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Birmingham Drops Open Source Initiative
eldavojohn writes "Birmingham, England put a stop to a half million pound project to put Linux and open source applications on library access PCs across the city. From the article, 'The council planned to roll out Linux software and applications on 1,500 desktops in libraries across the city, but in the end went no further than a 200-desktop project. Several industry watchers have voiced their concerns about the project, particularly around the number of PCs rolled out. Birmingham's expenditure averaged over 2,500 pounds per PC.' Why did they stop after 200 PCs? Because they claimed with Windows, the project would have been 100,000 pounds cheaper. One may wonder if they paid for initial training of their workforce making the first 200 more expensive than the rest but the article does not say whether or not this occurred."
The actual article is titled: "Criticism mounts over Birmingham's Linux project"
This is a followup on the project being discarded, mainly focusing on critical comments of how the project was managed.
Notable quote: 'Mark Taylor, whose Open Source Consortium also exited the project in the early stages, said: "I have no idea how anyone could spend half a million pounds on 200 desktops, running free software".'
Anything is possible given time and money.
At current exchange rates, that is $4,736.75 per desktop
Clearly you don't like Indian food.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
"You're everywhere. You're omnivorous."
The problem of course is that around here it's commonly understood that because I installed Fedora on the two Celeron boxen in my room and didn't spend a dime, that deploying 25,000 desktops across an enterprise should be no more complicated or expensive.
This is a strawman argument. No one else said it did not cost money to roll out 25,000 desktops in an enterprise. The discussion is should it cost as much as they claim to roll out 1500 desktops as workstations in public libraries. The consulting firm that they parted ways with called their costs "ridiculous" and they have a lot better idea of what the project entailed than anyone here.
And looking at the general direction the comments on this story are going I'd say we have a winner. Another great day for Slashdot ad impressions and another "look at what teh evil Micro$haft did" data point to use in the next flamewar.
Who's talking about Microsoft? We're talking about the incompetent shmoes in charge of this project who decided to stop working with two different Linux deployment consulting firms and "do it themselves" with current staff who had no experience and questionable purchases.
Baltis aren't Indian:
http://www.birmingham.gov.uk/balti.bcc
Nothing costs nothing
Claiming that it's the fault of incompetent staff isn't really an excuse. In every deployment I've seen, the staff has known nothing about the product when the deployment starts.
What!?! You've never hired people familiar with the platform you're deploying to deploy it? You just hire random minimum wage people or what?
What you rely on is good whitepapers and documentation provided by the company on how they expect a rollout to occur.
They parted ways with two consulting firms that were both experienced at deploying this and instead paid no one for documentation and support and instead tried to create it themselves. That is incompetence at the management level if nothing else.
This could be a case of them encountering more obstacles than they assumed initially, and/or having no good reliable source for help to solve them quickly.
...Because they decided to stop paying both the experienced planners and the support company.
I realize this is /. and everybody here thinks they are smarter than everybody else in the world, but the real world doesn't work like that.
In the real world if you make idiotic design decisions, your budget balloons to levels described by the company that helped you plan the deployment as "ridiculous," and you decide to scrap the whole thing at the cost of a million bucks then yeah maybe you're incompetent and should have retained at least one of the professional companies instead of trying to do it yourself. There are plenty of from-scratch deployments in numerous countries, that cost half what these people wasted.
this guy actually has a good point. anyone who has futzed about trying to get poorly supported wireless cards or a soft-modem to work under Linux can attest to this.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
You make some excellent points, but you have to keep the setting in perspective. Your comments are definitely valid in a corporate setting, but this is a library setting with computers open for free public access. My mother works in a public library in the US and I have volunteered my time assisting the sysadmin in support.
The first thing to remember, is that the public user does not need any specialized applications. The staff may need a special app for their check-in/out cataloguing system, but as for the public user, they need access to only two things: Office suite and web browser. Sure there are lots of other apps that we've provided (mostly some games) but the only things people do on these public machines is office related and web related. Now with the web portion, there are a lot of apps that may go along, as in flash, acrobat, etc. We even broke down and installed all of the popular instant messenging clients (I objected, but was over-ruled and had to install aim, yahoo, and msn on every pc in the place). The only exception I can think of is tax software, but the demand for it was usually low (only on a couple pc's and only used around April 15th).
You also argue about support. You and the parent are both correct in your assessments of support in Windows. Corporate support for Windows (from what I've been told) is pretty good and have gotten some previous co-workers out of some pack-up-your-things-cause-your-probably-fired type of jams. But these are for servers. A public library is already stretched for funds and does not have a support contract with MS. That's why they have their IT guy (and yes it's usually just one guy running the show). In cases where the IT guy is stumped, he's on google searching for a solution. Usually he ends up at support.microsoft.com, but the answers aren't there. The linux users have the support of not just those who wrote the software, but of everyone else using it. Comparing general desktop, non-corporate, Linux wins big time.
"It's not whether you win or lose, it's how drunk you get." -- H. J. Simpson
We deployed 120 new desktop pc's which we built ourselves from parts purchased from a trade supplier. Spec was AMD 2800 Semprom, 512MB RAM, 40 GB IDE drive with no CD-ROM as we're trying to encourage the use of USB sticks. Each PC came in at £105 and the build took place in summer 2005.
We installed XP Pro on a volume licence (£35) and then duel booted with Ubuntu Breezy.
Total cost £16800 + the time to build. Without XP these would have been £12600.
Installation of XP consisted of install, update, install all applications and create disk image to be rolled out using Dolly. Install of Ubuntu consisted of popping the disk in, booting, clicking a couple of buttons, upgrading and imaging. The Ubuntu install took much less time as all the apps and drivers were installed at the same time. At the time of building a script was added to run a prompt for a machine name followed by winbinding to the domain.
The image is easy to roll out via our Gigabit LAN using Dolly. Network wide software installs can be done on Linux using a script that checks a directory on the server and after doing an md5 check uses apt to install whatever we want it to.
Given the ease of all this, the Birmingham thing just has to be down to incompetence. Excluding people who know what they're doing from helping is an arrogant act but ultimately one that probably caused the laughably huge bill.
I think that writing to the National Audit Office would be a good move by those Open Source Organisations involved as someone really needs to be held accountable for such a blatant waste of public money. Then again, maybe it was an overtime fiddle by those involved with or, more likely, another public body using Linux to beat Microsoft down on price.
Hmmmmmm..... Deep fried and look like Squirrel.