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Birmingham Drops Open Source Initiative

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the sad-day-for-adherents dept.

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."

2 of 275 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How can windows be cheaper than a free OS? by dedazo · · Score: 0, Redundant
    Most did nothing at all to back up your assertion.

    Really. Well, here's my original point, which you as usual managed to "miss" completely:

    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. Therefore, these folks must be retarded - after all I get all my apt-get help from IRC just fine. WTF? Yes, therefore "M$" must be in on it.

    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.

    There we go. If you want, I can paste it again and again, until you stop "missing" the point.

    --
    Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
  2. Re:How can windows be cheaper than a free OS? by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Really. Well, here's my original point, which you as usual managed to "miss" completely...

    Great, I can copy and paste my original reply and save all sorts of time, since (as usual) you failed to address any of the points I brought up in it:

    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.

    I'll bet I can script this.