Saturday, December 10, 2016

Why Microsoft, not Linux - voices from fields

Just read
http://www.cnews.ru/news/top/2016-12-07_linuksoidy_obyasnili_minkomsvyazipochemu_v_rossii

In the meeting in Ministry for Communication of Russia (participants - Ministries of Finance, Security etc., many russian software market key players) were shaped major problem areas, why the migration from Microsoft products to Open Source fails.

There are some of them:
- Active Directory
There are no fully comparable Open Source products, which can replace Microsoft Active Directory. Additionally, any migration to similar Open Source solutions is difficult; slow and expensive.
- ActiveX
Many solutions on Microsoft platform, which are in use by public sector and government organizations, are implemented using ActiveX technology of Microsoft and oriented on Internet Explorer as frontend. Lack of support for this technology and IE at all does the migration of such solutions to Open Source not realistic.
- Office documents
Microsoft Office documents, even Open XML, accompanied by numerous macros and VBA modules cannot be efficiently supported and processed by Open Source. Also used fonts break the optics of tables and diagrams once they are moved from Microsoft to Open Source world.

As for today, there's neither statement nor further instruction published by Ministry for Communication of Russia. The Open Source community and Microsoft didn't post any official statements as well.