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Birmingham To Buy More, Not Less Open Source
K-boy writes, "Last week, the press (and Slashdot) reported that Birmingham City Council had decided to ditch its open source project because a report said its trial had cost £100,000 more than it would have cost to buy Windows. However, Techworld has discovered that the opposite is true, and the Council is actually planning to use more open source software as well as to roll out Linux in the next few years. The head of IT was interviewed and he gives a fascinating rundown of the problems he had getting open source working with his systems. More interestingly, he points out that now the trial is over and he and his staff have the technical skills, they expect to save lots of money in future by going open source. Oh, and the report's figures were based on the special rates that Microsoft gives Councils just to make sure the short-term budget look worse — £58 for a Windows license as opposed to the normal £100."
Free as in freedom, not free as in beer. Where have I heard that before?
Cost of the software is a tiny portion of the "Total Cost of Ownership", or TOC. Support contracts and making this stuff all work together is where the costs are.
Birmingham City Council has defended its year-long trial of desktop Linux, claiming it to be a success, despite an independent report showing it would have been cheaper to install Windows XP.
In an exclusive interview with Techworld, head of IT for the council, Glyn Evans, argued that the higher cost resulted from the council having to experiment with the new technology and build up a depth of technical understanding, as well as fit it with the complex system already in place.
The 105,000 saving that the report says would have resulted from going with Windows XP has also come under question as it was calculated using the special discounted licence rate that Microsoft offers councils - something critics argue is a calculated effort to prevent public bodies from building up technical knowledge of open source offerings.
With Birmingham's trial period over and with lessons learnt and understanding gained, the Council now expects to make cost savings over time, and contrary to press reports which claimed Birmingham had scrapped the Linux initiative, it will in fact "significantly increase" its use of open-source software, Evans said. The trial also had other positive results, he claimed, such as demonstrating the ease with which Firefox and OpenOffice.org can be substituted for Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office.
The trial was carried out with the government-backed Open Source Academy (OSA), and planned to install Linux on 330 desktops in the council's libraries service, split between staff PCs and public access terminals, in an effort to build up practical experience that could be drawn on by other public-sector bodies.
It ran from April 2005 to March 2006, but is still ongoing, with the council refining its Linux desktop image and planning further rollouts next year, according to Evans. "The project did not end when the element of original funding ended, because it is part of the Library Service strategy," he told Techworld. "This project is still very much ongoing, and now that a stable image... has been developed, we would expect significant movement forward."
Over-ambitious
He admitted the council's original plans were over-ambitious, with rollouts of Linux-based staff and public PCs originally scheduled during the one-year trial period. In reality, ongoing testing of the desktop configuration means no Linux desktops have yet been installed. Instead, 96 public desktops and 134 staff desktops are running open source applications such as the OpenOffice.org office suite and the Firefox browser.
The council does plan to begin migrating those desktops to its Suse Professional 9.3-based desktop OS, however, a plan that should go into action in the near future, according to Evans. He said that far from scrapping the Linux initiative, as has occurred in some other high-profile cases such as the London borough of Newham, Birmingham is planning to "significantly increase" the number of desktops involved with the project.
Evans' description of the project is a sharp contrast to the findings described in a case study authored by iMpower Consulting at the formal conclusion of the trial in March, which is available from the OSA's website [pdf]. The case study found that the council had failed to make a business case for its Linux desktops, largely because the half-a-million-pound cost of designing and implementing the system cost more than the estimated cost for a Windows XP installation.
The difference is largely down to high "team costs", including setting up the project, technical definition and design, development and testing and training, all of which amounted to roughly 100,000 more than the estimated team costs for a Windows installation. The total cost of the trial was 534,710, compared to an estimated 429,960 for Windows XP.
"The project showed that there are considerable costs incurred in de
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
You need support. You need techs and installers and troubleshooters on staff. You need a support contract so that if anything bites it big time you can call up Novell, or Redhat, and have them find the solution for you rather than tying up your staff that already have other duties. Besides, if it becomes unresolvable you can point to the purchased support as the cause thus covering your very tender and precious butt. Same thing goes on with any software in a commercial/governmental setting.
that's the phrase, but most open source users/advocates seem to think "free as in beer" is something other than "not paying money", and "free as in freedom" contains "not paying money", as well as some obscure subset of the standard definition of "freedom"
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You're sig answers your question, plus you forgot to say "First Post!"
This reminds me of the "You can teach a man to fish" saying...
In this case the fishing classes cost some money, sure. And the report basically said the would have saved money by purchasing some fish... well duh. - but how long would that fish have lasted?
They now know how to get unlimited fish themselves and are free from the stinking fish market.
City Councils are making pioneering tech policy decisions these days on open source, WiFi, broadband, and other tech procurement. But they're totally outclassed by marketing strategies that distort the facts on which decisions are made.
With all of the rigged numbers originating in incumbent market dominators showing up in city council policy and budget analyses, it's obvious the councils need guidance. I know that the NYC City Council doesn't have any resources with "BS logs" of ongoing vendor distortions, except for consultants like me. State/federal or even international organizations that serve the people administered by these city councils should produce research to weed out the lies. Sort of like a "City Council Consumer Reports". In the US, the GAO (now "Government Accountability Office"), or the Office of Management and Budget, or some team at Treasury at the federal level, could produce them. Or the state Comptroller. Or maybe a "City Councils Association", that could reach internationally.
Government is really big. In the US it's about 25% of our economy, though that includes the military (about 30% of total). So maybe these guidelines are already being produced, perhaps redundantly. The government response would be to produce similarly obscure guidelines on finding the guidelines. That's how government gets so big (especially the military). Is there a better way for City Councils to share wisdom, not just knowledge, about the information used to make these decisions?
--
make install -not war
it is that you are Free to make changes to the code. For a single person, it may be cheaper to go with Windows. But for any company with an IT dept. it will nearly always be cheaper and better to go with OSS. The one place where Windows wins out is for specialized apps that run only on windows, which only encourages competition in an OSS version that will run on Linux and apple.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I've always considered OSS to be free as in no-cost if you're bad-ass enough that you don't need any support.
>>> "You need support. You need techs and installers and troubleshooters on staff. "
You need some level of support agreement with either solution - Windows or Linux. Comparing the costs of a MSFT support agent or a Red-hat/Novell/Ubuntu support agent is another choice (and cost driver) altogether. As is training and converting users.
My guess is it is a similar cost of support with either solution. I also expect the USER training required to migrate to Vista is similar cost to migrating to Linux. This then falls back to the cost of acquisition. Is it cheaper to pay $100,000 to train your sys admins in Linux so you have an 'organic' capability for OS upgrade and acquisition, or intall XP, then have to buy Vista in a year, then MSoffice 2008, Outlook server 2009, Explorer 2010 etc...
Bad-ass or stupid-ass? In this case, they are one in the same. If you are brave/stupid enough to use FOSS software in a business environment, you shouldn't be a complete moron and choose to not buy support for said software. And, now that you have proven that you need this advice: NEVER TELL YOUR CUSTOMERS THAT THE SOFTWARE WITH WHICH YOU ARE SUPPORTING THEM IS FOSS THAT YOU DECIDED WAS GOOD ENOUGH TO NOT WARRANT SUPPORT. Good luck...you're definitely gonna need it!
At one point, realising that most of the usability issues were attributable to Gnome, which had taken three months to configure, staff ripped out Gnome and replaced it with KDE.
I use Gnome, but it sure has usability issues. I hope the Gnome developers will take the trouble to understand why Birmingham dumped Gnome - sfter selecting it initially.
I don't (yet) run Linux but have fiddled with a Slack 10 and Debian installation but the above comment can't be good for the folks developing Gnome.
Can someone with a bit more insight explain why one would work better in the above scenario since, presumbably, both do the same thing?
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
What's the logic of going with a version that is so far behind? I know that you don't go bleeding edge with such a project but 9.3 is ancient. I guess it is still supported but it seems like being *that* far behind would be leaving yourself open to a number of security/compatibility issues.
Slashdot, Rumors for nerds, inaccurate speculation that matters.
Do you guys ever bother to check the vlaidity of a source before you publish a fucking story.
ASSHATS!
The point of FOSS is that it works better and can be customized if it still doesn't work well enough. EOF.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
It is, but the Birmingham council and the civil servants working there aren't that bad ass when it comes to computers. But I bet they are more bad ass than you about things governmental.
> Isn't the point of OSS that its FREE?
Sure, if you are living in a cave.
In truth (and in reality), no piece of software is ever truly *free* -- you invest it in other forms. The things that you invest in with may not be very valuable to you, but they are investments neverthless (e.g. time).
Now, this is true for everything, and softwware, free or otherwise, is no exception.
TCO, maintenance, support and other things are not free, even if a piece of software is free. In some ways, *paying* for something would mean that the other party has made a contractual agreement towards providing you a product or a service, which is missing in free as in FREE kind of scenarios. Who is to be held responsible if something goes wrong? Who can I cast the blame upon?
Why do you think companies like RedHat and others make so much money?
How could the savings be "under question" because of the discounted rate? What, do you expect them to calculate the savings while pretending that they would have had to pay full price? If so, Microsoft would have rightly stated that they were massaging the numbers just to make open source look good.
What's more interesting is whether their numbers for open source included the costs of Windows XP, as they didn't actually install any Linux systems. (Not exactly a big win for Linux there, either.) How do you spend £534,710 on installing OpenOffice and Firefox on 230 Windows computers, and playing around with Suse for a year, anyway?
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
start the Gnome vs. KDE bun fight... 3, 2, 1...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
All of a sudden, Birmingham council IT dept is awesome :)
SURELY NOT!!!!!
1) It is quite different from Windows.
2) It is a newer idea than the desktop metaphor as used by windows (so the wrinkles haven't been ironed out)
3) Hiding configurations. Again *what* needs to be hidden hasn't been 100% worked out
It could be that the system will be fine when bedded down. For those not used to windows' way it may be fine NOW.
"If you are brave/stupid enough to use FOSS software in a business environment..."
Not true. The very large company I work at leverages Python as their glue language with great success and Apache is used successfully as well to name a few.
Sign a licensing deal with MS and it will be way less than $58 for budget purposes.
I don't think the fish analogy maps very well. Migrating to FOSS isn't necessarily like teaching someone to fish (teaching himher how to program). It's more like taking someone who has only ever seen fish in the supermarket, and showing them a harbor. Explain where fish come from, the fact that they reproduce on their own, etc. At this point the person doesn't have to learn to fish. She could just buy from one of the many beachfront markets. She could hire one of the many fishing companies or individuals in the harbor there. Or buy/rent a pole and ride with one of them. And so on.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Somewhere near where the M6 joins the M5 .....
Thees is bostin' nyohs! Oi main, an' all, oos Brummies 've bin pronaincing it as Leenux, and not Loinux, seence forever, loike. Way don' naid no steenkin' Moicrosoft!
Anywy, are yo mashin?
The obscure subset part is the ability to keep other people from making money as well.
I have long said that Gnome had a problem for most users in a typical business environment, and was met with comments referring to me as a troll and as one who was just a KDE fanboy.
This article articulates just one of the problems with Gnome.
For this particular problem, there are folks who say that I should use "ctrl + L". Though this keyboard shortcut is not even documented anywhere near where one would want to use it. Imagine that.
These are just *some* of the issues that make Gnome a non-starter for me and I am glad the Britons found out as well. This will make the developers think about what users want. How can a desktop environment take three months to configure? This is insane! These are not my words but quotes from the article.
Calculating ROI is difficult in technology projects, because there's a factor which is difficult to measure. I'd call it Opportunity Cost, but perhaps there is another name.
That is, several questions come to mind:
- What's the cost for not being able to do something? That is, if there end solution doesn't support a given task, what's the cost? Perhaps they don't even know they could perform this task right now.
- Imagine instead of spending time on this project, you did something else with your resources. What's the lost cost of not doing something else more meaningful?
- Productivity of endusers? Many people look at the cost of upgrading an old desktop, but don't measure the cost of not upgrading.
There are plenty of questions like this that don't seem to be answered by any of these articles.
"no Linux desktops have yet been installed"
.. staff ripped out Gnome and replaced it with KDE"
.bash_logout 'shutdown -r 0 now' and that's it. And besides which, why do you need to reboot at logout.
/tmp to store temp files all you have to do is add another line to .bash_logout 'find /tmp/ -user $user -exec rm -r {} \;'. Or else put /tmp in a ramdisk and flush it to logout.
It strikes me that thay attempted a roll out of a Linux desktop solution with no previous experience. They would have been occupied in bringing in an experienced company to do the job.
"half-a-million-pound cost of designing and implementing the system cost more than the estimated cost for a Windows XP installation"
What were they implimenting on the Suse desktop that required spending half a million pounds.
"usability problems with the original Gnome interface
Like what, Gnome is specifically designed to provide a rich user interface. Either of them can be replaced by a Windows look alike.
"For instance, existing Windows 3.1 public terminals used a program called Deepfreeze that rebooted the system at the end of each session, something that had to be re-engineered for Linux"
He's kidding, put a line in
"Staff also found that the OS was storing information about the contents of public users' removable media, and for privacy purposes had to develop a script to delete this information"
Like where and how, Linux mostly uses
davecb5620@gmail.com
Part of the reason for the difference is also that Microsoft has a virtual monopoly on support contracts for their own software. Sure, there's lots of help out there, but generally if politicians buy M$ software they assume they're going to get some M$ support. This is directly opposite in standing from Linux; there's so much in common between the various distros that basic support can be cross trained. Resultingly, there is a much more competitive market, and the support acquired per dollar is probably much higher quality.
I remember times when people I worked with have been paying hundreds of dollars for sets calls to M$ on the same topic where they didn't get the answer they needed. In a truly competitive market that just wouldn't fly.
My little site.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
quite true, but I'd prefer a way of saying "you can make money if you contribute back." It allows them to make money on it, but fairly. One more freedom to add to the mix.
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Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
Windows is prone to going Tango Uniform for no good reason, and nine times out of ten Windows cab ne fixed simply by rebooting. And you can train a monkey to reboot a Windows machine -- in fact, it wouldn't surprise me one bit if somebody somewhere has actually done this. This means Windows "techies" are cheap, because nine times out of ten they'll just reboot the errant machine (which the user could have done for themself, were they not scared absolutely shitless by the complexity of anything that plugs in and has more than three buttons on it) and it will work -- and the tenth time they'll reboot it a few times, mutter a few sotto voce expletives, realise it's not having it, give up and buy a new one. This means you end up scrapping repairable machines -- but of course, they ultimately come out of departments' own budgets, not IT's budget.
Unix-like systems don't usually fail without good reason. So anybody working on them really needs to know their arse from a hole in the ground. This means Unix techies are expensive -- because they're good. They have no choice but to be. And there's more transferrability of skills between software: much of what you might learn about Linux can be applied to Solaris and the BSDs, some of what you might learn about MySQL can be applied to PostgreSQL or Firebird, Perl is a bit like PHP, ProFTPD and Apache have similar configuration file syntaxes, and so forth.
Basically, if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Here's a link to a marvellous Birmingham infotainment-video, for those who don't know much about our City of Sunshine:
http://www2.b3ta.com/birmingham/
"I use Gnome, but it sure has usability issues"
...
What specific usability issues would the average user have in Browsing, Emailing and Wordprocessing ? was Re:I hope the Gnome folks read this bit
davecb5620@gmail.com
It's unfair on several levels to imply that using short term figures is dishonest. The short term budget is the only budget you can point to with any certainty.
Some people think Microsoft produces nothing but crap, and other people think Microsoft produces the nothing but the finest. Both views miss the point of Microsoft. Microsoft is about consistently delivering mediocrity, year in, year out.
This sounds like damning with faint praise, but consistent mediocrity has its advantages. Think of all the once great products that were run into the ground; or the promising projects that ended up going nowhere. Microsoft might be mean old Mr. Potter, but too often the alternative is like the Bailey Building and Loan without George Bailey. Do you really want Uncle Billy managing your nest egg?
Birmingham chose SUSE; how much trust should you put in Novell's future stewardship of SUSE, even granting the best of intentions?
It's important to acknowledge the leap of faith that Birmingham is making here. Pretending that short term costs don't matter underestimates the guts it takes to do that. Somebody has to take a leap of faith, every now and then, but it doesn't always end happily.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
"Would you like some coffee? No? Yes?" isn't natural (unless you're a Gnome, I guess). But -- and this is just one example -- you can't pry the "logical way" out of the hands of Gnome developers. Can't convince a highly-technical (nerd) person that "practical" isn't always "logical".
/end of rant
Yeah. Yeah. Let the flames about "Microsoft's way; Not 'natural' way!" begin. But who do you think has spent the most on usability studies? Who's studied how people like things presented, the most? Nerds should deal with the UI / machine layers and UI practitioners should tell us nerds where to place the buttons and window trimmings.
How much damage has Linux gotten from Gnome-pushers? "I hated Linux" is so unfair if you haven't tried any other DE...
What is this, the next generation of Solviet Russia jokes? Come on.
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
My guess is it is a similar cost of support with either solution.
Of course what everyone else is doing in your area plays big into how much admins cost. If you traing/hire linux guys, and the next big hire in your town/industry/country is for a big windows install, then your employee's don't have the experience to be as desireable to be sucked away (=lower admin cost.) But if the next big job is that 5 other companys decide to transition to linux also, then you got a bidding war to keep an admin.
'sed s/linux/windows' is also true. Of course, you can buy with cash the experienced admin, instead of buying experience with time/mistakes if your not blazing the new trail.
being the admin, of course I want lots of transistions to LinuxApacheMysqlPhp because I got that experience, not windows/.net/...
I haven't been able to access my university's WebCT from Gnome at all for the last three years or so (tried from various flavors of Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora). It was a breeze in KDE using Konqueror. That was one of the main reasons I changed to KDE. Even developers on Nautilus's mailing list aren't sure where the problem is; its webdav access works in some sites and not in other. Maybe they can just take a look at Konqueror's code to see how it handles webdav links to get a hint.
As one who has contributed to KDE and will be again shortly, I hate it when others put down GNOME (or the others). They each have some interesting ideas and have contributed to our success as well.
Why is the city of Birmingham, Alabama paying for software in British Pounds? Oh wait...
Cust: ..and the 4th service pack did not got through, something to do with key management?
Vendor: Ah! let me tell you all about the suite tools an licensing for the 2007 roll out.
Cust: Well, our budget is thight. We have a team working to port part of the application to Open Source servers.
Vendor (smiling): Do you have ANY idea how much is going to cost?
Cust: Well, the actual numbers are a big point of contention.
Vendor: I'll save you the agravation, IBM? Oracle? they have R&D and D stands for deep pockets, get it? But I'm here ready to offer you big discounts for the all our upgrades, you know that if you don't upgrade right now, you'll have to pay FULL price once the contract expires, right?.
Cust: (sight).
Vendor: Now about those licenses...
- these are not the droids you are looking for -
The one thing I noticed, which is going to be important for any initiative like this is the fact that people in this pilot still had real trouble with the Linux distro in terms of making it easy for non-technical users to use. The actual FOSS winner here was the applications, not Linux.
Of course it shows that actually making Linux the centerpiece of your FOSS change is looking at the problem from the wrong angle. If you make applications that people don't need to install a new OS to use, and then make sure that they get used to them under XP or whatever, then the move to Linux is almost a no-brainer. Why? Because once you have apps that work well on Linux and XP, the fact that Linux distros are free (or much cheaper) means that the bottom line is on your side. Microsoft can drop its XP licenses to 58 quid and have that work while you NEED MS Office. But once you no longer use MS Office, then 0 quid beats 58 quid. MS can't compete. And wouldn't that be a nice change?
Of course, even at the price of free, badly developed OS user interfaces will stop Linux from being adopted. Everyone knows non-technical people fear Linux. And honestly, I don't blame them.
MS's committment to making a friendly OS is mediocre, but at least it exists and they have a product. Granted, being a monopoly has allowed them to force people to learn to deal with the rough edges that exist, but truly, Windows is a genuinely usable system for a newb. Not great, but its good enough. The Linux community really needs to get behind that effort, even to the exclusion of adding new features, if necessary.
It may be true that Linux needs to have a superior UI to beat out MS's mediocre monopoly UI, but what of it? Linux does nearly everything in a superior manner to Windows.
Or it can continue to be simply a server OS, and well, that's just fine too.
It's remarkable how much that gets reported turns out to be unquestionably false. We hear reports of cows with accents, and it turns out that all of the quotes are from people who were mostly directly contradicting the story, but said a few things that could be totally rewritten to suggest support for it. We hear about school districts allowing text message slang in exams, and it turns out that this is entirely reporters extrapolating from schools not flunking students who make spelling mistakes when writing correct answers. We hear that women use 3 times as many words as men, and this turns out to be directly contradicted by every study actually carried out, from major academic studies to curious people handing tape recorders to a pair of people and then counting.
I hardly think it's surprising any more that successful completion of a project is reported as the project being scrapped. It's almost surprising that we didn't get reports on the recent election of the Republicans keeping control of both houses of Congress for another two months.
Birmingham should look at Koha, since one of the problems listed was with the Galaxy library system.
I could go for pages about how library system vendors are generally pretty shady and do an awful lot to keep unwitting customers locked in. All kinds of song and dances come forth. However, it all comes down to the buyers (libraries) not wanting to take the time to find out 1) what they are paying for, 2) what they ought to buy and 3) what they are actually getting. Libraries often end up as a result in a position where the vendors dictate the terms conditions and pricing. Many don't even bother to fulfill the contract since rarely does anyone ever check up on them anyway. A little technobabble will dazzle the one or two brave souls that try.
If Birmingham wants to go whole hog, then they can move to Koha. The makers of Galaxy will be as uncooperative as they can get away with, but they would do that with any threat of migration to any other vendor anyway. There are many ways, few easy, but doable to extract the contents of a library system, even against the vendors will.
If nothing else, Birmingham can look at Koha and see how it meets their needs. Many use it not because it it open source, but because it has the funcitonality they need. All library systems suck, they just suck in different ways. And Koha has quite a few technical advantages over the closed source varieties. However, being open source is one of the stronger non-technical advantages. It means not only that small changes can be done in house, but that larger changes can be outsourced to those that have time, interest and experience. BTW simply threatening to evaluate Koha can bring significant consessions from their current vendor.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
done.
Free as in freedom: Local councils do not, as a rule, have needs that are 100% identical to everyone else. No, I don't just mean a bribes column in the accounting books,
Sounds like Mexico.
Especially, Tijuana cops are corrupt.
Gnome and KDE are both big, bloated, and slow. I have a lot of older hardware, and have spent some time hacking on Slackware 10 and 11 to set up an environment that's far from perfect but good enough. Knoppix will tell you it just can't run KDE in a measly 64M of RAM.
A 4G hard drive is a bit cramped these days, so I've been experimenting with Reiser4, but who knows what will happen to that file system now, and "bzexe" (gzexe using bzip2 instead of gzip), and installing as few packages as possible while still having crucial "killer apps" user software, that being Open Office, Firefox (with Java and Flash), GIMP, xine (no luck with gxine) with codecs for viewing wmv stuff, xmms, a PDF viewer (xpdf), and GAIM. And gphoto2 for digital cameras. Solved printer setup problems by getting an HP with an ethernet interface and using HPLIP. (USB printers in Linux are a huge pain.) Can scan that way too. Learned of jwm from Puppy Linux, hunted around for a file manipulator like Windows Explorer and settled on Xfe, and I hacked agetty and the startx script to make login automatic. No display manager pigging out on resources that way.
Automatic mounting of CDs, DVDs, USB memory sticks, and all the varieties of flash memory is still a problem. I thought I had that solved with Submount (that's right, not Supermount), a relatively tiny daemon and kernel patch, but it doesn't seem to be maintained anymore. (Yes, I'm using the very latest kernels-- don't believe that about 2.6 not being suitable for low memory environments, I've run it and X on 48M and had 20M of RAM free according to top.) Instead, there's a movement towards HAL/dbus/ivman which are way way WAY larger. Don't have anything equivalent to Add/Remove Programs, or Settings (except CUPS printer management web page), and some other things are missing, but it works.
So, yeah, KDE, Gnome, or "hack it up yourself" all have their points. Only recently did Xubuntu pop up on my radar. Lot of the lightweight distros, like DSL, economize too much on the desktop.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
unix techies are expensive? you're aware that if oss catches on at this rate, you'll get unix monkeys a dozen.
Do not trust this signature.
"Oh, and the report's figures were based on the special rates that Microsoft gives Councils just to make sure the short-term budget look worse -- £58 for a Windows license as opposed to the normal £100."
The ACTUAL quote is:
The council gets a steep discount on Windows licences through a broader Education SELECT licence arrangement, paying £58 for a Windows XP licence compared to roughly £100 for OEMs. "Accounting for corporate instead of Education SELECT licences would have added nearly £50,000 to a Windows upgrade project," iMpower found.
Most corporations, companies big and small don't buy OEM licenses for Windows for goodness sake! They USE a Select Enterprise license! Why? Because it saves them MONEY.
I LOVE the amount of half truths some people use to bash Windows/Microsoft.
You'll get 60% that way if your not trying. Some places get up over 90% discounts depending on how stubborn they are and how plausible the threat of moving to FOSS is. Uppsala is one example of getting over 90%.
It sounds clever, until you realize that the discount is simply an investment the vendor is making and that it expects to earn all that money back, and then some, in the future. And you can bet that each round, it will be harder and harder to move either systems or data...
See where you went wrong here? You bought non-portable software, and also it was proprietary, so you were locked into doing business, in a world full of millions of programmers, with one entity in order to get the maintenance that you wanted. See all the IT workers whining about having a hard time finding a job (i.e. people you could hire very cheaply)? You can't use them. You don't get to take advantage of the market. You didn't get to request bids on the porting job.
Oops. Now is where Birmingham's IT people will have a real chance to show their where they are on the Wisdom-vs-Stupidity scale: are you moving toward phasing out this dead-end application? 10 Years from now, will you be able to use whatever platform you want to, or will one application developer still be making that choice for you, while also getting to charge whatever they want for maintenance without having to worry about pesky competitors underbidding them?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Henchman runs into Ballmers office.
Minion: Sir, sir! I have some good news and some bad news.
Ballmer: Stop breathing in my direction, and give me the bad news first.
Minion: Evans say they will "significantly increase" its use of open-source software.
Ballmer picks up a chair and advences towards the minion.
Sweating minion: Sir, wait. You haven't heard the good news yet.
Ballmer: This better be good!
Minion: The council will use SUSE.
Ballmer flops down into the chair and laughs loudly *evil pinky*
Carbon based humanoid in training.
They use Pounds in Alabama???
<_<
>_>
Last time I was at a bar, my beer wasn't free..
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
How many people buy Windows and then expect to "make money" directly from that purchase?? Answer: None.
You may use GPL'd code for free (as in beer) and because it's free (as in speech) you can modify it to exactly fit your needs and share it with others with out the license cops breaking down your door and hauling away your computer equipment.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Some people will never "get it" because some people don't want to. You are one of those people.
Your sig speaks volumes about your lack of understanding as well as your zealotry against Linux. I'd call you a Microsoft butt-boy but that might get this otherwise insightful post modded down as a troll.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
I'm about 90% into a complete changeover from Windows to Linux in my (rather geeky) home. I have to say, I can see how Gnome can easily cause a great many problems to the CLI-phobic. KDE's 'Control Panel' thingy is far from perfect, but at least it covers most everything, and it's all in one place. In order to do things in Gnome (like xorg.conf settings), I find I need to actually go into my /etc folder and start vimming.
Gnome needs a Control Panel - something an average user can understand, and with a minimum of effort, change everything from display resolution to mouse accelleration to kernel modules. Forcing users to change things manually is where you crash your systems (I know this much). If you keep it all in the GUI, you maintain control over the settings, and you can make sure any changes are sane before implementing them. But if you hide the settings, the user has no choice but to muck around on his own, and then complain to all his coworkers that Linux is strictly for geeks.
This is not Apple. You can't assume the user won't have to change settings, because the hardware is nothing approaching uniform.
FTA:
At one point, realising that most of the usability issues were attributable to Gnome, which had taken three months to configure, staff ripped out Gnome and replaced it with KDE. The new interface was up and running within a week.
And let the flame war begin.
meh
I couldn't help laughing out loud at the concept of TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) being soundly slapped over the rump. The reason that "Neutral And Independent / May Bill Gates Live Forever" studies show Linux having a higher TCO is because of the up-front retraining investment needed. Microsoft portrays it as a steep, unworthwhile climb. But simply by doing the trial, Birmingham went over the hump already, and is already on the downhill slope where they can sit back and recoup their costs for years to come.
Interviewer: So, Linux cost you more?
IT guy: Yeah, we had to learn stuff all over again and reconfigure everything. We blew so much money on that!
Interviewer: So, I guess it's a no-go for Linux, and you're going back to Microsoft?
IT guy: Are you kidding me? We already spent so much on Linux --why would we want to throw away everything we worked so hard for?
Bravo, Birmingham, for going through with the trial. I hope the word gets out --the bogeyman of TCO is what is keeping companies and institutions from taking the plunge.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
"If new-desktop designers want to have something people use (rather than just scratching their own itches a dark corner somewhere) then they are implicitly going after windows desktop users by definition."
People standing in the middle of the road look like roadkill to me. -- Linus Torvalds
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
"IBM to run nine proof-of-concept open source trials designed to mesure the cost-benefits" Must have used an Opensource Word processor to spell "measure" as "mesure"
What is this crap about free (as in beer). What is this meant to imply ? Highly taxed, expensive, fun, pissy - what ?
Whenever I see a sign for 'free beer' it always has appended 'tomorrow'
Don't be so quick to knock it. The GP is saying that it is the brave who deploy open source software in business environments. By implication he is saying that only the cowards buy proprietary solutions. In business cowardice gets you nowhere. QED.
Burns: We're building a casino!
McAllister: Arrr. Give me 5 minutes.
Well, you're probably done now, but last one I installed on a 64MB machine was VectorLinux. It's slackware based and I seem to recall the lightweight desktop used IceWM with Rox filer. Worked well. Worth investigating anyway.
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
From the report:
"It appears that OpenOffice provides a satisfactory equivalent to Microsoft products for those using basic or intermediate functionality,"
I hope this and other studies put to rest this one.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
In the sense you are implying (but it should not be btw).
But you can't force people to learn, mantain and modify the software for you for free.
That has associated costs.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.