51
votes
Lyon, France joins European exodus from Windows to Linux
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- Title
- This city is dumping Microsoft Office and Windows for OnlyOffice and Linux - here's why
- Word count
- 573 words
I'm a fan of the growing exodus from Windows, Microsoft suite is so slow and buggy now.
I'm working on a hardware refresh of new Windows 11 laptops at work and Intune will randomly fail to build a fresh install 25% of the time. I never had this problem at my old work with RHEL and Ansible, but unfortunately we have Windows-only business critical apps.
I also think we'll reach a turning point in 5ish years for companies to go back to on-premise deployments as the price of 365 etc. keeps increasing.
In my experience Brazilian workers hate Linux with a passion. Probably because it's usually some crappy custom distro made by IT department and also because Libreoffice is not an exact replica of Microsoft Office. If they need to learn anything at all than it is complete shit.
I want to love LibreOffice, I really do. But my god, they need to bring on a UX person. It fails the “my mom can - just - use Excel but I’m trying to get her off pirated Microsoft” test so hard. On my old Dell XPS with a hi-dpi screen the icons are all screwed up and unreadable. Their ribbon UI is close enough to the MS version to trigger your muscle memory but then stuff is infuriatingly in different places which makes it harder than if it was just totally distinct.
I mean, I still use it, but every time I have to write a letter or do a spreadsheet I feel like a kid having to wrinkle his nose and take his gross-tasting medicine.
I literally just use Google Sheets if I ever need a spreadsheet to avoid having to interface with LibreOffice. I literally can't figure out how to do pretty basic shit in LibreOffice Calc to an absurd degree. I don't even need spreadsheets for anything fancy either -- they fail at communicating even basic functionality even to an otherwise highly technical user.
A concern has been scratching at the back of my mind.
Right now, it feels like a lot of the intertia behind migration away from Windows is predicated on the maturity of projects like WINE and Proton. I always figured that Microsoft didn't really worry about those projects because they didn't take a meaningful chunk of desktop marketshare away from Windows. If migrating to Linux becomes more of a trend, does reliance on Win32 become a potential legal liability in the future?
Maybe Microsoft starts sending nastygrams to the WINE project. Maybe they start suing users of Windows software who run said software on Linux. Maybe they don't care because the real money is in cloud services and government contracts.
Honestly, the time for MS to have fought WINE was 30 years ago, and even then the project has always adhered to black-box reverse engineering principles specifically to combat that. Everyone has accepted the legality of their software for literal generations at this point.
In a sane world, regulators would step in. If the only time MS is going to sue over their APIs is when they're actually facing an iota of competition (let's be real: a handful of European municipalities dropping Windows is less than a drop in Microsoft's bucket), then they've essentially made the case for their monopoly.
Sadly, "sanity" and "US regulation" have always had just the barest sliver of overlap on a Venn diagram in the best of times, let alone today.
It is, but that's how movements start. If there is a tangible cost savings or operational benefit after the migration dust has settled, it'll be a signal that other municipalities can as well. It's very much a domino effect. It's not a coincidence that Microsoft chose Munich as their new European HQ and the city announced a revert to Microsoft that same year, almost immediately after the completion of the migration.
In addition to what Akir said, which would make it unlikely they'd succeed anyway, my understanding is that they're also well beyond the statue of limitations. My very surface level knowledge of copyright law is that there's a window of time after learning about the infringement that any filing must be done within. I don't think Microsoft could believably argue that they first learned about WINE within the last couple years.
This is also the reason I've heard about why companies like Nintendo are so aggressive with copyright claims: that they have to attack them quickly after learning about them because they otherwise risk losing the right to do so.
You might be thinking of trademark (which has the use it or lose it trait) instead of copyright.
I was referring to the Copyright Act. https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html contains:
I really don’t think that Microsoft has any real legal claim. WINE Is Not Emulation; it’s clean reimplementation of Windows APIs.
That being said I seem to remember Oracle suing Google over their JVM virtualization because it implemented their APIs, and they won at one point. I wonder what happened with that case because it was terrible precedent.
It feels kind of weird that I've been following that case since it started...
Anyway, the Supreme Court ruled on it, after over a decade of appeals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_Inc.
The TL;DR of the ruling is that Google's use of the APIs is fair use, but the statements of the justices left room to say that an API is subject to copyright. And Clarence Thomas, as usual, is a professional village idiot (joined by Samuel Alito, as is tradition) and wrote a dissent that "Google's use of that copyrighted code was anything but fair."
Loved visiting Lyon a few years back. Happy to know that the folks living in a lean-two on the highway who made fellatio motions at me will have a civic government run by a linux distro 🤢😜