured into government software that runs on Windows. Billions more poured into support, verification and validation of that software.
Switching would be very, very, expensive - and its not clear that it would help even in the long run.
Additionally, Windows is still THE dominant platform for science and engineering work, especially modeling and simulation. How many engineers (non-CS) do you know that do not use Windows? The most popular CAD software, SolidWorks, is available only on Windows. Alibre, the second most popular one, is also Windows only. The next most popular one, AutoCAD, is Windows and Mac only. 3DStudio Max - Windows only.
Most simulation software is also Windows only, at least when I was a government contractor, that was the case.
If the government switches to Linux, they'll have to switch en masse - having some people on Linux and others not won't work very well at that scale of bureaucracy. And when even most engineering software isn't available on Linux, that isn't gonna happen.
I think the most important factor is that Microsoft puts a ton of effort into backwards compatibility, to make sure that it is always easier/less risk to upgrade Windows (and Office) than to switch to something else.
I know that in the corporate world there are still very many business applications that are mission-critical and very special-purpose (sometimes custom) that were not written in a cross-platform way, and may not be maintained anymore - I would be shocked to find out that it was not this way in the government too.
The major problem is that anyone over the age of probably 40 would be crippled by a migration to say Ubuntu. My parents still struggle with basic stuff on Windows even though they use it (Win7) everyday at work. Throwing something foreign at them would account for so many lost hours the initial cost would end up being extremely expensive.
Also Microsoft Office, basically MS's golden egg, is way farther ahead then Libre Office regardless of what people say. All of MS office's services integrate extremely well with each other as much as it pains me to say.
At the end of the day all these people need is Outlook, Word and XL which are leaps and bounds ahead of Libre Office, which doesn't even have a mail client.
Add in all the lobbyist and money going towards the right campaigns and there's your answer.
One of the biggest reasons isn't just the licensing and individual system, but the supporting systems and processes: certification and accreditation processes for security, ability to only pay for one year at a time due to legalities of budget constraints, and items such as mandated ediscovery systems that are tied to the OS and systems architecture they are designed for using. It takes a great deal of experience, planning, and foresight to decouple services and make removal and swap out of key pieces open and even possible to change out. Add to that active defaults by vendors that encourages lock-in as well as the failure to draw in expertise that would survive in such an environment, equates to mediocrity in IT.
And so, XP support still lives on. Actually, at $200 per computer per year, it has the potential to be quite a lucrative support, so it'll continue as long as there's demand.
Now...I'm not sure if a $30 million cost would be considered a tax write-off, esp when it's the IRS, or will it just fall under their whoopsie daisy category on their annual budget (kinda like their failed Star Trek YouTube ad campaigns).
While I understand write offs when it comes to a business for costs of doing business, there are FREE alternatives (like ubuntu) that the IRS could use. I'm not anti-Microsoft (in fact I'm deving an app for windows phone right now), but seems to me that whoever is managing the IRS' budget are idiots, and their decisions really need to be audited.
Can someone explain how this is tech or startup related? It feels like a, "Haha, look! The IRS missed their deadline just like I miss my tax deadline every year!"
Since the government has paid for the additional patches to be created, can Microsoft please send them out to everyone running XP that can't afford to buy a new computer?
Now I wonder, considering the financial and other non accountable damage at this point, John Koskinen should or should not be sacked?
From 2008 to 2014 it's a long time for any migration to take place. Six years? They could have migrated to OpenVMS and have a team write custom software for them in six years for Christ's sake!
Yeah, given unlimited appropriations and manpower I'm sure the IRS could have gone to the moon in six years, too. But since the IRS is like every other federal agency, it operates with limited budget authority and, therefore, it needs to choose its priorities.
3. Really, really good price on support contracts - which they'd insist on getting if they switched to any *nix. Oracle (formerly Sun), IBM, RedHat (?). Are there any other major players in the OS world that can offer anywhere near the level of support that the government has come to expect?
4. And as Igglyboo said, MS Office. So many workflows in corporate environments depend on that damned suite, it'd be difficult to move away from it at the moment.
---
There are many offices that could make the transition. They use all web applications and various office suite tools (Excel, Word, PowerPoint mostly). The other applications they use would be things like Acrobat (but office suites can generate PDFs directly these days) and software to fill out forms (not handled as DOC/DOCX files or PDFs). The latter may be able to transition to signed/fillable PDFs. But these aren't the majority. Too many offices (particularly anything involving project management or inventory management) just depend too much on custom desktop applications that would take too much to port over or rewrite. It's like trying to modernize the avionics systems of an aircraft: in theory it'd be great, in practice your developers will kill themselves.
Because you have to understand the context. For nearly everyone one earth, a computer is a physical tool that exists for the sole purpose of helping them accomplish other tasks. In many cases, the most complex tasks people tackle are those they're being paid to work on. Those people just want a tool that works, that works they way the expect, that is supported and supportable by a vendor and internal IT, and is replaceable with something similar enough that things don't break.
Look, I'm a programmer turned engineering manager and I totally get where you're coming from with this comment, but you just don't seem to get how and why things are the way they are.
Speaking personally, I managed a project a few years ago to replace MS Office 2003 with Libre Office 4.0 (we actually started with OpenOffice but when Oracle acquired Sun and The Document Foundation was created to house the OO.o fork, we switched out of antipathy for Oracle). The mission was to remove MSO from as many machines as feasible, and the decision of what was feasible was, for the most part, left to me. We managed to convert about 20% of users, and these were composed of about 75% machines that never executed any Office app anyway and about 20% of machines whose users were just consumers of files other people created. Only about 5% of the machines converted belonged to creators. We found that most macros and custom formatting and blahblahblah were fairly straightforward to convert to work in LibreOffice, but the UI/UX was horrific, sometimes things just didn't work, and productivity was adversely affected far beyond the cost of the licenses.
We migrated to Gmail and Google Apps from Exchange+Outlook at the same time and saw similar adoption issues with Google Drive ("Docs" at that time -- in 2008). We (I) didn't make the mistake of forcing the issue this time and relied on coercion and organic growth to build the foundation for broad support. Today we are seeing about 1500 Sheets and ~500 Docs & Presentations created weekly (~22,000 users). Most of them still have MS Office on their machine, too.
Because, guess what, the right tool for the job is important.
(another commenter noted the haphazard and often ridiculous release schedule and evolution of RedHat / Fedora, BSD and Ubuntu over the past ten years or so. In my company, the Linux guys are mostly on their own to build their own environment because it became too unpleasant for corporate IT to create and maintain a standard image that worked well enough for most people most of the time. The devs these days tend to prefer Arch and Ubuntu and the sysadmins often run Fedora (our prod servers are almost always RHEL ... because guess what -- support is kinda important to most companies, especially big ones that aren't technology companies and where internal support is often understaffed and underequipped to DIY everything.)
This probably comes off rantier than I had hoped, and for that I apologize. Perhaps I'm just getting to CIO'y in my old age. :(
Because Linux or BSD is not a drop in replacement for Windows XP. It comes at a cost of rewriting their existing working applications and not to mention the time and money required to retrain the existing employees. Does anyone know how good the corporate support is for Linux/BSD distributions? Does it match upto what Microsoft provides?
>How is this a responsible use of taxpayer money?
The same way the govt decides to purchase Cisco's $25,000 wifi routers for city libraries.
At the scale the IRS is running, a copy of Windows is a few tens of dollars, which is about the cost of the necessary replacement keyboards over the lifespan of the computer. Ongoing patch support, however, is where MS actually shines here. Windows XP had support available for 13 years, with subsequent OSes being supported for 10+ years. In comparison, for OSes with support lengths as long as windows, like RHEL, the per-year support seat costs start at $49, which would lead to support costs of near $500 per seat over that same lifespan. So even with the IRS botching the rollout and needing to pay MS an extra year, they're still cheaper than the few Unix offerings that provide the duration of support MS does.
I think it would be great for them to switch but I can think of 2 huge reasons they wouldn't.
1. Retraining the users, very few people use linux so it would be a massive undertaking to retrain their thousands of mostly non-technical workers to use a new, unfamiliar, operating systems.
2. Microsoft Office. Say what you want about LibreOffice and OpenOffice but when it comes to enterprise grade software MS Office is unrivalved, especially concerning Excel.
It would be much more expensive in terms of hours lost to make the switch.
Alternatively, Windows 7 / 8 is such a disaster that the IRS is paying a few million dollars (out of their 10 billion dollar budget) to stick with something that works.
[+] [-] afarrell|12 years ago|reply
Yes, this is wasteful, but what else could the IRS have done without approval from congress?
[0] http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/23/us-usa-fiscal-budg...
[+] [-] mason240|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wslh|12 years ago|reply
Patching the security issues themselves? I know this can be complex in many cases but the security and reverse engineering community have this knowledge, probably not fixing the whole issue but at least blocking it.
I've wrote an article about doing this here: http://blog.nektra.com/main/2013/08/07/using-deviare-to-crea... last year.
[+] [-] wyager|12 years ago|reply
I understand that the government has a contract with MS, but it seems like it might actually be costing the government more to take advantage of the contract.
[+] [-] chimeracoder|12 years ago|reply
So, you can't just look at the consumer price tag on a Linux distribution ($0) and compare that to what the IRS is paying Microsoft in support contracts - you have to compare it to the total costs of enterprise Linux support.
And if the IRS is having a hard time migrating off of a version of an OS that was released 12+ years ago to its more recent version, I imagine they'd have a hard time migrating to a completely different operating system altogether.
Even if the incremental costs of upgrading LTS versions of a Linux distro ended up being smaller, they simply don't have the up-front capital to cover the costs of migrating to Linux in the first place.
(Oh, and don't forget that even if they did manage to procure that somehow, as soon as Microsoft gets wind of it, the price for Windows support contracts will magically fall).
[+] [-] quanticle|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Igglyboo|12 years ago|reply
1. Retraining the users, very few people use linux so it would be a massive undertaking to retrain their thousands of mostly non-technical workers to use a new, unfamiliar, operating systems.
2. Microsoft Office. Say what you want about LibreOffice and OpenOffice but when it comes to enterprise grade software MS Office is unrivalved, especially concerning Excel.
[+] [-] michaelt|12 years ago|reply
XP was released in 2001. If they'd adopted Red Hat they'd have adopted 7, and upgraded 22 times, changing distro once to be on Fedora 20. If they'd adopted Ubuntu they'd have had to wait 3 years for the first release (confusingly numbered 4.10), and now they'd be on release 13. Even Red Hat Enterprise Linux didn't become available until 2002, and you'd be on version 2.1, unsupported since 2009.
If you suck at upgrading and want something that will be supported for 12+ years, Linux is not for you.
[+] [-] squidfood|12 years ago|reply
We're slowly creeping to R, python, etc., and Linux is allowed as a choice (about 10% of us choose it). That said, my lab made it over to Win 7 about 2 years ago now...
I like the linux alternative, but I like even more that decisions like this are made at a local level, rather than through a massive top-down disruptive push.
[+] [-] zenbowman|12 years ago|reply
Switching would be very, very, expensive - and its not clear that it would help even in the long run.
Additionally, Windows is still THE dominant platform for science and engineering work, especially modeling and simulation. How many engineers (non-CS) do you know that do not use Windows? The most popular CAD software, SolidWorks, is available only on Windows. Alibre, the second most popular one, is also Windows only. The next most popular one, AutoCAD, is Windows and Mac only. 3DStudio Max - Windows only.
Most simulation software is also Windows only, at least when I was a government contractor, that was the case.
If the government switches to Linux, they'll have to switch en masse - having some people on Linux and others not won't work very well at that scale of bureaucracy. And when even most engineering software isn't available on Linux, that isn't gonna happen.
[+] [-] rhelmer|12 years ago|reply
I know that in the corporate world there are still very many business applications that are mission-critical and very special-purpose (sometimes custom) that were not written in a cross-platform way, and may not be maintained anymore - I would be shocked to find out that it was not this way in the government too.
[+] [-] yeukhon|12 years ago|reply
Even if they do run Linux, upgrade is still a pain in the ass.
[+] [-] en4bz|12 years ago|reply
Also Microsoft Office, basically MS's golden egg, is way farther ahead then Libre Office regardless of what people say. All of MS office's services integrate extremely well with each other as much as it pains me to say.
At the end of the day all these people need is Outlook, Word and XL which are leaps and bounds ahead of Libre Office, which doesn't even have a mail client.
Add in all the lobbyist and money going towards the right campaigns and there's your answer.
[+] [-] PointerReaper|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PeterisP|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] higherpurpose|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paul_f|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DangerousPie|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonymfus|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] rolfvandekrol|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quackerhacker|12 years ago|reply
While I understand write offs when it comes to a business for costs of doing business, there are FREE alternatives (like ubuntu) that the IRS could use. I'm not anti-Microsoft (in fact I'm deving an app for windows phone right now), but seems to me that whoever is managing the IRS' budget are idiots, and their decisions really need to be audited.
[+] [-] coherentpony|12 years ago|reply
Edit: That reminds me, I need to do my taxes.
[+] [-] valleyer|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antsam|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] feefie|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sadfnjksdf|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fpgeek|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ne0codex|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atmosx|12 years ago|reply
From 2008 to 2014 it's a long time for any migration to take place. Six years? They could have migrated to OpenVMS and have a team write custom software for them in six years for Christ's sake!
[+] [-] massysett|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjzedalis|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wayne_h|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlisdairO|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Igglyboo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] na85|12 years ago|reply
How is this a responsible use of taxpayer money?
[+] [-] Jtsummers|12 years ago|reply
2. Custom Windows-only applications
3. Really, really good price on support contracts - which they'd insist on getting if they switched to any *nix. Oracle (formerly Sun), IBM, RedHat (?). Are there any other major players in the OS world that can offer anywhere near the level of support that the government has come to expect?
4. And as Igglyboo said, MS Office. So many workflows in corporate environments depend on that damned suite, it'd be difficult to move away from it at the moment.
---
There are many offices that could make the transition. They use all web applications and various office suite tools (Excel, Word, PowerPoint mostly). The other applications they use would be things like Acrobat (but office suites can generate PDFs directly these days) and software to fill out forms (not handled as DOC/DOCX files or PDFs). The latter may be able to transition to signed/fillable PDFs. But these aren't the majority. Too many offices (particularly anything involving project management or inventory management) just depend too much on custom desktop applications that would take too much to port over or rewrite. It's like trying to modernize the avionics systems of an aircraft: in theory it'd be great, in practice your developers will kill themselves.
[+] [-] eitally|12 years ago|reply
Look, I'm a programmer turned engineering manager and I totally get where you're coming from with this comment, but you just don't seem to get how and why things are the way they are.
Speaking personally, I managed a project a few years ago to replace MS Office 2003 with Libre Office 4.0 (we actually started with OpenOffice but when Oracle acquired Sun and The Document Foundation was created to house the OO.o fork, we switched out of antipathy for Oracle). The mission was to remove MSO from as many machines as feasible, and the decision of what was feasible was, for the most part, left to me. We managed to convert about 20% of users, and these were composed of about 75% machines that never executed any Office app anyway and about 20% of machines whose users were just consumers of files other people created. Only about 5% of the machines converted belonged to creators. We found that most macros and custom formatting and blahblahblah were fairly straightforward to convert to work in LibreOffice, but the UI/UX was horrific, sometimes things just didn't work, and productivity was adversely affected far beyond the cost of the licenses.
We migrated to Gmail and Google Apps from Exchange+Outlook at the same time and saw similar adoption issues with Google Drive ("Docs" at that time -- in 2008). We (I) didn't make the mistake of forcing the issue this time and relied on coercion and organic growth to build the foundation for broad support. Today we are seeing about 1500 Sheets and ~500 Docs & Presentations created weekly (~22,000 users). Most of them still have MS Office on their machine, too.
Because, guess what, the right tool for the job is important.
(another commenter noted the haphazard and often ridiculous release schedule and evolution of RedHat / Fedora, BSD and Ubuntu over the past ten years or so. In my company, the Linux guys are mostly on their own to build their own environment because it became too unpleasant for corporate IT to create and maintain a standard image that worked well enough for most people most of the time. The devs these days tend to prefer Arch and Ubuntu and the sysadmins often run Fedora (our prod servers are almost always RHEL ... because guess what -- support is kinda important to most companies, especially big ones that aren't technology companies and where internal support is often understaffed and underequipped to DIY everything.)
This probably comes off rantier than I had hoped, and for that I apologize. Perhaps I'm just getting to CIO'y in my old age. :(
[+] [-] nivla|12 years ago|reply
>How is this a responsible use of taxpayer money?
The same way the govt decides to purchase Cisco's $25,000 wifi routers for city libraries.
[+] [-] Sanddancer|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Igglyboo|12 years ago|reply
It would be much more expensive in terms of hours lost to make the switch.
[+] [-] justinsb|12 years ago|reply
To me, that seems like a very prudent decision.
[+] [-] nivla|12 years ago|reply
If you calling Windows 7 a disaster compared to XP, am sorry but you have no idea what you are talking about!
[+] [-] xtc|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] navs|12 years ago|reply