Texas Senate Proposes a Budget With a No-Vista-Upgrades Rider 290
CWmike writes "The Texas state Senate yesterday gave preliminary approval to a state budget that includes a provision forbidding government agencies from upgrading to Windows Vista without written consent of the legislature. Sen. Juan Hinojosa, vice chairman of the Finance Committee, proposed the rider because 'of the many reports of problems with Vista ... We are not in any way, shape or form trying to pick on Microsoft, but the problems with this particular [operating] system are known nationwide,' Hinojosa said during a Senate session debating the rider (starting at 4:42 of this RealMedia video stream). 'And the XP operating system is working very well.' A Microsoft spokeswoman said in response, 'We're surprised that the Texas Senate Finance Committee adopted a rider which, in effect, singles out a specific corporation and product for unequal treatment. We hope as the budget continues to go through the process, this language will be removed.'"
this language will be removed (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure Microsoft can pay to have that done.
Good (Score:4, Insightful)
With Windows 7 just around the corner, it makes far more sense to wait for the first service pack of Windows 7, then to upgrade XP to a soon to be replaced OS.
ROFL; but stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
It is perfectly acceptable, indeed kind of the whole point, for legislatures to make laws, and handle budget matters, and this would give them the legal authority to do something like this; but that doesn't make micromanagement a good practice. If Texas' state IT minions are so incompetent that they need politicians to tell them what software to use, based on anecdotal evidence, then they should be fired at once. If not, then they should be treated like reasonably responsible adults, and allowed to do their jobs to the best of their expertise.
Broad requirements like "thou shalt use only open, interoperable systems" are perfectly appropriate; but "thou shalt not use item X" is just stupid, even if I happen to dislike item X.
Not uncommon (Score:4, Insightful)
Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
Looks good so far, reasonable, tech savvy-- he just wants to ensure everyone uses stable, functioning software, and---
*facepalm*
Re:Bill of attainder? (Score:4, Insightful)
As I said in another comment, I think that this is a bad piece of law. However, the legislature has the legal authority to write up the budget, that is, and historically has been, one of the most important legislative powers. "Don't buy X without special permission" is a perfectly licit thing to put in a budget.
If they were trying to make the sale of Vista illegal in Texas, you'd have a stronger case, though probably not strong enough; but exercising budgetary control to not buy something is totally licit.
Re:ROFL; but stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
But are you sure that in Texas such decisions are made by competant IT professionals? I wouldn't be surprised if: (a) decisions about software purchases are made separately for different parts of the state government; (b) in at least some of them people who aren't all that savvy make the decisions. It is also possible that even the IT pros are heavily invested in Microsoft and do pretty much what Microsoft says to do. So this may not be an instance of ridiculous micromanagement.
Oy (Score:5, Insightful)
So, does this person actually know anything about operating systems? Or is this "my friend heard from a friend heard from that friendly Mac guy" type of silliness?
I mean, where I work we're not upgrading to Vista either. But that was a decision made by IT, after actually looking into it. I highly doubt the politicians have any idea of what they're talking about.
Remember, next month they could just as easily say "no upgrading to Linux, everyone knows that's socialism!" It'd have just as much research behind it as this legislation does.
Like color TVs in prison (Score:1, Insightful)
Yeah, plus how hard/expensive will it be to get a new PC with XP instead of Vista?
It is like a friend of mine that compared prison to hotels because they both have color TVs.
Yeah, just the same.
Plus, I don't what my state officials having to go out to find B&W TVs.
You know how hard those would be to find now-a-days?
That is a lot of flea markets the prison system employees would have to attend.
Re:this language will be removed (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not a matter of whether Microsoft can pay to have it done. It shouldn't be in there because it sets a bad precedent. If they can forbid Windows Vista, why not forbid any other piece of software that has, whether or not for valid reasons, gotten bad press? These decisions are much better left to those deploying the technologies.
Not at all (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:this language will be removed (Score:5, Insightful)
As AuMatar states, the legislators are doing their jobs. They can forbid the state doing business with Microsoft at all, if they decide that to be in the State's interest. In this case, they have refused to foot the bill for upgrading to a shaky operating system. Besides which, it is highly doubtful that very many government owned machines will run Vista's aero "features" anyway. Waiting for Win 7, IF they decide to upgrade at all, makes sense. Of course, it makes even more sense to me that Texas upgrade to open source, require that their employees get the proper training to provide their own support, and simply stop paying for proprietary software. WinXP is, and will remain, a good business operating system for quite some time, after all.
Re:Oy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:this language will be removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Although it would be best if a strong IT department could make that determination on their own, maybe they need some help to make it stick. There is nothing unusual about avoiding Vista. My company is very Micrsoft-centric and even THEY won't touch it. The situation to avoid is where agency X decides on their own to upgrade (especially if they get subsidized freebies), and then agency Y is pressured into upgrading to be compatible with agency X. Sooner or later, some critical piece of software refuses to run on Vista and the brown stuff hits the fan.
There are probably a few state agencies that are either exempt (or pretend to be exempt) from the state IT dept. And they probably need more guidance than they are willing to admit. For all we know, it may have been the IT department that asked the legislature for help.
My guess is that MS can get this language removed, but they will have to provide all kinds of freebies. The best outcome would be to leave the language intact and bag Vista. Second best would be getting all the upgrades for free. From the legislative point of view, a win/win situation.
Re:this language will be removed (Score:3, Insightful)
The software cost of upgrading is often effectively nil, because most large enterprise environments are on multi-year Enterprise Agreement contracts that allow for no-additional-cost software upgrades. There is the time to deploy which costs some money, but depending on how they do it, it shouldn't really be that expensive with current software management mechanisms, including those built into Active Directory which produce a lower cost of deployment.
It's appropriate for the legislature to specify technologies in more abstract terms, such as ordering a pilot project for IPv6 or requiring that all networks have IDS/IPS on them. Deciding that a specific product is inappropriate is out of their purview, however, as they do not as a group have the expertise to make that decision. I would wager that a significant portion of them are still running Windows XP (if not OS X) and have little or no experience with Vista aside from what their son's best friend's cousin's neighbor told them.
Would you be comfortable with them blocking Red Hat on the reason that Fedora's update servers got cracked last summer, and therefore we can't rely on Red Hat-sponsored projects to properly secure their systems?
Re:ROFL; but stupid (Score:3, Insightful)
But if they're already using XP, and know that it works, then they can save that money on your suggested development lab, by simply telling people to keep using XP. Why squander money on testing al your ancient legacy systems against a new OS that doesn't give you anything new that's obviously worthwhile for the jobs your employees are doing, and which seems likely to be obsolete soon anyway? If you really must have a whizzy OS testing lab, have 'em testing open systems stuff and Win7, and skip Vista.
Dumb or Disingeneous Idiot (Score:3, Insightful)
The anti-virus and security upgrade treadmill is a farce, as long as Active-X and extension based execution are pervasive Win X has no security, if the Security Policy is modernised then there is massive application level incompatibility, the only way to run Win-x securely is to virtualize it under Linux.
Re:budget stuffs (Score:3, Insightful)
If you have 50,000 staff using XP, who've been trained on XP, and you want to migrate them to Vista, you'll have to budget retraining them to use the new tools you're issuing them with. Are you going to send 50,000 people on a "Moving to Vista" training course?
Re:this language will be removed (Score:5, Insightful)
I do work for a government, so I'm well acquainted with the purchasing and the oddball requirements that come with it. Generally speaking (though I've seen some significant exceptions that drew a great deal of controversy), the government bends over backwards to ensure that things are as fair as possible in the technology assessments. We listen politely to the senior leadership, including elected officials, and then go and do what the laws and policies tell us to do so that we're not held to the fire when some violation is brought up.
I've no problem skipping Vista. I have it on on my work notebook and have since Beta 2, and while it's fine for me, my notebook is more powerful than most. We've identified software incompatibilities that will take most of a year to fix, by which time Windows 7 is due out, so the upgrade makes sense. My position is that it should be -- and usually is -- decided after proper evaluations, and not prior by uninformed elected officials.
Re:Politicians interfere with our abuse methods??? (Score:2, Insightful)
He has absolutely no technical expertise to make that decision. It should be left to a dedicated group of IT staff well versed in security.
This is like refusing to replace a car's transmission that's in serious danger of blowing up, simply because no one knows how to repair the new models.
I'm no fan of Vista, but XP only gives the appearance of reliability because it's had 10 years for people to work around its quirks and box it in. Its security problems outweigh any ease of use considerations.
Re:Politicians interfere with our abuse methods??? (Score:5, Insightful)
So XP is about to blow up? Really? And Vista is the solution to that? What if the transmission's just fine, but the dealership is sending you postcards saying "hey, your transmission is 10 years old now, and even though we know it's been maintained, and we don't really suspect that it's about to break, we think you should buy this expensive new one we came up with that does more stuff and we think is super cool"... should you replace it? There isn't a single right answer to that question, and it's going to depend a lot on how you use the car and what kind financial situation you are in. Since the Texas State Government probably doesn't need the spiffy new features of Vista, and it most likely doesn't really provide any mission critical upgrades (maybe once it too has had years of security updates to lock it down it will, but for now the security advantages are speculative at best), spending a ton of money to upgrade from what they already have working amounts to little more than spending a bunch of money to start over from scratch.
Re:this language will be removed (Score:3, Insightful)
If it made VISTA mandatory; and outlawed use of BSD, Linux, Solaris, and Mac O/S by anyone with long term jail sentences at hard labor, Microsoft would be praising it as progressive, enlightened, and humanistic.
and slashdot would be enraged, shocked. completely opposite of the reaction now. whereas both situations are completely equal: bias against a specific company.
Re:Not at all (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, because only Republicans can be bribed.
Just turn a blind eye to the neo-libs that defened Fannie Mae and AIG until the companies were sufficently drained not to pay them anymore.
Re:Not at all (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good (Score:3, Insightful)
lost money == lost jobs (Score:4, Insightful)
The software cost of upgrading is often effectively nil, because most large enterprise environments are on multi-year Enterprise Agreement contracts that allow for no-additional-cost software upgrades...
Like they haven't been already burned before [networkworld.com] by that company, at least once, by similar claims.
Deciding that a specific product is inappropriate is out of their purview...
Except if that product is known bad. They have an obligation to prevent further damage and / or to prevent good money from being thrown after bad. The recession is a depression in many areas, as evidenced by among other things, deflation. Regardless of recession or depression the times are harder, and not through getting harder, than has been experience for a few generations. And with that in mind, any wasted money means lost jobs. That wasted money can come through unnecessary licensing as well as lost efficiency.
If the French Gendarmerie can reduce IT costs by 70% [www.osor.eu] through use of FOSS, why isn't Texas allowed to do so as well? Or, as the original post states, why not at least be able to avoid shelling out for MS Vista upgrades and upgrade headaches?