IRS misses XP deadline, pays Microsoft millions for patches | Hacker News Reader

IRS misses XP deadline, pays Microsoft millions for patches

computerworld.com

94 pointsasaddhamani112 comments

The federal government hasn't had a budget for four years until less than a month ago[0]. Up until then, our government was funded with a variety of appropriations bills as stop-gap measures. When a large organization doesn't have a budget, how do they make long-term investments in their IT infrastructure? So, the IRS can't very well execute a major migration when they don't have a budget and they aren't going to do so a few weeks before April 15th.

Yes, this is wasteful, but what else could the IRS have done without approval from congress?

[0] http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/23/us-usa-fiscal-budg...

but what else could the IRS have done without approval from congress?

Patching the security issues themselves? I know this can be complex in many cases but the security and reverse engineering community have this knowledge, probably not fixing the whole issue but at least blocking it.

I've wrote an article about doing this here: http://blog.nektra.com/main/2013/08/07/using-deviare-to-crea... last year.

Official patches are more trustworthy in the enterprise and public service world. Whether those patches are better or worse is up for another debate.

You wouldn't want someone downloading random patches off the Internet or hiring a non-MS employee to make a patch without hiring multiple people to verify the integrity and usefulness of the patch (think backdoor) to fix computers handling your tax information. Do you?

I wouldn't.

You wouldn't download a random patch for heartbleed until openssl releases the official notice and patch. Or you won't download because you want the fix from your distro vendor.

Do you?

Yes. At the end it's all about trust.

With a good community making hotpatches, and explaining their fixes I will install them.

The question was not would you install a random patch but would you be ok with the IRS installing random patches when creating a backdoor could easily be worth 100+million?

First, I don't like the "random patch" expression. I am talking about patches discussed by the reverse engineering and security community. IRS is already patching their systems in a similar way when they update a Linux distribution.

No really, The IRS will use something like Red Hat and the Red Hat Corporation will be providing a level of guarantee which the IRS can fall back on should they need to.

If they just pull patches from the community themselves, when something goes wrong they will have to take the blame themselves and people will think they are foolish being so reckless. As a techie, this option may seem feasible to you but then again you're just some random guy on HN who probably thinks node.js is the be all and end all of IT. I doubt you've got the intelligence (cleary) or the experience (very cleary) to understand how the IT industry works at a human, risk management and legal level.

It's funny how you talk about me without knowing me. You don't even made a background check to see if I adjust to your node.js bias.

No, my company sells hard core technology to big vendors and sign the kind of corporate contracts that you refer in your comment. Since the IRS will not solve the issue there is another route: selling a hotpatch service to another vendor who sells to the IRS.

> With a good community making hotpatches, and explaining their fixes I will install them.

You will have to be reassure that your patch will work and is risk free. If not, get ready for a bill and possibly a congressional hearing.

Good community is great, but you need to shift responsibility whenever possible. Not that there aren't any kernel hackers work in the public service sector, but they have other important things to do than fixing someone else' product if there's a choice.

This is an interesting article, I give you that. But you have to be realistic. The IRS patching security issues in Windows XP is about as realistic as my grandma building her own home automation iPhone app in objective C.

The IRS is not paying $11M for the development know-how to maintain security; it's true that they could probably shop around and find the services they need for much less.

No, they're paying $11M so they can say "We paid Microsoft $11M! What else could we possibly do?" when something goes wrong.

Sadly that's probably pretty accurate.

threaten microsoft to swith to linux?

Something tells me you did not understand the above comment... He's saying the IRS could shift responsibility based on the fact they paid the worlds biggest software vendor 11mil... Switching to Linux puts the responsibility back in the IRS's court...

They seemed to have found funds in their budget to harass political groups from one ideology.

Operational expenditure is different from capital expenditure.

Yes, and the majority of the groups that were found to be in violation were Democratic.

Oooops. So much for your talking point.

Go away, troll.

What are the reasons for the government not to switch to linux? I'm not trying to be snarky; it really seems like there are a huge number of benefits and very few downsides.

I understand that the government has a contract with MS, but it seems like it might actually be costing the government more to take advantage of the contract.

I think it would be great for them to switch but I can think of 2 huge reasons they wouldn't.

1. Retraining the users, very few people use linux so it would be a massive undertaking to retrain their thousands of mostly non-technical workers to use a new, unfamiliar, operating systems.

2. Microsoft Office. Say what you want about LibreOffice and OpenOffice but when it comes to enterprise grade software MS Office is unrivalved, especially concerning Excel.

3. And whatever other IRS-focused enterprise software they may be running, probably runs on the Windows platform.

Side note: Maybe this gets better in 10 years when lots of things have been written on the managed CLR? Although I don't think the challenge Wine has is running the C++ programs, but implementing all of the stubbed out APIs correctly... the same challenge exists with a C# interface.

4. As good as Ubuntu's latest version and its UI may be right now, anything other than basic stuff you want to do requires command prompt. Normal users who are not geeks can't imagine themselves doing that on a daily basis.

Still wondering how they even go by doing their job on a computer. If you ever worked in a support role, you'd know that no matter how many years of experience they have, they are most likely being confused by the UI change every time MSFT decide to be 'cool' and 'innovate' (See the ribbon style introduction back in 2007). And this is without the regular nagging of them not wanting to learn where are the options they want to modify, despite the menus and sub menus.

With regards to MS Office and MS mail client, sure they are more polished, but does that really matter? Are those people crafting an art piece every time they want to add an image to their report? Just an honest question.

3. Microsoft Outlook. If you've worked at any of these big organisations, you quickly learn Outlook plays a big part in day to day running of the office.

If these are user-facing computer, then the obvious reason is because of what people use and the software they rely on.

Even if they do run Linux, upgrade is still a pain in the ass.

The major problem is that anyone over the age of probably 40 would be crippled by a migration to say Ubuntu. My parents still struggle with basic stuff on Windows even though they use it (Win7) everyday at work. Throwing something foreign at them would account for so many lost hours the initial cost would end up being extremely expensive.

Also Microsoft Office, basically MS's golden egg, is way farther ahead then Libre Office regardless of what people say. All of MS office's services integrate extremely well with each other as much as it pains me to say.

At the end of the day all these people need is Outlook, Word and XL which are leaps and bounds ahead of Libre Office, which doesn't even have a mail client.

Add in all the lobbyist and money going towards the right campaigns and there's your answer.

> The major problem is that anyone over the age of probably 40 would be crippled by a migration to say Ubuntu

I accept that migrating to a new platform would entail an amount of disruption, but I don't see what that has to do with anybody being over 40.

Why should LibreOffice have a mail client, when there's Thunderbird or any number of other excellent mail clients?

I'm not saying it should but I figure it would be easier to fully integrate an application that already used the Libre Office subsystem rather that integrating external mail clients.

To be honest, I don't see how migrating to Linux would actually solve the problem the IRS is having. If anything, it would make the problem worse. Ubuntu LTS is only supported for 5 years on the desktop. RHEL goes up to 13 years, which is about how old Windows XP is right now. Windows or Linux, the IRS would have run into migration pain as support for its outdated operating system ended. Yes, if they'd used Linux, they would have had the possibility of backporting fixes. Realistically, though, very few organizations outside of the distros themselves backport kernel fixes. Instead of hearing about the IRS making extra payments to Microsoft, we'd be hearing about them making extra payments to Canonical or Red Hat.

Now I'm not saying the move to Linux is necessarily the right move for the IRS, but you missed the point entirely. The only thing stopping the transition on time was that the upgrades were put on hold because of budget issues, not because it was hard to upgrade. Last I heard, Ubuntu was free to install, so sure they would still have a similar upgrade schedule, but this wouldn't be an issue here, at least in terms of budget for such an upgrade.

You're just thinking about the cost of the OS licenses, think about how many man hours it would take to update all those machines.

Oh come on, the man hour cost to install the update is miniscule to the cost of a Windows license per machine (even if they do get site licenses). And if their problem is budget, switching to Linux is a potentially valid fix for this problem, as the cost (even though there is still a cost) would be dramatically lower. Although again I'm not advocating for the change as there are many other issues that would be caused by this transition.

Most places I've worked - organizations far smaller than the IRS - have had site licenses, so the costs of upgrading don't lie in paying for the OS.

The costs lie in training, upgrading hardware, and upgrading user applications (including things that are closed source, discontinued or developed in house by people who have left the organization).

Unfortunately you'd get most of these problems in Linux too.

If you read the article, they have already upgraded some of their computers, so the upgrading user applications has already been done, as the machines that have been upgraded would have needed this. The training required to go from one version of an OS to another version of the same OS, is very miniscule, as (at least for the standard user usage, which the majority of IRS users, they fall under) OS developers go out of their way to make the changes as seemless as possible. And sure upgrading hardware may be a cost, but again this generally a much smaller problem with Linux, as Linux is generally a much lighter weight OS than Windows is.

> If you read the article, they have already upgraded some of their computers, so the upgrading user applications has already been done, as the machines that have been upgraded would have needed this.

But they've upgraded to another Windows version, not a * nix. Windows has taken backwards compatibility support to plaid (11 if you're a fan of a different movie). I worked in an office with a data analysis tool written using Visual Fortran in the 1990s for Windows 95. Without retargeting it it runs just fine with a single launch flag set for Windows to use the appropriate compatibility mode. The cost of upgrading user applications is really the cost of testing user applications. Moving to * nix wouldn't be upgrading, it'd be rewriting/porting or significant testing with Wine or some other compatibility layer. [1]

[1] As others pointed out, as more applications run on the CLR porting to * nix will become easier as CLR support improves on those platforms. But that also requires a rewrite, you can't take an existing Fortran or VB or C++ project and retarget it without effort.

The issue is clearly not about the price of the licenses. The IRS is paying 200$ per machine to extend XP support (which is more in a single year than what they would have paid for new Win7 licenses).

The expensive part is upgrading the hardware to support Win7, rewriting all the software that aren't compatible with Win7, training the personnel to use Win7 (and all the newly re-written software). Now, imagine if they were actually trying to upgrade to Linux. They'd pay much more to train the personnel, they'd have to re-write almost every single software they have been using. On top of that, they'd still pay for custom support (and Linux support is considerably more expensive than Windows support).

>Linux support is considerably more expensive than Windows support

In my experience running a small business, Linux support was much cheaper than windows support. The Linux professionals seem to charge more but can almost always fix a problem twice as fast as a the support I get from Windows "professionals". I also ended up having less problems with Linux than I did with Windows (after a few initial bumps in the road). I've also talked to quite a few other entrepreneurs and many of them agree that Linux is a fine and much better choice for start-ups simply because you're starting from a clean slate (So there is no legacy code to deal with) and because 90% of small businesses and start-ups consists of a network of 10 or less computers.

This might be true for startups, but the IRS certainly have more than 10 computers.

>Last I heard, Ubuntu was free to install

Ubuntu is free to install only because your free time has no monetary value. For organizations whose time has monetary value, the cost of an OS license is swamped by the cost of the time it takes to rewrite applications, retrain users, roll out the upgrade, and fix the inevitable breakages.

And like I said above, these costs are present whether you're using Linux or Windows.

Also, if you are the type of person who hangs around on HN, you are more likely to be the type of person with friends who run linux or who is comfortable working through software configuration problems by googling for things and trying thinks from internet forums. Most people don't have that privilege, and so linux is actually pretty expensive for them in terms of time and frustration.

(I run ubuntu with xmonad but have never written my own packages)

I think the most important factor is that Microsoft puts a ton of effort into backwards compatibility, to make sure that it is always easier/less risk to upgrade Windows (and Office) than to switch to something else.

I know that in the corporate world there are still very many business applications that are mission-critical and very special-purpose (sometimes custom) that were not written in a cross-platform way, and may not be maintained anymore - I would be shocked to find out that it was not this way in the government too.

It is certainly not backwards compatibility. Every internal review of Microsoft systems within the government indicates they upgrade whenever possible, even to the detriment of keeping versions that "just work". That is one of the frustrating things about succcesses in deployment of open source: a mindset that still wants to put out the latest version due to features and "coolness" instead of patching and keeping stability that would ultimately save money.

Presumably if they had could switch OSes easily, they would have switched from Windows XP to Windows 7 by now.

XP was released in 2001. If they'd adopted Red Hat they'd have adopted 7, and upgraded 22 times, changing distro once to be on Fedora 20. If they'd adopted Ubuntu they'd have had to wait 3 years for the first release (confusingly numbered 4.10), and now they'd be on release 13. Even Red Hat Enterprise Linux didn't become available until 2002, and you'd be on version 2.1, unsupported since 2009.

If you suck at upgrading and want something that will be supported for 12+ years, Linux is not for you.

Ubuntu's version numbering system is not confusing at all, it just doesn't follow the standard start with 1 and go up. Ubuntu's version numbering system is the date the version got released, so 4.10 got released in October 2004, and version 14.04 (which gets released in 4 days) means that is is released in April 2014. Not so confusing at all.

Edit: Anyway your point is invalid anyway. The reason the IRS suck at upgrading is because they didn't have the budget to pay for said upgrade. Last I heard, it was free to upgrade the majority of Linux distros. Although there may be many other reasons not to switch to Linux, this is not one of them.

There's a lot more to the cost of upgrading than the price of the license. Licenses for Win7 are nothing compared to the price of upgrading all the custom software they developed over the years to insure compatibility with a new OS. The reason almost no business or organism decided to leave XP for Linux is because it's not economically advantageous to do so. When talking about an investment as big as this, you can be sure that almost every options have been evaluated.

Do you live in a world where linux just magically upgrades itself on 110,000 computers for free?

Er ... yes?

http://imgur.com/omXommu

(Except the "110,000 computers" bit, this is just one.)

Who runs this UI on 110,000 computers?

The 110,000 computers bit was the only bit that mattered.

At their scale, they will need to pay someone for support no matter what, whether that "someone" is Microsoft, Red Hat, Canonical, etc.

So, you can't just look at the consumer price tag on a Linux distribution ($0) and compare that to what the IRS is paying Microsoft in support contracts - you have to compare it to the total costs of enterprise Linux support.

And if the IRS is having a hard time migrating off of a version of an OS that was released 12+ years ago to its more recent version, I imagine they'd have a hard time migrating to a completely different operating system altogether.

Even if the incremental costs of upgrading LTS versions of a Linux distro ended up being smaller, they simply don't have the up-front capital to cover the costs of migrating to Linux in the first place.

(Oh, and don't forget that even if they did manage to procure that somehow, as soon as Microsoft gets wind of it, the price for Windows support contracts will magically fall).

In my federal government research lab, we have 15+ years of Excel scripts behind a huge amount of our ongoing analyses. Whether this route was the best or not is a bit moot now (Excel dependence grew by individual choices on the local level); currently the expense of the switch would be very high. Also, in any interaction with the outside world (like Universities), Office is still the de-facto standard. An attempt of mine to lead a co-authored study in a Latex document, with several scientists at universities, caused mass confusion (as opposed to just 'track changes' in word).

We're slowly creeping to R, python, etc., and Linux is allowed as a choice (about 10% of us choose it). That said, my lab made it over to Win 7 about 2 years ago now...

I like the linux alternative, but I like even more that decisions like this are made at a local level, rather than through a massive top-down disruptive push.

15 years of this Excel? I guarantee your analysis is incorrect. How much is it worth to get correct analysis results?

Eh, cheap dig. We are under specific legal and regulatory burden to produce, proof, and provide our results for external audits, which happen regularly. QC is a substantial part of the costs of a new system. Thanks for the offer of guarantee, though!

One of the biggest reasons isn't just the licensing and individual system, but the supporting systems and processes: certification and accreditation processes for security, ability to only pay for one year at a time due to legalities of budget constraints, and items such as mandated ediscovery systems that are tied to the OS and systems architecture they are designed for using. It takes a great deal of experience, planning, and foresight to decouple services and make removal and swap out of key pieces open and even possible to change out. Add to that active defaults by vendors that encourages lock-in as well as the failure to draw in expertise that would survive in such an environment, equates to mediocrity in IT.

There have been billions of dollars poured into government software that runs on Windows. Billions more poured into support, verification and validation of that software.

Switching would be very, very, expensive - and its not clear that it would help even in the long run.

Additionally, Windows is still THE dominant platform for science and engineering work, especially modeling and simulation. How many engineers (non-CS) do you know that do not use Windows? The most popular CAD software, SolidWorks, is available only on Windows. Alibre, the second most popular one, is also Windows only. The next most popular one, AutoCAD, is Windows and Mac only. 3DStudio Max - Windows only.

Most simulation software is also Windows only, at least when I was a government contractor, that was the case.

If the government switches to Linux, they'll have to switch en masse - having some people on Linux and others not won't work very well at that scale of bureaucracy. And when even most engineering software isn't available on Linux, that isn't gonna happen.

And so, XP support still lives on. Actually, at $200 per computer per year, it has the potential to be quite a lucrative support, so it'll continue as long as there's demand.

It's okay. It's only tax payer money. They're not paying it out of their pockets.

Sure. Everybody knows that federal employees are exempt from taxation.

Obviously they are not, but they pay the same amount of taxes regardless how large their spending is.

It's a concept so basic I'm stunned that anybody would be so bold to write a sarcastic comment about it.

While the snark is amusing, there's a big difference between running a business with a hard budget and always being able to borrow or demand more money.

The _government_ might not have a "hard" budget, as you mean it, but you can bet the IRS does. Congress decides what they get, and you can be sure it's barely enough to keep running as-is, let alone enough to put into future investments like say, an upgraded IT infrastructure, which then necessitates emergency measures like paying MS for XP support.

Work with government long enough and you'll find the majority of "waste" comes not from spendthrift government layabouts, but insane auditing and transparency requirements (which require oodles of paperwork and three people to review it to make sure you're not wasting taxpayer money), hamstrung budgets (renting the same building at exorbitant rates because Congress will give you the money for that, but not to buy it outright, which would be far cheaper; paying for continued XP support because you couldn't get the funding for an upgrade), hiring contractors for decades-long jobs, and a legion of other controls in place to save us from government excess.

I'm by no means saying that we should let them run around doing whatever they want, damn the cost, but keep in mind that auditing and transparency have a cost, and we need to look at what's cheaper in the long run and not just in the short term.

>Congress decides what they get, and you can be sure it's barely enough to keep running as-is, let alone enough to put into future investments like say, an upgraded IT infrastructure, which then necessitates emergency measures like paying MS for XP support...I'm by no means saying that we should let them run around doing whatever they want, damn the cost, but keep in mind that auditing and transparency have a cost, and we need to look at what's cheaper in the long run and not just in the short term.

I sincerely doubt that the IRS, a revenue department, is running efficiently and is underfunded. I did a cursory search to see if I'm making up crazy claims and it seems like the lack of funding is largely self-reported.[1]

I sincerely believe that this is due to a lack of planning and just 'kicking the ball down the field.' Why go through all the annoying conversations about upgrades when you're going to retire or leave before it matters?

Microsoft first set the end of support for 2011. As a nod to their massive XP user-base, they pushed EOS to 2014. You're suggesting that the IRS is rational in paying for emergency patches to something that they received a 3 year extension on? Windows 7 was released EOY 2009 -- it's not as if they were stuck for lack of options.

This is crap planning and I really doubt that consequences exist.

[1] http://www.taxpayeradvocate.irs.gov/2012-Annual-Report/irs-f... (side note: I like the "automation is bad, boo" bullet-point)

You've obviously never worked at a large corporation.

This isn't all bad news. The money to pay support and new machines will come from their "enforcement" budget. That's a win for taxpayers.

Sounds more like it is a win for non-taxpayers, doesn't it?

Nope, it's a win for both.

Not everyone that is audited is guilty of tax-evasion.

The 99% who are not audited benefit from enforcement audits against underlayers.

And not enforcing traffic laws must be good for pedestrians.

What is "enforcement" budget?

The department that enforces correct payments. Audits.

The Dutch government also failed to complete the transition from XP to more recent versions of Windows on time. First the national government negotiated a deal with Microsoft for continued support of Windows XP (http://nos.nl/artikel/631811-rijk-betaalt-miljoenen-voor-xp....), then even the five largest municipalities negotiated a deal (http://nos.nl/artikel/633985-gemeentelijke-deal-met-microsof...) that allows other municipalities and provinces to join.

Now...I'm not sure if a $30 million cost would be considered a tax write-off, esp when it's the IRS, or will it just fall under their whoopsie daisy category on their annual budget (kinda like their failed Star Trek YouTube ad campaigns).

While I understand write offs when it comes to a business for costs of doing business, there are FREE alternatives (like ubuntu) that the IRS could use. I'm not anti-Microsoft (in fact I'm deving an app for windows phone right now), but seems to me that whoever is managing the IRS' budget are idiots, and their decisions really need to be audited.

Can someone explain how this is tech or startup related? It feels like a, "Haha, look! The IRS missed their deadline just like I miss my tax deadline every year!"

Edit: That reminds me, I need to do my taxes.

Did you miss the part about Microsoft and Windows XP patches?

I believe we're doing the same thing here at the Government of Canada.

Since the government has paid for the additional patches to be created, can Microsoft please send them out to everyone running XP that can't afford to buy a new computer?

I wonder what retail companies are doing about all of their POS (point-of-sale) computers running XP.

They're still running it.

Those point-of-sale computers are probably running XP Embedded, which has a longer support window.

Now I wonder, considering the financial and other non accountable damage at this point, John Koskinen should or should not be sacked?

From 2008 to 2014 it's a long time for any migration to take place. Six years? They could have migrated to OpenVMS and have a team write custom software for them in six years for Christ's sake!

He's only been in charge a few months...

Sorry, I didn't knew that... My bad.

Yeah, given unlimited appropriations and manpower I'm sure the IRS could have gone to the moon in six years, too. But since the IRS is like every other federal agency, it operates with limited budget authority and, therefore, it needs to choose its priorities.

paid for with taxpayer money - so it should be made public. we own those patches!

It's support, not purchasing the rights to the product.

They are paying per seat, the IRS is not paying for every single XP computer in the US.

Good god, why do these agencies not run on Linux or BSD? Think of the money that could be saved.

How is this a responsible use of taxpayer money?

I think it would be great for them to switch but I can think of 2 huge reasons they wouldn't. 1. Retraining the users, very few people use linux so it would be a massive undertaking to retrain their thousands of mostly non-technical workers to use a new, unfamiliar, operating systems. 2. Microsoft Office. Say what you want about LibreOffice and OpenOffice but when it comes to enterprise grade software MS Office is unrivalved, especially concerning Excel.

It would be much more expensive in terms of hours lost to make the switch.

It would cost them a tenth of this XP license nonsense to fix whatever makes LibreOffice or Calligra "not enterprise grade enough" for them.

And they are switching to 7. Inherently, they have the retraining costs already, and Lubuntu or Zorin is much more linear a change than going from no-search no-dock quicklaunch to Windows 7.

The government, for various reasons, is not really in a position to direct their employees to fix LibreOffice to make it suitable for them. They also aren't in a position to offer a grant to some organizations/individuals to do the work. They need something that exists at this moment. If free software proponents (myself included) want the situation to change, then we have to improve the status of free software in the enterprise (either by improving its image if the software is ready, or improving the software if it's not).

EDIT:

Also, retraining to Windows 7 is not really an issue. The issues with going to * nix are numerous. Non-COTS applications that'd need to be ported/recreated. Email infrastructure (what's the state of support for MS Exchange in the * nix world? That is, any applications that integrate as well with Exchange servers as Outlook?). I forgot about the server side in my other post. So much is running on Windows servers. SharePoint has become the de facto document sharing system, this is nicely integrated with MS Office, any * nix equivalent? Exchange is their email server, but does far more than just email - keeping contacts up to date, calendars, shared/group inboxes. Is there a singular application that can replace Outlook in the * nix world? Would they have to switch to 4 or 5 applications to do what one application did before? Will they play well with each other and properly share information (that is, if I create a calendar event in the calendar app will it be integrated well enough with the mail app to let participants now, and then re-sync later on once they've replied? I've never tried to do that in the Linux world, what applications support this?).

EDIT AGAIN: Anyone know how to insert a * next to a word without triggering italics? * <space> nix just doesn't flow right.

Addressing the Exchange part, no they're really aren't any good nix applications capable of using exchange. Thunderbird can do it with a plugin but you aren't getting contacts or calendars and you'll only get email if the guy who setup the exchange server allows IMAP.

I tried the HTML code for asterisk before 'nix': * but it seems it doesn't process them. Too bad, might be a bug.

LibreOffice and Calligra are not the only thing stopping the switch. For instance, smartcard support is big within the government, and while it can be done with enough effort on Linux, paying for "enough effort" would make the switch impractical almost by itself.

And it's not as if KDE 4 (or God forbid, GNOME 3) is so similar to Windows XP as to minimize retraining costs.

http://i.imgur.com/ipHo50B.png

I just booted a live Kubuntu and just switched the launcher, removed the activities / show desktop / virtual switcher widgets, switched the desktop from widget to folder mode, and added a quicklaunch widget. Looks and feels exactly like XP at that point. The only exception would be the file manager.

And it is not like you wouldn't be deploying custom images to all your machines - you could tweak all the theming to use MS Windows styles. Hell, some people even got KDE looking like 7 years ago: http://www.lirent.net/2009/05/windows-7-transformation-pack-...

> Looks and feels exactly like XP at that point.

Did you remember to remap Alt-F2 for Krunner (which looks nothing like on XP...) to Win-R?

Did you fix the Lock Screen to look exactly like XP?

I can tell you as a KDE dev myself that although you can do amazing things regarding look-n-feel, there is still a big difference. Even on things that are not very different between the two, that simply becomes an "uncanny valley".

Excel is great to be sure, but it's only the really advanced features that LibreOffice Calc is missing. Things like advanced macros or embedded VB scripts.

I really doubt that people in most government agencies are using these features.

And if they're intelligent enough to use these features, learning to use Unity would not be a huge hurdle.

These things get used all the time --- especially when statistical, economic or engineering analysis is being performed. Also, most users aren't using these features directly, they're using a template created by someone who did know how to use them. Most of what the end user does is punch in this years data and interpret the output.

For a specific example: unless LibreOffice or Google Sheets develops a solid equivalent to the Solver add-in, replacing Excel will be a non-starter in any department that deals with Engineering data.

1. Momentum.

2. Custom Windows-only applications

3. Really, really good price on support contracts - which they'd insist on getting if they switched to any *nix. Oracle (formerly Sun), IBM, RedHat (?). Are there any other major players in the OS world that can offer anywhere near the level of support that the government has come to expect?

4. And as Igglyboo said, MS Office. So many workflows in corporate environments depend on that damned suite, it'd be difficult to move away from it at the moment.

---

There are many offices that could make the transition. They use all web applications and various office suite tools (Excel, Word, PowerPoint mostly). The other applications they use would be things like Acrobat (but office suites can generate PDFs directly these days) and software to fill out forms (not handled as DOC/DOCX files or PDFs). The latter may be able to transition to signed/fillable PDFs. But these aren't the majority. Too many offices (particularly anything involving project management or inventory management) just depend too much on custom desktop applications that would take too much to port over or rewrite. It's like trying to modernize the avionics systems of an aircraft: in theory it'd be great, in practice your developers will kill themselves.

Because Linux or BSD is not a drop in replacement for Windows XP. It comes at a cost of rewriting their existing working applications and not to mention the time and money required to retrain the existing employees. Does anyone know how good the corporate support is for Linux/BSD distributions? Does it match upto what Microsoft provides?

>How is this a responsible use of taxpayer money?

The same way the govt decides to purchase Cisco's $25,000 wifi routers for city libraries.

At the scale the IRS is running, a copy of Windows is a few tens of dollars, which is about the cost of the necessary replacement keyboards over the lifespan of the computer. Ongoing patch support, however, is where MS actually shines here. Windows XP had support available for 13 years, with subsequent OSes being supported for 10+ years. In comparison, for OSes with support lengths as long as windows, like RHEL, the per-year support seat costs start at $49, which would lead to support costs of near $500 per seat over that same lifespan. So even with the IRS botching the rollout and needing to pay MS an extra year, they're still cheaper than the few Unix offerings that provide the duration of support MS does.

Because you have to understand the context. For nearly everyone one earth, a computer is a physical tool that exists for the sole purpose of helping them accomplish other tasks. In many cases, the most complex tasks people tackle are those they're being paid to work on. Those people just want a tool that works, that works they way the expect, that is supported and supportable by a vendor and internal IT, and is replaceable with something similar enough that things don't break.

Look, I'm a programmer turned engineering manager and I totally get where you're coming from with this comment, but you just don't seem to get how and why things are the way they are.

Speaking personally, I managed a project a few years ago to replace MS Office 2003 with Libre Office 4.0 (we actually started with OpenOffice but when Oracle acquired Sun and The Document Foundation was created to house the OO.o fork, we switched out of antipathy for Oracle). The mission was to remove MSO from as many machines as feasible, and the decision of what was feasible was, for the most part, left to me. We managed to convert about 20% of users, and these were composed of about 75% machines that never executed any Office app anyway and about 20% of machines whose users were just consumers of files other people created. Only about 5% of the machines converted belonged to creators. We found that most macros and custom formatting and blahblahblah were fairly straightforward to convert to work in LibreOffice, but the UI/UX was horrific, sometimes things just didn't work, and productivity was adversely affected far beyond the cost of the licenses.

We migrated to Gmail and Google Apps from Exchange+Outlook at the same time and saw similar adoption issues with Google Drive ("Docs" at that time -- in 2008). We (I) didn't make the mistake of forcing the issue this time and relied on coercion and organic growth to build the foundation for broad support. Today we are seeing about 1500 Sheets and ~500 Docs & Presentations created weekly (~22,000 users). Most of them still have MS Office on their machine, too.

Because, guess what, the right tool for the job is important.

(another commenter noted the haphazard and often ridiculous release schedule and evolution of RedHat / Fedora, BSD and Ubuntu over the past ten years or so. In my company, the Linux guys are mostly on their own to build their own environment because it became too unpleasant for corporate IT to create and maintain a standard image that worked well enough for most people most of the time. The devs these days tend to prefer Arch and Ubuntu and the sysadmins often run Fedora (our prod servers are almost always RHEL ... because guess what -- support is kinda important to most companies, especially big ones that aren't technology companies and where internal support is often understaffed and underequipped to DIY everything.)

This probably comes off rantier than I had hoped, and for that I apologize. Perhaps I'm just getting to CIO'y in my old age. :(

Alternatively, Windows 7 / 8 is such a disaster that the IRS is paying a few million dollars (out of their 10 billion dollar budget) to stick with something that works.

To me, that seems like a very prudent decision.

I think Windows 7 is quite solid. What's wrong with it?

Ah - I meant the collective "Windows 7 & 8". Windows 7 is fine, but has already been replaced by Windows 8, so why not Windows 8? Windows 8 introduced Metro, which is hated and not really an option for the enterprise, so 8.1 has sort of removed it (but not fully). And Windows 7 support ends in 2020.

In short, it's not a confidence-inspiring roadmap, and I think waiting a year is a valid choice.

8.1 did not remove metro at all, it just made the desktop a little easier to find.

Maybe it's time the FBI upgraded to touch screens anyway.

Start screen aside, Win8 is a faster, leaner Win7. No good reason not to use it if you're committed to the Windows platform.

Windows 7 (and Vista) won't run on PCs without ACPI support in the bios. I don't know how prevalent these old PCs are in the government setting but its certainly affected some POS systems for some businesses.

1. Size. Standard install takes up almost 20GB of hard drive space. Fresh Lubuntu, Crunchbang, or Debian takes up a gigabyte.

2. Backdoor prone black box. Something like Windows - buy licenses, get support from a 3rd party, be ignorant about product itself due to withheld software freedoms - works for the small to medium business. When you are federal scale, it makes no sense to spend tens or hundreds of millions in MS tax when you could, for a fraction of the price with a small dev team, maintain your own Linux fork. And while the IRS is on the "same side" as the NSA, who puts back doors in Windows, it should be hard to sleep at night knowing Microsoft could be bought off like that, and that China might do the same. Unless they get special source access to inspect it, at that scale they might.

3. No package management. For enterprise deployments, I've dealt with enough small businesses who just sit on half a decade old Firefox or Chrome because they can't enable the auto updater and didn't set up an Active Directory applications server. So the middle road is just having your own package repository of updates with all the machines synced to it pushing whatever new stuff you want available automatically.

And you could also throw in that a GNU/Linux distros modularity makes it much more reasonable to deploy to servers, embedded devices, and desktops at once with one maintenance crew. And if the IRS is running Windows Server.... taxpayer dollars at work, all right.

1. I used to consider the size of Windows a problem, then it occurred to me that I no longer play video games, and my video sources are all streaming. My 1TB hard drive has 800 GB free. Government employees outside of media offices and labs/shops that are heavily dependent on large data sets or large resource files like CAD or GIS data are probably not facing a data crunch on their user workstations with the current cost of hard drives.

2. Didn't like my response to this, may edit later.

3. Now this is reasonable, software installation on Windows sucks by default. However, there are some good tools out there for handling the distribution of software. I recall using some when I worked in IT at a university. Ghost had a way to do it that was essentially taking a snapshot, installing, then another snapshot. The difference was what got installed onto the rest of the computers. There was also a piece of software we used that let us handle on-demand software installation for things with limited keys (like Matlab), I don't remember (a decade ago now) what this one was. Not baked in, but it was more than serviceable as I recall.

4. IRS probably still has a fair number of mainframes. If they're like other federal agencies they'll have a mixture of Solaris, Windows and Linux servers installed depending on the contract at the time the information system was put together. Again, that modularity would be nice, but it's hardly practical unless the fed establishes one organization to be responsible for making, supporting and distributing this OS. Then you'd get a bunch of folks on the right bitching about government interfering with business, and people on both sides bitching about the security/privacy implications.

1. First, that's only a default install: you can easily package up a custom 7/8 install disc that gets down to 10-15 GBs. And if you compare that with a distro that installs a Windows-like window manager but default (say, stock Ubuntu, which takes up 5 GBs of space[1]), that gap narrows by a lot. Furthermore, it's just an irrelevant point. What's 10-20 GBs on modern desktops? Sure, the initial install will take a bit longer, but I sincerely doubt that a limiting variable for anyone right now is having a 40GB HDD instead of an 80GB HDD.

2. You are severely overestimating the ability of the government to hire a "small dev team" competent enough to build a custom Linux fork. The bulk of cost, no matter if they go Windows or Linux, is support. That's because it's really, really hard to manage software entirely through internal means, even if the product is completely open-source.

Furthermore, who's to say that the feds don't already have access to Windows source? At this point, it's impossible to know, but the idea that MS could be "bought off" by China is absurd. They're an American company whose operations and finances are largely based in the United States. You would have to have a high-ranking executive (or collection of executives) commit blatant treason, high the bribery money in some other country, AND convince a large number of MS developers to be completely quiet about an exploit placed in Windows source code on purpose. And not an exploit placed there under the threat of criminal punishment by the "legitimate" American government but an exploit that would send hundreds of employees to federal prison. I'm paranoid enough to admit that it is theoretically possible, but waaaaaay less likely than waaaaaaay more things that we should be legitimately worried about.

3. You say there's "no package management" and then you go on to explain how there is package management but that it's not setup correctly. The IRS is not a small business. Microsoft provides high-end support to them so that they can properly setup Active Directory and WSUS. And if they went Debian or Ubuntu, they'd pay the same money to properly setup those package managers.

Not to mention all the sheer costs of deploying and transitioning to a completely new infrastructure, as well as training thousands of relatively low-skill workers to use a completely foreign system. Oh, and rebuilding tons of custom software that wouldn't be in any public package repository anyway.

Anyway, OP's original point was that Windows 7 and 8 are garbage compared to XP, which is blatantly wrong. They're both very stable operating systems, and while it's fine to debate WHEN MS should cut off support for XP, it's an inevitable fact that they eventually MUST. The IRS has to upgrade eventually, and they've had a heads up for a while. It should've been done already.

[1] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/SystemRequire...

But Vista is still good, right?

> Windows 7 / 8 is such a disaster.

If you calling Windows 7 a disaster compared to XP, am sorry but you have no idea what you are talking about!

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