CERN to go Open Science... ahem source

[LukeSavenije]

Source: ZDnet, CERN, @AluminiumTech

Beginning a year ago, CERN launched the Microsoft Alternatives project (MAlt). The name says it all.  CERN wants to get away from Microsoft programs for a very prosaic reason: To save money.

 

Quote

Iban Eguia, a CERN software engineer, tweeted:

"At @CERN, we are moving away from @Microsoft products due to their license fee increases for our research laboratory. We will try to use open-source software as much as possible. :)"

 

Emmanuel Ormancey, a CERN system analyst, explained that commercial software licenses, with their per-user fee structure are unaffordable, for CERN. For decades, CERN could afford Microsoft programs because it paid "academic institution" rate. All good things must come to an end. Recently, Microsoft revoked CERN's academic status, and it replaced the old contract with user number-based one. This increased "the license costs by more than a factor of 10. Although CERN has negotiated a ramp-up profile over q0 years to give the necessary time to adapt, such costs are not sustainable."

 

So, CERN started the Microsoft Alternatives project (MAlt). It's initial goal is "investigate the migration from commercial software products (Microsoft and others) to open-source solutions, so as to minimise CERN's exposure to the risks of unsustainable commercial conditions."

 

On the cloud, CERN is a long-time supporter of the OpenStack Infrastructure-as-a-Server (IaaS) cloud. Before that, until recently, CERN, with its partner organization Fermilab, had its own Linux distribution: Scientific Linux. The groups recently stopped developing Scientific Linux, which was a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) clone. They did this since CentOS -- a general-purpose Linux based on RHEL sources -- made Scientific Linux redundant.

 

you know... I don't even see why they didn't in the first place, with the heavy changes you can make to Linux without a company in the way are endless. I approve

[The King of the Undead]

less micromoney so yay? I like this and there reasons are pretty good I mean the sole purpose of a not non-profit busines is to make money so.

[Taf the Ghost]

Need to save money for their black ops squads. Can't let those college students play with time travel so much.

[Albal_156]

I had TechDeals predict Windows 10 will be free within a few years. Though Im guessing that will consumers and not enterprise or server.

[The King of the Undead]

16 minutes ago, Albal_156 said:

I had TechDeals predict Windows 10 will be free within a few years. Though Im guessing that will consumers and not enterprise or server.

linus did to in one of the wan shows!

[Guest]

If they sell some of their alien technology surely they can come up with the money?

[mr moose]

Companies, schools and countries are doing this all the time,  moving between Linux and Windows for their OS.    Sometimes it works for them and sometimes it doesn't.  There used to be an active list on the net of places making the switch and in which direction.  

[leadeater]

4 hours ago, mr moose said:

There used to be an active list on the net of places making the switch and in which direction. 

And then they realized most people don't actually care about that, along with it being a near impossible thing to actually track to a useful extent, so why bother 

[mr moose]

6 minutes ago, leadeater said:

And then they realized most people don't actually care about that, along with it being a near impossible thing to actually track to a useful extent, so why bother 

If I remember it was started by a Linux community in an effort to promote the usefulness of Linux over windows.  

[Bananasplit_00]

That's a huge dick move from M$ but at least something good has come out of it

[Video Beagle]

19 hours ago, LukeSavenije said:

Microsoft revoked CERN's academic status

That seems like a dumb and short sited decision. 

[The King of the Undead]

4 hours ago, Video Beagle said:

That seems like a dumb and short sited decision. 

Michaelsoft has broken Michael fix your company. 

[dalekphalm]

Assuming their IT department can handle the backend management of Linux (seems like a no brainer, since they already used RHEL based distros), and they can manage to train and support their staff using a Linux desktop (if they go that far), this could work.

 

But many people forget that in a corporate/enterprise environment, supporting software comes with it's own costs. And supporting end users using Linux can be quite expensive, if those users have next to no experience on Linux.

 

Being a scientific enterprise, CERN likely has far more users already familiar to some degree or another with Linux though, so for them, I imagine the switch might be easier.

 

Though this was honestly a stupid move on Microsoft's part. By revoking Academic status, they're likely going to lose CERN entirely as a customer.

[Chunchunmaru_]

If I don't remember wrong, the CERN already contributes to the Scientific Linux distribution...

[dalekphalm]

16 minutes ago, Chunchunmaru_ said:

If I don't remember wrong, the CERN already contributes to the Scientific Linux distribution...

The article goes over that - they stopped once CentOS became available, since they were working on similar features and the same parent distro (RHEL).

[TacoSenpai]

On 7/5/2019 at 11:01 AM, Taf the Ghost said:

Need to save money for their black ops squads. Can't let those college students play with time travel so much.

Perhaps this means someone is back looking for an IBM 5100...

[Crossbred]

Why did my brain snap to NERV instead of CERN...

[moriel5]

On 7/9/2019 at 11:03 PM, dalekphalm said:

Assuming their IT department can handle the backend management of Linux (seems like a no brainer, since they already used RHEL based distros), and they can manage to train and support their staff using a Linux desktop (if they go that far), this could work.

The corporate offices will continue to to use Windows 10 for the time being, according to CERN, though they are hoping to change that in the future (They are heavily reliant on Microsoft Office).

It is only the research sections that will move away from Linux+Windows to all Linux.