Los Angeles to Consider Open Source Software

lientz writes "According to an article at FederalComputerWeek, the city of Los Angeles is considering using Open Source software as a cost cutting measure. From the article: "...city officials could save $5.2 million by switching to OpenOffice... rather than purchasing a Microsoft Office product at $200 per license for 26,000 desktops. The savings would go to a special fund to hire more employees for the police department, a major focus for city officials right now, he added.""

Comments

Heh

[Anonymous Coward]

Now watch microsoft drop that price from 200$ to 10$....

I can just smell it on the air.

Re: Heh

[Black Parrot]

> Now watch microsoft drop that price from 200$ to 10$....

I don't know about that. I called a press conference and announced that I was going to play Doom instead of Age of Empires, and I didn't get one red cent out of the cheap bastards.

Re:Heh

[goon america]

No, just watch a swarm of Microsoft lobbyists descend upon the city, donating enough to local politicians to equal the amount they would save in the city budget by switching to Open Office. This solves the real problem for both parties, which for the politicos is not the city budget but the campaign budget, and for Microsoft is not profits but control.

Re: Heh

[Anonymous Coward]

Calling mom & dad down to the basement is not what I would describe as "calling a pres conference" :)

Negotiating Ploy?

[mordors9]

It just sounds like a good way to get M$ to lower their licensing fees.

Re:Negotiating Ploy?

[mordors9]

The general acceptance by the world as THE office suite? Most school systems use MS Office for teaching students, so the possible employee base is more likely to be familiar with it than OpenOffice. And no I am not a MS fan, I use Slack for my home desktop. But you have to accept reality, while hoping it changes.

Typical tactic

[null etc.]

This is the typical tactic used by governments in order to get Microsoft running back to their doorsteps, courting them with low prices.

There's nothing to see here, move along.

Re:Typical tactic

[bkzitalsux]

This story ws covered on NPR last week (at least in the LA area). The reporter explained to the clueless what OSS was and the benefit of putting more cops on the street with the money saved. She then moved on talk about the "TCO" of going OSS, as if the status quo had none. Evidently coached (or brainwashed or funded) by MS or the reseller for the city.

I'd be amazed if LA were to switch. Pleased, but amazed.

Police is good

[Space_Soldier]

I would rather have more police officers than Microsoft Office licences. If the federal government did this, I wonder how many FBI agents, CIA agents, NSA agents, radiation-proof suits, and other goodies could be bought!

Macros

[tyleroar]

Gordon Haff, a senior analyst and IT adviser at Illuminata, said business value should be the main concern in transitioning to an open-source environment. "The decision-making for the state or local or federal government could be essentially the same as for a corporation," Haff said. "Does it save money when all the costs [are] taken into account? And that includes conversion costs, retraining costs, perhaps costs of getting and writing or converting software that doesn't run on an open-source platform."

That's a very good point. OpenOffice is great and all, but what if they have lots of macros written for the Office suite? Once OpenOffice has implemented compatibility with macros, there will be no reason to not switch. The other thing that occurred to me, is why do they feel like they have to upgrade? Why can't they stick with the version they have?

Re: You get what you pay for

[Black Parrot]

> Windows XP, Microsoft Office, and all the rest, these programs actually work.

Get an account, Bill.

Microsoft Response

[AfterSchoolSpecial]

"The savings would go to a special fund to hire more employees for the police department, a major focus for city officials right now."

Steve B. (Or Bill G.): "You see, open source makes you less safe and secure than windows products...oh wait...crap."

And a fine tactic it is.

[Noksagt]

The fact that Microsoft cowtows to tactics like this by lowering their prices gives legitimacy to OpenOffice.org. If MS didn't view F/OSS as a viable thread, they wouldn't lower prices--they'd pull strong-arm tactics and say "yeah--good luck with that. When your migration fails, you can come back and give us the same deal as we are proposing now."

Lowering prices not only validates OO.o as a useable alternative, but also proves that F/OSS is a truly disruptive technology--MS can't get away with charging what they want to anymore.

Re:And a fine tactic it is.

[behindspace]

I agree, OO.o was the best thing I ever migrated to. Everyong I know was acting like "you can't do that, you'll come crawling back to M$FT" I switched about 8 months ago, and have since converted my office, my friend who runs a computer shop (he now fully endorses OSS, and OO.o, Firefox, and Thunderbird come with all of his new computers, unless a customer wants to have M$Orafice and pay the $200+). The town of North Hampton NH is looking into the migration as well, same with the town of Methuen MA. sure, both these cities combined aren't even the size of a city block in LA, but still, it begins to prove the point that F/OSS does prove to be a powerful competitor to M$...

Let's start spreading our own FUD

[britneys 9th husband]

What does a cop make, about 52k/year or so? We need to start fighting fire with fire. Here's the new FUD we can start spreading against Microsoft:

Through its licensing fee structure, Microsoft tried to take 100 police officers off the streets of Los Angeles.

Smaller communities would benefit most from OSS

[TykeClone]

I'm on the city council of a (very) small town, and because of that I'm on a mailing list for an Iowa municipal issues magaizine. This month they had an article in it about reducing Microsoft licensing costs - by using the state purchasing power. No mention of Open Office or any other competitors.

In Iowa, there are a few population centers, a few "larger towns", and many towns with low enough populations that they can run the entire municipal government with two or three employees. These are the kinds of places that don't have the built-in MS infrastructure and could migrate to OpenOffice fairly easily. Larger communities may have the infrastructure in place the makes it more difficult to migrate away from Microsoft.

Seeing headlines that LA is thinking about going open source is interesting, but there might be thousands of other communities in the country that could see a proportionally greater benefit from that software than LA would - but they'd never make the news.

Re:OpenOffice Access

[cttforsale]

It's called
1. make your Access database an ODBC datasource.
2. Start any Open Office app and click Tools--->Data sources.

This is under MS Windows, which is what they're still using....

I know. Certainly not a replacement. But it is there...

Pilot Program

[nurb432]

Lets hope this spreads among other states too.

We are tax payers, everyone write a NICE letter to their local representatives..

Forget the simple "replace Microsoft.. they suck" angle, this sort of move saves money..

Re:OpenOffice Access

[ptlis]

Er... Open Office Base perhaps? Included in the OO.o 2 preview releases it seems to be an Access-like front-end for a real RDMS, none of the built-in access bullshit which dies if there are greater than 5 concurrent connections to it.

Re:something for nothing

[cyberfunk2]

I'd like to see the people in charge who save money by using open source get the bonus. Now thats a real incentive not to go w/ the status quo.

If it suddenly becomes finacially incentive for the politicians to consider OSS, you're gonna be damned sure they will.

Or pay for mod's you need in an Open Source one.

[khasim]

You're right. But they don't have to pay to write one from scratch.

That's a lot of money to pay for developers to add in any features/functionality that you want but does not exist in OO.org.

Save $2 or $3 million this election cycle and save even more next cycle.

The best thing is, every year you can keep investing in development and still claim that you're saving $$millions$$ in license fees.

And if you hire local programmers, you're also "creating good jobs".

My experience: OO need less support.

[Futurepower(R)]

"maybe has a little less support"

When you have "26,000 desktops", commercial support is not a factor, because you have your own support staff. Also, my experience with Open Office is that the help messages are better and there are fewer serious quirks than Microsoft Word 2000. (I've never tried Office XP because I decided to get off the Microsoft time waste train.)

I'm guessing governments have not adopted Open Office sooner because most government officials did not have enough technical knowledge to feel confident in committing thousands of desktops to something that didn't come from Microsoft. It is "you can't get fired for choosing Microsoft, even if the software doesn't work well".

When someone chooses a software package, they are choosing business partners, because so much staff time is invested in becoming comfortable with software and in using it. Officials are beginning to think about this: Is is sensible to want to be the business partner of a company that has been so adversarial toward its customers, and which produces software of amazingly bad quality?

If you test Open Office, be sure you test the latest version, 1.1.4. Version 2.0 will be available in April or May of this year.

Generally, when you send documents outside your company or organization, it is better to send PDF files. That guards against accidental changes. To make PDF files in Open Office, just click the PDF icon in the toolbar. To do this in Microsoft Word, install additional software.