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Birmingham To Buy More, Not Less Open Source

Posted by kdawson on from the on-second-look dept.

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."

7 of 232 comments (clear)

  1. Re:*BUY* more? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    You're sig answers your question, plus you forgot to say "First Post!"

  2. Re:Teach a man to fish... by FireFury03 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Give a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day.
    Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

    --
    http://blog.nexusuk.org
  3. Rumors for neds by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    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!

  4. oh dear.... by advocate_one · · Score: 2, Funny
    usability problems with the original Gnome interface. 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.

    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.
  5. Great news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    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?

  6. Re:Show a man the ocean by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    "I don't think the fish analogy maps very well."

    Then why did you procede to extend it for a paragraph?

    Wait. I think Linux is the fish and FireFox is like caviar! Or maybe, Windows is the fish and IIS is the stinking pile of fish heads and guts. That makes Solaris the giant squid that wraps it's tentacles around your boat and drags you to a watery grave. And BSD is like El Niño. and ... and

  7. Re:Teach a man to fish... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    the only enviroment i can see ms products make sense would be a landfill.

    Hey, a computer without Microsoft is like ice cream without ketchup.