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Dutch City Of Haarlem Takes Up OpenOffice.org
zerdood writes "An article in IDA states that Haarlem, the capitol of North Holland, has succeeded in converting 2000 desktops to use OpenOffice.org. They initiated the migration in response to the 500,000 Euro licensing fees paid every year to Microsoft for an upgrade from Office '97. Training people to use OpenOffice.org is projected to cost about one tenth of that. Jan van de Straat, director of R&D for the city, has also stated that they could move up to 20% of the city's desktops to Linux without any problems. Their servers already use Penguin Power."
hopefully the 25% prediction will come true. In US there is no chance in near future because any attempts made by the fed govt or state govt to recomend oss is shot down by the M$ lobyist.
Calm down people, its a religion not an operating system.
It's encouraging to see a story about someone who has actually made the switch to some sort of OSS as opposed to someone talking about it. I don't mean to imply that the other places considering the switch were insincere, but it's a lot easier to take seriously when you've eliminated the possibility that it was just a stunt to get reduced prices on MS Office. Nice work, Haarlem!
It looks like they are taking a sensible migration path.
:)
:)
:) ) and it is good to see Microsoft Office alternatives given a chance.
Adopting a new product (OOo) as the new standard, training people to use it and then insisting it be used for new work is the way to go.
Since they already have licensed copies of Office97, there is no cost involved in keeping it alongside to run legacy apps and handle legacy documentation.
Sending documents for other people to view can always be done by creating PDFs of them. This is the main way we do it and find that most people can read them regardless of platform. I can even read them on my telephone
The next step on migration would be to divert some of the cash that would have been spent on the upgrade to porting the legacy apps to use OOo. Even if this took the whole upgrade budget, in the medium to long run they will still benefit greatly.
Where there are people who cannot cope with PDF, or a PDF isn't adequate (i.e. they need an active spreadsheet) then encourage people to get OOo. The price is right
In the case of suppliers, then you tell them they have to use it. I doubt there will be any contractual issues regarding this - I've yet to see a contract that said 'all invoice to be submitted in Word97' or somesuch:) If they want your money, this is a minimal cost (and ultimately a saving) for them.
For other people, there can be problems, but even then how different are they to upgrading to a new version of Office? I remember incompatabilities between versions and having to save documents as Word 2.0 format, etc. OOo does produce passably decent Office code that is probably no waorse than those cases.
OOo is freely distributable. CD-Rs are cheap. Burn a few copies to give to these people. If you have an organisation of a few thousand (as many govt organs will), then you will have a tech support department. Give a few of these valued people access to your tech support for OOo issues. It won't cost anything extra in most cases.
While I write software commercially for a living, I also find advantage in OpenSource. Companies like Microsoft have, either by design or accident, gained a strong monopoly and thus have a stranglehold over us. For a piece of software that has become a 'standard', its cost is just too high for most people to afford. How many pirate copies because of this? How many feel justified in doing so? How many would agree with them?
Whatever the 'rights' or 'wrongs' of the situation, no commercial product should be in such a monopoly position (unless its mine and I get all the dosh, of course
Open Standards are well worth encouraging.
Their adoption gives everyone a chance to get the service level they require. Free software can be written in the knowledge that it will interact with commercial software. Commercial software can be written to give the slick finish and support that the corporate or nervous user craves.
If an organisation as large as the collective EU were to take the open standard/OSS route, all compainies like Microsoft could do was jump on the bandwagon to compete on a more equal playing field.
Open-source is a good and noble cause but nobody is going to win the war for open computing based on GNU/Zealotry alone. It plays an important role but even more important are standards that let all members work on equal footing.
For example, Safari is not purely open-source but it has foundations there and on the whole is very friendly to the standards. In the grand scheme of having a better, more open Internet, another Safari is just as good for us all as another Firefox user. (Here, for the sake of honesty, I admit I'm a rabid Apple fan, though Mozilla is actually my primary browser.)
In short, it's not about the license as much as it is the standards (or lack thereof) that the software supports.