[Gllug] El Reg story

[Stig Brautaset]

* Richard Cottrill <richard_c at tpg.com.au> spake thus:
> I was pretty happy with this story at The Reg. Hopefully the Norwegian
> experience will be repeated elsewhere. Microsoft seems particularly good at
> selling into Government; here and home (Canberra) both seem to be tragically
> afflicted by the Microsoft virus. I find it particularly annoying because I
> know that for all the bumbling stupidity of government, I don't trust free
> enterprise (the less fashionable form of anarchy) to provide basic services
> to citizens any better. I seem to have put some distance between myself and
> a point.
> 
> http://theregister.co.uk/content/4/26172.html
> 
> Stig, are you able to provide any further comments on the linked articles?

The linked articles has less useful information than the link posted
above ;) I don't follow news very closely, so this was all news to me. I
think this has to do more with Norway being low on M$'s priority list
than the Norwegian Govt. being clueful... The only thing they've ditched
is M$ contract that guarantees they're the exclusive supplier; nothing
indicates that they will use M$ products less, really.

Norway have not one but two official written languages (we've got three,
but one is only used by a handful of people). I seem to remember from
some time back that the Norwegian government wanted spell-checkers and
native desktops for both, but M$ refused (too much work, too little
gain). However, someone was very clever and ported Gnome/KDE to both of
the languages (or dialects). The govt are using this to push M$ into
getting better contracts (or they were before at least). 

It *may* be that they have clued up a bit though; the Unix/Linux
movement is ever-growing over there as well. 


Stig

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