Public funding of open source software is one of the most direct ways that government spending can grow the supply side of the economy. Taxpayers will directly benefit from the public domain technologies developed to replace the contracts CERN is moving away from. Software and science share an important economic trait, that once you produce them you can maximize their total impact by spreading them around as much as possible. That's an advantageous situation for public funding without IP restrictions, which is the model of academia.
Disclaimer: I worked at CERN in IT for 5 years as staff.<p>CERN has never been a Microsoft organisation excepted in the head of management that was pushing for Microsoft solutions everywhere without success.<p>- Scientific computation are done at CERN under Linux with the Root framework.<p>- Most (all?) scientists uses OSx or Linux.<p>- All computing clusters runs SC Linux or centos.<p>- Most internal softwares: indico, EDH, landb, and other are running under Linux and are web based.<p>- All DBs are OSS or oracle<p>- All storages system are home made (EOS, Castor) or ceph based and run under Linux.<p>- Data distribution is home made and based on a framework named xrootd under Linux.<p>- Software distribution is also Linux based and run as a fuse module (cernVMFS)<p>- Most systems services are UNIX C++ and Java for the control part.<p>- CERN uses Openstack for virtualisation After the management pushed for Hyper-V and failed miserably.<p>- Management pushed for SharePoint for years before the entire website switched to PHP and Drupal.<p>There si not real "Microsoft" at CERN excepted AD and phones. It is however a study case of bad management decisions in IT.
Since people don't read the article:<p>"The Microsoft Alternatives project (MAlt) started a year ago to mitigate anticipated software license fee increases. MAlt’s objective is to put us back in control using open software."<p>"A prime example is that CERN has enjoyed special conditions for the use of Microsoft products for the last 20 years, by virtue of its status as an “academic institution”. However, recently, the company has decided to revoke CERN’s academic status, a measure that took effect at the end of the previous contract in March 2019, replaced by a new contract based on user numbers, increasing the license costs by more than a factor of ten. Although CERN has negotiated a ramp-up profile over ten years to give the necessary time to adapt, such costs are not sustainable."
CERN had a major role in making kicad what it is today. they implemented tons of complex stuff that you normally only find in really expensive CAD tools.<p>Hope they can repeat that with a few more FOSS projects!
I worked support some hardware CERN used once. Fun guys to talk with / work with.<p>They call me up one day to note that one of their devices I supported had an accident and they were concerned they didn't know why. So they sent me photos.<p>This device had rows of modular cards installed in it. In the center of the device with two cards pulled out you could see that something had burred and even melted some of the surrounding cards. But it didn't look like any given card had failed as much as there was some sort of really hot fire ... that had been in the air between the cards or something. Now keep in mind this was just what a handful of photos looked like, so who really knows. Makes no sense that there was something floating in the air between the cards hot enough to do that thing ... but that is what it looked like.<p>Anyway it was like a good 100k+ in hardware burned up, possibly MUCH more as the full chassis held a lot more than that. So I promise them a new chassis and such and tell them to pack it up nicely and we will have a courier come and get it and send it to our QA team. The CERN guys promised not to expose the equipment to anymore micro black holes ;)<p>The process to send stuff to the QA team in strange situations like this was a painful series of steps. The QA team was BRUTAL about process (even if they never followed it themselves...). They also were a real pain to even email, but that was part of the process. Amusingly enough when I sent them the photos and explained it was CERN even the QA ultra dry guys cracked some good X-files references ;)<p>Still wonder what the hell happened to that equipment.
It is awesome to see how CERN is supporting open source. They have been long time users of our open core GitLab with 12,000 users <a href="https://about.gitlab.com/customers/cern/" rel="nofollow">https://about.gitlab.com/customers/cern/</a>
I'm waiting for some of these documents being made public. I am working for a government institution that is making much of the same moves. Would be nice to see what an immense IT undertaking like this comes up with.
>...increasing the license costs by more than a factor of ten<p>When I hear stories like that I always wonder what was the thought process of the sales people that managed that account. Probably something like that:<p>- Hey, do you remember our old customer CERN, a world-famous scientific non-profit organization that pushes the boundaries of human knowledge about the universe?<p>- Yeah, what about them?<p>- Let's charge them 10 times more for our software licenses<p>- Can't see anything wrong about it, go ahead
Also see the comments last time this was posted: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20166070" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20166070</a><p>and what I said last time:<p>I'm honestly pretty happy about this. I'm hoping that by aiming to replace the commercial products they use with opensource alternatives, the alternatives leave with a better polish and user experience. I also see CERN as an institution that is willing to hire the devs needed to maintain / support a project.
Does this mean that no scientist at CERN can use applications like Mathematica? Or is this just focusing on essential foundation software like operating systems (moving away from Windows)
While this post is referring to desktop/server software, CERN are also using open source platforms in some of their experiments: they recently re-performed some of the 2012 analysis that led to the discovery of the Higgs boson, on top of Kubernetes.<p>Adam and I spoke to a computer scientist and two physicists from CERN for our podcast, and you might like to listen if you like physics or software.<p><a href="https://kubernetespodcast.com/episode/062-cern/" rel="nofollow">https://kubernetespodcast.com/episode/062-cern/</a>
That's kind of ironic. I was doing paid contract work in 1994 (on Linux!) that involved customizing the open source CERN httpd server (before Apache existed, or loadable modules in a web server).
Matrix would be a good fit for most research institutions, allowing cooperation trough federation. Heck, even Mastodon could be interesting, and ActivityPub as a transport layer for publications.<p>However, one issue is that small institutions cannot afford to self-host everything, or make the necessary adjustments themselves. I wonder if CERN and other big institutions could perform some heavy lifting (and maybe provide some shared services, hosting servers, etc.) without necessarily centralizing everything like it is done nowadays.
I'd like to see more done in the open networking space. Cumulus Linux was talked about a ton just a few years ago, but it seems like I haven't heard about it as much lately. Probably because Juniper and Cisco have (mostly) managed to catch up on the automation front.<p>I couldn't find anything concrete on the CERN website, but in their virtual DC tour I noticed HP Procurves as top-of-rack switches. I was really hoping to see whitebox switches.
I came across a white paper years ago (2012/2013 ish) on how they used Icinga (An early but rapidly growing Nagios fork) and mod-gearman to monitor their ATLAS computing farm. At the time, as a newly appointed sysadmin, I was looking in to possible solutions that could scale well myself and their usage was very inspiring. Eventually deploying something similar where I'm still working now.<p><a href="https://cds.cern.ch/record/1455464/files/ATL-DAQ-PROC-2012-014.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://cds.cern.ch/record/1455464/files/ATL-DAQ-PROC-2012-0...</a>
Good idea but<p>> Needless to say, isolated initiatives will waste effort and resources.<p>If the centralized procurement approach is what put everyone in the current mess, what indication is there that a centralized approach to open source won't produce the same issues?<p>I personally wonder why commit to open source in a centralized manner vs commit to interoperable standards (but not the specific tools used to speak to the standard).
I suspect this is specifically targeting Windows. I think this would be a good idea for anyone really. I don't know whose or which decision brought MS into this mess, but this isn't a sustainable OS for the future.<p>Our company still relies on it, but any new piece of software has to be platform independent. Licensing income probably skyrocketed on MS end, but I don't think they made any friends with W10.<p>Maybe MS is correct that W10 will be the last Windows. But maybe not because of rolling releases.<p>Anyway, good news and the correct strategy in my opinion.
CERN is not a university and has no student, it's entirely justifiable for Microsoft to not give them a university discount.<p>Universities have thousands of students that do not generate any revenue. The standard licensing model per person or per computer totally breaks down in that case, asking for a huge bill based only on the sheer amount of users. Education discounts are adjusting for that, large user bases with no money to pay.<p>That being said. The CERN is a government entity. They should argue to be given government discount.
My gut says this is related to forced updates and unwanted interface changes in current Microsoft products. It's been super annoying where I work, and staff are pretty upset.