Microsoft Alternatives project (MAlt): Taking back control using open software

https://home.cern/news/news/computing/microsoft-alternatives-project-malt

by jrepinc • 7 years ago

231 92 7 years ago

carwyn3• 7 years ago

This is perhaps the most poignant comment in the article:

"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."

BlueTemplar• 7 years ago

Reminds me of the recent Google Maps price increase. My nearly million-people town's public transport route planning software has had frequent outages since...

asark• 7 years ago

If there's one widely used Internet or Web service that seems like it really ought to be run by the government, it's mapping and routing. It's kinda infrastructure, governments have or should have the info already, and there's not much benefit to having multiple projects handling it. The data and basic API should at least come from a government source, I'd say. Let companies but whatever sugar they want on top of that (streetview, say).

pianoben• 7 years ago

Two thoughts come to my mind.

One, this article and the project it covers will be good negotiating leverage against Microsoft's fee increases. I wouldn't be surprised if they end up winning back lower license fees and sticking with MS in the long run.

Two, what a boneheaded move on Microsoft's part, PR-wise. CERN is an internationally-respected research institution which is widely admired by the kinds of people who make purchasing decisions. Why poke the bear, especially when business is going so well?

downrightmike• 7 years ago

Short term investment's need for ever growing revenue/profits. If they raise everyone's license costs 23% this year, investors will be happy. Then MSFT will have to raise their rates again next year.

rat9988• 7 years ago

From a different point of view, I don't see using PR to have lower fees very ethical. It looks to me like "lower our fees, or we are gonna trash you in our PR, and you know we have a good reputation".

rootsofallevil• 7 years ago

I guess it depends on whether CERN merits academic status or not. If it does, then this is fine. If it doesn't then I agree.

It seems to me that CERN is a research institute but whether that is counted as an academic institution, from a licensing POV, is a different question

carwyn3• 7 years ago

High end tech procurement is more like your average market stall haggling than you might imagine. It tends to be the middle ground that's most stable.

Spooky232• 7 years ago

Have you ever negotiated in a contested deal with a big company?

They get way nastier than PR pieces.

chucksmash• 7 years ago

What's unethical about "if you do something we don't like, we're going to talk about it"?

What would the more ethical alternative be? To just take the deal on offer or silently move on?

dv_dt• 7 years ago

That seems something of a double standard, companies are encouraged to use any legal means possible to improve profits, but customers need to stay silent about poor terms?

gonzo41• 7 years ago

I don't think that really holds water. The ethical thing for the researchers is to drive down costs everywhere they can to get the most money spent on research. M$oft wants to maximize it's profits and is negotiating from a position of strength knowing that big enterprise integrations can't just say "f-this, were off to use ubuntu".

tyingq2• 7 years ago

I didn't read any trashing. Just a general note that the current commercial terms aren't sustainable for them.

carwyn3• 7 years ago

The first of these certainly does happen, in this case though I suspect it may be a bit of both. When it comes to negotiation this will likely go both ways, the prestige and association of a project like CERN is worth something to large tech companies, as is being involved with the people and projects.

It's unlikely that they will be able to quickly or even ever move everything to new platforms, but with time there's a good chance they can move much of it. It will come down to the economics and time pressures of buy-in vs build-in.

notimetorelax3• 7 years ago

It’s the usual, Oracle did something similar to CERN a few years back. Lock in and profit!

tomxor• 7 years ago

Did CERN manage to migrate away?

Spooky232• 7 years ago

Usually the salespeople get a quota that can only be met by either moving Azure or hitting some impossible software target.

pkaye• 7 years ago

The court of public opinion is the way to get companies to do things these days.

nercht123• 7 years ago

Wish that was the case with Mozilla.

cookiecaper• 7 years ago

This project sounds awesome, but apparently one has to be a CERN employee/affiliate/something to see the referenced project page with all the details? Clicking the links to http://cern.ch/malt just takes one to a login page. Used the Google auth option and get forwarded to a page that says I'm not authorized.

batbomb• 7 years ago

This is endemic to many CERN projects, even things that are often open source are behind a login. Or - the source (or export of it from CERN's GitLab) will be available, but documentation is behind a login page.

dessant• 7 years ago

Reminds me of Mozilla issues on GitHub and Bugzilla. You'll find important discussions that reference Google Docs documents with plans for architectural changes, roadmaps, or other details pertaining to the issue, but the documents are restricted to Mozilla employees.

This is especially frustrating if you want to learn more about the issue, or you'd like to contribute to the project.

https://github.com/search?q=org%3Amozilla+docs.google.com&ty...

XenophileJKO• 7 years ago

That is an interesting point. If they "default" to private seems a little like wanting their cake and eating it too.

mattnewport• 7 years ago

They seem to be primarily concerned with the free as in beer rather than the free as in speech aspects of open source and in "taking back control" of their software licensing costs. Nothing wrong with that but it doesn't seem like the most important battle in today's world of surveillance capitalism to me.

Create• 7 years ago

Because CERN is pretty much active in the global surveillance effort (recruiting and training), hence the authwall people are discussing above. The previous DG openly despised anonymity.

jononor• 7 years ago

How exactly is CERN involved with that?

swebs• 7 years ago

Are you confusing reality with Steins;Gate?

sneakernets• 7 years ago

Pff, everyone knows all you need is an old IBM computer, a hot pocket, and a circuit-bent microwave to outsmart CERN.

gen3• 7 years ago

I'm honestly pretty happy about this. I'm hoping that by aiming to replace the commercial products they use with opensource alternatives, the alternatives leave with a better polish and user experience. I also see CERN as an institution that is willing to hire the devs needed to maintain / support a project.

300bps• 7 years ago

I also see CERN as an institution that is willing to hire the devs needed to maintain / support a project.

I didn't see where CERN said how much the licensing costs were per year but they did say that their MAlt project is a cost-saving initiative. Developers are pretty expensive right now.

m0zg• 7 years ago

They are nowhere near as expensive in Europe, where CERN operates. Yes, even in Switzerland.

PretzelFisch2• 7 years ago

They will need to hire more then just developers to run a successful software project

ForHackernews• 7 years ago

I'd do work on a CERN-led libre software project for free. If CERN can put together the right management structure, I suspect they'd have plenty of devs willing to volunteer. Of course, organizing a large distributed free software effort is its own challenge.

berti• 7 years ago

KiCad is an excellent example of CERN doing exactly that. I’m cautiously optimistic about this project!

Theodores• 7 years ago

The Microsoft products are probably mostly being used by admin staff rather than Nobel Prize winners at CERN. They probably have the canteen menu typed up in Word and the receptionists using Microsoft Outlook. Then in the visitor centre some automated Powerpoint presentations for passing five year olds to learn about the atom.

The point of an educational discount is that it is for the core educational stuff. I doubt that they are running Microsoft Access on any of those supercomputers and I doubt that 49 Petabytes of data goes onto NTFS formatted storage.

They probably got sold an enterprise educational deal decades ago when Microsoft were trying to indoctrinate all students to learn their products. I mean, why use LaTeX when you can do it in half the time in Word? It was good at the time.

CERN were well placed to do everything with the WWW and have a culture of it, to be doing things the Chromebook way where you don't have desktop software any more. Maybe Microsoft have given the kick they need and maybe peripheral admin things should be paying for Microsoft software since these subsidiary operations are not hardcore research.

tyingq2• 7 years ago

It sounds like the first two products being moved off of are Outlook/Exchange and Skype, and that use of those is fairly widespread.

eesmith5• 7 years ago

Your description doesn't seem relevant. Most universities don't have Nobel Prize winners, so the ratio of winners to support staff is 0.

Most universities also do have canteens and receptions .. and yes, many even have visitor centres. As https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/academics-minority... points out, "Academics in the minority at more than two-thirds of UK universities"

Support staff, btw, might include a glass blower for the chemistry department .. who does no teaching but may also print up a price list in Word.

So the educational discount cannot be meant for only "the core educational staff" as that's simply not the observed policy at universities.

ChuckMcM• 7 years ago

TL;DR version: CERN used Microsoft software under academic licencing terms, Microsoft revoked the terms and created a 10x cost increase (and budget hole). CERN is going to replace the software with something else.

This is such a beautiful, real life, example of the Piracy Paradox that I've kept a copy in my Evernote database.

The Piracy Paradox is this; Vendor A counts the number of copies of their software that are running in a region/venue/company, multiplies by the list price of that software, then subtracts the revenue received and comes up with a number they are "losing due to piracy."

The assumption, which the media often simply buys into, is that if the software were impossible to obtain without paying list price, the vendor would receive much more more money. However, the reality is that if you could make the software impossible to obtain, then the revenue received would simply be zero. It wouldn't be purchased because it is priced above the market value of its utility to the customer.

The result is that the "piracy numbers" that are bandied about, whether it is for CAD software, DVD movies, or Computer Games, is overstated by three or even four orders of magnitude.

Validation that this effect was a real effect has been proven multiple times, the two most famous examples have been the "99 cent single" price of iTunes and the watch all you want video subscription service of NetFlix. In both cases, the arrival of a pricing system that more accurately reflected the value perception of the consumer, whether it was that albums/CDs were too expensive to buy for the one or two songs you really cared about, or that DVDs were over priced for the occasional viewing, better pricing schemes reduced the amount of digital content that was used outside the terms of a use license dramatically.

The challenge for vendors is that the products they sell just aren't worth the same amount to every possible consumer. There are tools available to evaluate the elastic cost value of a fungible service but implementing them is challenging.

I am really surprised that Microsoft didn't negotiate something that would give them some revenue, as it stands the success of this effort will reduce revenue from CERN from what it was to nearly zero it seems. I'm guessing there was a cost increase between 2x and maybe 5x that would have not kicked off this effort. And of course a number of large laboratories will see the success of CERN and then they too will eliminate Microsoft as a cost item in their budget (ideally to spend more on the science, but sadly that isn't always the case).

mxuribe• 7 years ago

Cheers to Cern! I'm not above paying for quality software/service...but games like what MS and others play in the name of capitalism, get annoying quickly.

Awww, man...The relevant project website is behind a login[0]. Would have loved to see it. In any case, would be cool if big (or at least well-known) orgs. like CERN begin to adopt more open source offerings, and positively stir up vendors who support such OSS offerings. NextCloud comes to mind...now that is a model that i'd like to support at the enterprise level. Software is free, support is paid for - this seems reasonable and fair to me.

Once again, kudos to CERN!

[0] = http://cern.ch/malt

fbartels2• 7 years ago

NextCloud comes to mind...

Cern is actually for some time already using Owncloud for this. https://owncloud.com/cern-smashbox-and-owncloud-collaboratio...

remir• 7 years ago

This could be interesting if other institutions and perhaps even public administrations are willing to participate in this effort and pool resources to make this a sustainable thing.

That being said, it's difficult to know what this project is targeting since it is behind a login page.

PretzelFisch2• 7 years ago

Even at 10x the price commercial software, could be cheaper than building/maintaining their own replacement products.

c487bd62• 7 years ago

And when they raise the price to 20x or start doing something shady you can just move everything to a cheaper and more ethical competitor. Except that you can't.

mr_toad• 7 years ago

If they can do for email & telephony what they did for the web, they wont need to maintain it themselves.

imglorp• 7 years ago

There are many, many other advantages to open source than price.

la_barba• 7 years ago

I remember being shocked after reading in the MS lawsuit that IE cost 100 million dollars to develop in like the 90s. What!?

I wonder how much Google has spent on Chrome..

zaphirplane• 7 years ago

Strange that I need to sign in to see the project page

hereme888• 7 years ago

So... does anyone have access to the CERN postal and is willing to post non-confidential info on the software alternatives? Otherwise I'll try to get access to the project and post it here.

fbartels2• 7 years ago

https://reddit.com/r/linux/comments/bzsmsb/microsoft_alterna...

ajxs• 7 years ago

I always have a bit of a grim chuckle when I think back to the days when Microsoft was the boss villain of enterprise software. I even still have a 'KMFMS' T-Shirt in the closet.

lanevorockz• 7 years ago

Excellent effort, my business runs completely open source since 2000s and it’s always constantly improving. Closed source has so many downsides that it only means that companies that adopt are nothing more than lazy.

IloveHN84• 7 years ago

It would be interesting also to have an Apple Alternatives version, especially for system apps (iOS and Mac OS)

sgt101• 7 years ago

Android and Linux?

hoseja• 7 years ago

I'd wager a guess that overall, Microsoft has gotten more value out of CERN research (cough www cough) than CERN has gotten out of using Microsoft products.

notimetorelax3• 7 years ago

Heh, www is what blindsided Microsoft and they had to catch up.

Microsoft Alternatives project (MAlt): Taking back control using open software

Related Stories