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."

Comments

Sweden switched

[cdn-programmer]

Check out which side of the road Sweden drives on. Perhaps the average Swede is a little smarter than the average Brit?

Re:How can windows be cheaper than a free OS?

[dedazo]

This is a strawman argument.

I'm not making an "argument" here, regardless of what you might have thought. I'm pointing out what the "general consensus" will be among people who will post to this article. After 30 minutes my predictions are correct.

Who's talking about Microsoft?

For both my points, take the time to go through the comments posted so far. I'm a little busy right now and I can't go round them up for you.

Now did you have a specific point about what I posted or are you just looking for a scrape?

Re:How can windows be cheaper than a free OS?

[dedazo]

That is an argument.

No, it's a prediction. You're big on this semantics thing, aren't you?

I did thanks, I just don't see how they support your assertions.

Interesting.
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=207498&c id=16918232 It's free, so someone must be stealing money
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=207498&c id=16919058 Smells like baloney!
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=207498&c id=16918080 This guy has it all figured out. Nee "I installed Fedora on my boxen everyone else is stupid"
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=207498&c id=16918426 No learning curve.
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=207498&c id=16917970 Grandma as a data point
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=207498&c id=16918190 It's no big deal
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=207498&c id=16917764 You asked "who's talking about Microsoft?" originally.
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=207498&c id=16917728 Of course, it's all about maintaining "viruses", as if any halfway-decent enterprise hadn't figured this out by now.
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=207498&c id=16917548 Microsoft is in on it.
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=207498&c id=16917528 LOL!
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=207498&c id=16917872 Priceless

Now a few good ones, including one you replied to essentially calling the OP stupid:
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=207498&c id=16918078
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=207498&c id=16917964

ponderously close to being a troll

Well I'm sorry you feel that way. I think you might be a troll too, considering your reply to one of the links above.

*gasp* the article itself.

Yeah. Apropos, I love the fact that I have to include the "Open Source Consortium" or risk failure:

2) The Open Source community, especially the Open Source Consortium (others included the Gnome Foundation), was entirely excluded from the project after the initial trial. BCC IT's department thought they could undertake the deployment themselves. The failure of this project proves this was not the case.

Now, let me save you some keyboard lubricant. Go back to my original post, and then read it very carefully. Understand what I said in that post. Then read through these links or through the whole article. I hope something clicks, because (and here's another prediction) your next reply to me is going to be a correlation between the total number of comments and the ones that confirm my prediction, and I really don't have the ti