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It seems likely that everyone here has heard the old saw "No one ever got fired for buying|using Microsoft". Well, times change.
The government of the Italian province of South Tyrol wants to save money and, noting Munich's savings of over 10 million euros, it sees Free Software as a solution. (The freedom thing isn't lost on them either.)
Governor Arno Kompatscher says "We've started to review our license costs. If there are free and open source alternatives, and where the costs and risks of changing are justified, we will switch to these." The new policy is meant to reduce IT costs. Should this fail, the region must resort to reduce its workforce, in order to balance the region's budget.
Did you catch the nuance? If you are a gov't employee and they can't change software because you aren't adaptable enough to use something other than Windows, you can plan on being the first one out the door. Hat tip to Robert Pogson for just the right spin on this story.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by anubi on Monday April 21 2014, @05:09AM
About that new software training... that one threw me too.
I had been using one CAD system, circuit analysis system, and PCB layout system for several years. It all ran under DOS, and schematic capture and circuit analyzer would run off a floppy disk, which was neat because I wasn't a manager and did not rank having my own PC at work.
The new management team hired by my company brought with them a new CAD system that was all networked and required a much more sophisticated machine to run. It came with a shelf-full of manuals. I had no idea how to run it. I would try, but the system they provided me to run it ( 386-SX running doublespace under WIN2.1 ) was giving me fits under ViewLogic. I would click the mouse and sometimes it would do something, sometimes it wouldn't, but most of the time I got a general protection fault and had to reboot. My productivity went to shit. They gladly posted how far behind I was getting up on a wall. They thought giving me 40 hours to learn it was going to work. It didn't. I ended up losing my aerospace career over this.
I developed a really shitty attitude when I realized just how little all the experience in circuit design I had meant to them, when it was all to easy to just lay the older guys off.
The bright side? I haven't paid duck squat in income tax in years. Which is just as good as I am having a damn hard time figuring out tax forms as well.
My interest was in topologies for microcontrollers and efficient energy transfer in thermal and magnetic circuits; I have very little drive in me to argue with a computer how to connect a part to a net. Or how to not delete the part when I am trying to move it. If their latest whiz-bang software cannot capture even a simple little circuit for me, then its useless, and if I cannot figure out how to use their whiz-bang software, I am useless too.
Incidentally, although I loved my old DOS tools, I am now on Eagle 6.5 ( professional ), which works great, and that neat SPICE version that Linear Technology released. However, I still maintain the machine that runs my old DOS stuff, albeit it now runs out of a memory designed for a camera instead of its old IDE drive.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 21 2014, @06:11AM
PCB layout system[...]ran under DOS
PADS, I'm guessing.
I am now on [Cadsoft] Eagle
Easily Applicable Graphical Layout Editor (It's an initialism; all caps: EAGLE).
which works great
A DOS guy might say that; Windoze guys always found it completely counter-intuitive at first.
I assume that your Mom told you "Don't put that in your mouth; you don't know where it's been".
...and I'm assuming that you know NOT to reuse library parts made by someone else when you are using that DRM'd product LEST YOU LOSE EVERYTHING. [soylentnews.org]
that neat SPICE version that Linear Technology released
Since 2003, Mike Engelhardt has made very sure that LTspice always runs under WINE.
Software developers take note: **THAT** is how you get to be an industry standard.
(You could do even better: Make it FOSS and native on every platform.)
-- gewg_
(Score: 1) by anubi on Monday April 21 2014, @08:37AM
Spot-on, Gewg. Pads PWORK for DOS. Version 6. It would accept Futurenet netlists.
The main problem I had with PADS is it came with a dongle - a little pink thing that required my printer port, and later broke. A company based in Florida sold me a program that got me running again, as PADS was pushing their windows offerings and from what I could tell had abandoned their DOS stuff.
It was a little tricky to get it going, as it wants the environment variables set up a certain way. It had a particularly infuriating malfunction if I failed to set it up right... it would work but the gerbers had errors in them. The EAGLE software I have is a lot more robust in that aspect.
Incidentally, I am a "paid-up" user for three licenses of the professional version 6.5 ( upgraded from 4.16 ). I am aware I cannot open files in later versions with earlier versions, but what is it I do to cause EAGLE's DRM to kick in? I was under the belief that the DRM was a license file. So far EAGLE has been very robust with me, causing me very few problems - and those it did cause were my own misunderstanding. If this thing is not reliable, I need to know before I build too much stuff using it.
Right now, my primary "large" project is some thermal energy transfer research I am doing where I am using a few Arduino-based processors. Once I develop this, my intentions are to drop the whole shebang onto the 'net.
Some of my client base goes back 20 years, and I have no intention of telling some soul that trusted me that I cannot support the thing I did for him because I no longer have access to the very files I made for him under his patronage. I know big companies often tell the little guy that they won't support old stuff, however if I built something for somebody twenty years ago, I will still support it. For however long God keeps me here.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 21 2014, @06:50PM
a dongle[...]broke
No dongleware for me. I allow myself to learn from the mistakes of others.
A particularly bad example was reported by a guy in s.e.d a decade back:
The cleaning crew came in and moved his computer (read: shoved it backwards).
The stack of dongles he had sticking out the back went CRUNCH.
Until he sorted that out, his software was useless.
No, thanks. Those guys can keep their dongles and their software.
I was under the belief that the DRM was a license file
Back in the day, guys who published a project article in the electronics mags would make available the files needed to create the boards for those.
The EAGLE crippleware demo was adequate to do those small things without paying, so it became a sort of standard.
Of course, there were some pirates who used a cracked version to get more capabilities than 3" x 4" and 2 copper layers.
Cadsoft got greedy in 2006 and decided **We want every single cent we can wrangle--and screw any attempts at that *let's be the industry standard* thing**.
They made sure that every change to every file created with their product would have a serial number descriptor added.
They had a list of rogue serial numbers and if you reused a sym/pac/dev that had been made with one of those, your work product became infected; when the app bitched because of a match with their database, your file became locked.
You didn't have to do anything wrong YOURSELF.
...or just USE SOFTWARE PRODUCED BY NON-EVIL PEOPLE.
If you reused something you believed was legit and it turned out that that had been touched by one of the rogue copies of the app, YOU got punished for the acts of someone else.
The DRM was completely occult, of course; not mentioned anywhere in the license agreement.
As I mentioned in the other thread, paid-up users asked Cadsoft to unlock their DRM-locked files and the company said NO.
The only way to avoid this is to do everything yourself down to the most minute detail (library components).
By the time this stuff happened, I was no longer using that product but had used it previously and had given a company's cash to Cadsoft for their stuff.
As such, I had financed behavior that I find to be evil.
I was and still am very angry about that.
GODWIN ALERT:
It's about this time in the discussion that some authoritarian/hyper-Free-Market someone says that it is perfectly OK for the company to punish people for the acts of others.
I compare it to Nazis occupiers rounding up 10 random townspeople to kill for every one of their guys who dies under dubious circumstances.
No dongles and no DRMware for me. There are Free(dom) Software tools that do those tasks.
Several years back, an electronics lab respin of Ubuntu and of Fedora appeared that were even bootable from a CD.
It's pretty clear that you don't/didn't hang out at sci.electronics.design/sci.electronics.cad.
my client base goes back 20 years
As I like to say, "Too soon old; too late wise".
I managed to dodge that bullet by getting off of EULAware.
Condolences on being an ongoing and unwitting party to evil--but then, I assume that you know of the business practices of M$ and accept those as well.
For however long God keeps me here
Sounds like your god stuck you with some software produced by evil people.
He has quite a sense of humor.
I'm now reminded of the zealot's line, "Kill them all; God will know his own".
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday April 21 2014, @12:33PM
They set you up to fail. That way, when they got rid of you for their real reason (probably saving money on health insurance costs, and not wanting an underling getting paid more than they got), you couldn't sue them.
That's how a cold-hearted business mind works.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.