Portugal's Vortalgate — No Microsoft, No Bidding 312
An anonymous reader writes "Companies using software other than Microsoft's are unable to bid at many Portuguese public tenders. This is due to the use of Silverlight 2.0 technology by the company, Vortal, contracted to build the e-procurement portal. This situation has triggered a complaint to the European Commission by the Portuguese Open Source Business Association; the case is unofficially known in Portugal as 'Vortalgate.'"
Re:That old saying... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Vortalgate? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Kdawson (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Macs, moonlight. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It's 2009 (Score:5, Informative)
Moonlight even works on Firefox on Linux, and it's getting better at a pretty good rate.
Moonlight doesn't support Silverlight 2.0-targeted code. You're being a bit disingenious implying that Silverlight code works on Firefox. Some of it does, but a great deal of it does not. Much of it even requires a Windows client.
That is what we call 'vendor lock-in'.
Re:I am shocked, shocked I tell you (Score:5, Informative)
Speaking as a portuguese, I can tell you that the whole "-gate" postfixing is senseless.. It just doesn't carry weight around here as it does over there. I'd wager the submitter knew this, but just added it anyway because a) he/she is "close" to the matter (probably belongs to the group who's denouncing the situation) and therefore takes this issue seriously and b) wanted to exarcerbate the impact of this news piece by way of a commonly used word-gimmick.. After all, your own media abuses the term whenever some sort of scandal crops up.
As far as "-gate" scandals go, there's another one a LOT more prone to getting that tag (allegations of impropriety or downright corruption that may implicate the current Prime-Minister regarding the licensing of a big real estate development when he was Minister for the Environment -- and therefore had specific oversight on these matters), a huge mess. And even THAT didn't get tagged "Freeport-gate". It would mean nothing to the majority of people here, many would probably not even get the historical reference (even with "Frost vs Nixon").
To be honest, and again speaking as a portuguese citizen, this is the first I'm hearing about it (and the first time I've heard about this particular portal, to be frank). As far as I can tell, this relates to a governmental portal for job procurement/hiring.. The "bidding" here either relates to companies wishing to offer services, applying for consulting positions (getting contracts) or for people trying to get employed.
It's obviously a Bad Thing(TM) but I doubt it was done intentionally and even less that MS had anything to do with it. Not that MS is above this, of course, and they do enjoy a cosy relationship with Portugal and portuguese institutions (we're a small country and they're a BIIIIG corporation -- it's "good business" to keep a major player/investor like that happy, however it may sicken me that we need it) but as other posters have pointed out, this is Vortal's own doing.
Silverlight is a new technology and Microsoft has been investing heavily around here.. I personally know many aspiring developers (as well as fully-fledged software engineers) who genuinely think Microsoft is God's gift to software engineering.. And it doesn't help that MS does indeed get some things right now and then. :)
The way I see it, whomever made the decision to use SL (and the ensuing IE-optimized html code -- even the places you can go without Silverlight installed really suck with Firefox, the usability/interoperability is seriously broken) didn't think things through, or honestly felt that Silverlight is the Next Big Thing(TM), and that going with it would be a clever move.
It's another reflection of the worst thing that Microsoft has managed to instill into so many people, often through the deals they broker with education institutions: the mono-culture mentality.. That only Windows matters (in fact, for nearly all non-CS students, Windows is pretty much IT, and even Apple has only recently begun to show up on their mental map). That as long as you develop for THEIR platform and use their technologies, you'll reach that huge percentage of users, the magic Windows OS desktop-share.. And that the rest basically don't matter. It's so sad seeing this happen in the very places that used to be all about inclusion, early adoption of ALL technologies and diversity.
The submitter over-dramatized the impact that this is having over here, but I'm glad that the complaint went through and hope they can coax the European Courts to issue a legally binding EU-wide mandate on interoperability.
Re:Macs, moonlight. (Score:3, Informative)
History, which repeats itself, repetitively shows that Microsoft never does something when they are not going to gain extra profit and/or extra lockin.
So yes, they are doing it on purpose. First they let everybody think "ah it's ok. It's cross platform and also available on Linux. Let's develop for it people!". And then when everybody does it KABOOM! No more support for the competition.
Re:Kdawson (Score:3, Informative)
My experience with Moonlight on Debian Lenny under Iceweasel:
I play a game called Conquer Club (online Risk). There are greasemonkey scripts for getting data and one of them uses Silverlight to draw graphs. I figured I'd try it. I get linked to the MS site, which routes me to the Moonlight home. I click the install and the plugin is dropped into my browser. Easy enough. I go back to the page that required Silverlight... doesn't detect it. I click on the Silverlight "get it now" picture and my browser crashes because the Silverlight site tries to push some codecs onto my machine.
I'm still waiting to be impressed by Silverlight in some way on Linux. On the other hand, my 64-bit beta Flash plug-in works great even though I had to manually place it in a plug in folder on my machine.
Re:That old saying... (Score:3, Informative)
Really, that saying was a saying? The old saying was "Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM."
MS replaced IBM in the saying in the 90s, in what I am certain was a campaign by MS sales agents.
Re:Kdawson (Score:3, Informative)
Had you ever actually done any work with XML and SVG you'd know that the browser support they have is no comparison to Flash, and I presume Silverlight (I refuse to look at it so I know no specifics about it).
The company I work for uses a Flash based system to get some things done, Adobe has killed part of what that system used for generating dynamic Flash content, I.E. Macromedia Generator. The OSS/Free clone isn't capable of what we want to do, and rather than fixing it up and proping up a retarded and closed application, we opted for going the XML + SVG + Javascript + A bunch of other crap in order to replace the flash portions.
As the lead developer I'm aware of the problems porting our system over to using standards instead of Flash.
If you think for a minute that SVG + SMIL + A host of other crap is any competition for Flash, then you have never worked with them both. You may have worked with one, but certainly not both.
SVG could have been a Flash replacement, but its not. They missed too many things, most notably, sound. Yes, SVG is a vector graphics standard, but it was created with the purpose of making Flash pointless. This was before Adobe bought Macromedia and they were looking to beat Macromedia in this area. This is also why Adobe made the Adobe Graphics Server, which is capable of doing a lot of what Generator does, but on PSDs, AIs, PDFs and SVGs (as well as some stuff to basic images as well). Note: AGS has been killed as well, with no direct replacement as yet.
So back to the point. I use SVG A LOT. Our entire product line now uses SVG to generate pretty much every image that is put into our websites or services. Most of those images contain dynamic content, animation, ect.
SVG + whatever other 'Standards' you want to throw at it, that work in a browser (any browser for that matter) are no match for Flash as a whole.
Its great to support standards, but if the standards don't do what you need/want to do, then whats the point of supporting them? Especially when not supporting them is less painful to everyone involved than supporting them, with the exception handful of people who scream 'standards compliance or die!!!'
Typically, demanding that your customers do something is not a good way to make a sale. If the 'demand' means little or no work to most of them because everyone already does it, thats one thing. Demanding your users do something different than their daily routine which they know and love is a lot more difficult to sell.
You prefer some browser other than IE, yes? And you get upset when someone demands you use IE, yes? You are a minority. Like it or not, IE is the leader. So what business in their right mind is going favor the minority over the majority, just on principal? We're not talking about standing up against racism here either, no sane business leader is going to be standing up for principals and pissing off his users right now. The nut jobs who do decide to do that now are probably going to go out of business soon, with the exception of maybe Ballmer, he could probably get by with it.
I LOVE using SVG over Flash for what I do. The ability to manipulate the presentation so easily using XML parsers makes dynamic content creation actually logical and easy to program for.
You will however, never see me comparing any current or currently proposed SVG standards to Flash. Its just not there. And that ignores all the actual browser and plugin incompatibilities between SVG implementations.
Remember, SVG rendering is much like HTML rendering. There is of course a standard, and a set of rules, but those rules can still be interpreted differently by different people, and implementations have bugs and missing features, the SVG spec is large and complex, no one supports everything, let alone supporting it the same wa
Re:Kdawson (Score:3, Informative)
Moonlight only exists because MS have disclosed most of the implementation details to them, it still lags a long way behind the MS implementation and isn't 100% compatible anyway.
Moonlight exists because we were able to put a prototype together in 21 days (you can read about our hack-a-thon here: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Jun-21.html [tirania.org]).
Microsoft has since helped us by providing licensed codecs that can be used by Linux users; Providing us with Silverlight specs for a full open source impleentation (Although 100% of it is available on the web at msdn.microsoft.com) and they provided us with test suites to ensure that Moonlight passes every single Silverlight test suite that Microsoft uses internally.
No two implementations will be 100% compatible. In fact even fixing a bug means that version a and version a.0.0.0.1 with the bug fixed are not "100% compatible", so there is not much point in arguing about 100% compatibility in the first case, it is easy to prove that this will never be the case. But in that regard, no piece of software will ever be (not the kernel, not the browsers, not anything that ever gets bug fixed as a platform).
But we can get very close to the indented behavior as articulated in the test suites "This is what it is supposed to do as far as -we- humans could guarantee". There will certainly be bugs, but we do not have a problem fixing those, and the Microsoft engineers have been very helpful in answering any questions we might have.