Slashdot Mirror
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."
A quick read thru the article reveals not a problem with Linux, but with the idiots trying to manage the deployment without knowing what they were doing.
I feel sorry for Birmingham. Not so much for having to use Windows, but for having to live with an IT staff like that one.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Microsoft: Where do you want to go today?"
Not Birmingham, thats for sure.
I used a couple of the Linux machines in their main library, and they were rubbish compared to the Windows ones. I think whoever set it up hadn't bothered using the machines themselves! They even had US keyboard layout set, did they just plough through the setup wizards clicking Yes to everything??
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.
...the Birmingham city council is using gas lighting because of the cost of teaching their employees how to flip a switch to turn on electrical lights.
£333/desktop if they had rolled out the full number of desktops.
Its not surprising that they spent a lot of money to achieve seemingly nothing - Birmingham City Council BOASTS all over the place that they are "the biggest employer in the West Midlands". Probably cos it takes 10 muppets to do the same job that 1 competent employee should be expected to do.
SURELY NOT!!!!!
It depends, really. It depends if you have to retrain staff to use the new systems, if you need to hire extra support personnel, if you need to buy hardware that works with Linux... all sorts of things could affect the overall cost, not just the license cost.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
In other news, Birmingham, Alabama is doing the exact opposite. Open source has fluorished here, as low funds make one go to low-cost alternatives.
"No freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms." -- Thomas Jefferson
The RIAA has to win every every court case because, by the legal principal of non-mutual estoppal, if they lose once they cannot use the same legal arguments in any future case they might wish to bring (i.e. if P2P music sharing occurs through an IP address you pay for, you're automatically responsible, guilty, and owe them lots of money regardless of what you actually did, or didn't, do).
Microsoft has to win every desktop every time because, if a large-scale commercial Linux deployment succeeds as a viable alternative to Windows, it will be considered seriously as a candidate in every future large-scale deployment of PC's. Microsoft will have to fight for every future desktop contract, instead of being the de facto only option for 99% of them.
And both groups are willing to do whatever it takes to win at all costs!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Not really. Anyone who knows *nix can adapt to Linux in a couple of days. And there are lots and lots of people who know *nix out there.
True, they might be more expensive than someone with an MCSE. But the MCSE you'd hire/contract for a migration of this size would be more expensive than the MCSE you'd hire to maintain a site that has already migrated.
Migration specialists cost the same whether they're Microsoft, Linux, Sun or whatever.
Again, not really. The problem is when people do not look at it as a real migration. If you've ever done an Oracle/Sun migration, you'd know the costs involved and the amount of planning. And those are the kind of experts you'd be calling in for a project such as this.
The strange part is how they could spend so much money, so quickly, on so few PC's.
Realistically, they should not have spent 1/20th of that before finding that Microsoft would cut their sales price to come under the Linux figures.
And most of that money would have been spent on identifying all the apps used and which could be ported and for how much.
Linux desktops are cheaper to run than Windows. Particularly if you're using them in a diskless environment.
The HUGE costs are porting the apps or migrating the data to Linux-based apps. This is because most vendors have spent time locking your data up in their proprietary formats in order to make it as expensive as possible for you to dump them.
Which is why migrations such as this are STUPID to rush into.
It makes far more sense to plan them over 5 years. That way, the cost of migrating/porting those apps can be compared to the cost of upgrading them (or migrating anyway when the ISV goes out of business) and the real savings can be seen.
And you can realize the easy savings sooner to off-set the more expensive projects later.
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.
Let's not forget that most governments have unionized employees, which (if true) is material to any massive IT redeployment. In true Slashdot fashion, the following post is pure conjecture and generalization. But I think it's plausible.
Ideally you would want to hire expert sysadmins on contract to conduct a pilot project such as this one. However, there is likely to be language in the union contract forbidding a contract employee from taking a job that might be done by a unionized employee. Unless a sufficiently far-sighted employer included specific language covering a Linux deployment, the deployment would necessarily default to the in-house IT people.
And you had better believe that the union folks would be vocal about it. Especially if they -- as Windows experts -- could be replaced by Linux sysadmins in a wholesale system turnover. In fact say they believed that Linux might require fewer sysadmins, thus threatening their jobs. Maybe they wanted it to fail for that reason? Again, pure speculation, but plausible given my previous interactions with unions.
This is not to say that unions are useless or evil. Or even that any of this happened or was a factor in Birmingham. But unions do form part of the institutional culture, and if not taken into account, they can cause projects like this one to fail.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
I'm not making an "argument" here...
You made an unsupported assertion about what you claim people think. That is an argument.
After 30 minutes my predictions are correct.
Really? Not according to the posts I read in this discussion.
For both my points, take the time to go through the comments posted so far.
I did thanks, I just don't see how they support your assertions.
Now did you have a specific point about what I posted or are you just looking for a scrape?
Here's my point, you're making baseless assertions about "what people think" and are ponderously close to being a troll. You throw around random large numbers and apparently did not bother to read the article being discussed. Just because you say, 'Slashdotters all think this" does not make it so and does not mean there is anything valuable at all in what you've posted. How about instead of generalized jabs at your opinion of the consensus here you try addressing specific posts from someone or *gasp* the article itself.
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.