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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."
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.
Doesn't matter how many have the expertise. With proprietary software the possibility outright *does *not *exist and with FOSS it does.
Other possibilities are:
-acquire the expertise
-hire someone who has it
Are you trying to paint possibilities as a drawback?
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
"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
"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."
As would anyone contemplating a move to new systems and new technologies.
From my perspective it appears that both sides have a point. Free software has costs associated with it, just like "paid" commercial software. Those costs can be purchase price, future upgrade costs, support fees, training, planning and implementation time, helpdesk time, lost end-user productivity, and so on.
Anyone considering either needs to review the TCO and impact on the organization at large.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
No, it's because Gnome lacks the depth of integration necessary for a proper desktop environment. It's a big mish-mash with probably the creakiest underpinnings in all of open source (which is saying something). KDE is the only open source desktop worth a damn, and it's still only at the beta stage. KDE 4 will hopefully fix that, and become the first real Linux desktop contender.
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.
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.
If "word" for $39 as part of home office meets 99% of my needs and openoffice meets my needs but could in theory be enhanced to meet 100% of my needs- I'll probably go with word despite disliking paying $39 and microsoft in general.
I groan everytime i see a pro-linux person complain "all you have to do is recompile the device drivers!"
They just don't get it.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
make changes today? hell no, why would they? make chages in 5 years after the vendor has gone out of business/got bought by a competitor/stopped making or supporting your product? hell yes
sarcasm:
-noun
1. harsh or bitter derision or irony.
"Because people said "I want a file selector, not a file selector + submarine control dialog?" The fact that you can do something on a dialog that's not really none of the dialog's business is usually a symptom of excessive featuritis."
No, it's consistency, something a GNOME fanboy should be all in favour of.
If I can see the file, I can right-click it and operate on it.
"Because people said "I want a file selector, not a file selector + submarine control dialog?" The fact that you can do something on a dialog that's not really none of the dialog's business is usually a symptom of excessive featuritis.
(Agreed, I think it'd be nice if the dialog had a button that says "open in Nautilus" for the rare cases where file management is needed.)"
And the reason why Gnome will never be taken seriously.
Are you honestly telling me that in today's world of operating systems, (Mac and Windows), that you are going to force people into a two step process for something that other operating systems do in one step! You obviously fail to understand the user. If Linux cannot do the simple things that Windows and Mac do, then most users will not bother to switch. User in the Windows and Mac world want simplicity. They don't care how complex it is on the backend.
The short comings of Windows and Mac operating systems are not enough to force MOST people to switch to Linux because the simplicity is not there.
Power users and people who are willing to tinker, because you have to tinker: DVD playback is disabled by default and you have to go through hoops to enable it, whereas DVD playback just works in Windows and Mac. Most users just want it to work.
As a librarian who manage several public access terminals, we also use similiar software to reboot the system back to a know good state.
/usr/random directory . Once they are done, the user got deletedd. For large insitutions, it may be worthwhile to do custom configuration and custom script in-house. But for most smaller libraries, it's usually came out cheaper just to pay license fee for software like "deep freeze."
1) Safety: so people can download various trojans, spyware or virus, without hurting other users who use the same terminal down the line.
2) Copyright: People download all sort of copyrighted materials on public terminals. If we allow those to stay on our harddrives, the liability issue is a concern. With those software, it just flush everything out, so it's all good when SBA showing up for audit.
3) Privacy: We don't have to give FBI the information we don't keep. And users don't need to see what any of the history or cache files other prior user, either.
Now, in linux, I suppose each session would be a new user with their own
No, always use the same user account, such as "publicusr". At the end of a session, just run "rm -Rf /home/publicusr/*". That will leave the publicusr home directory intact, but remove all of its contents, including any downloaded material (copyrighted material, malware, etc.) and clear the browser settings and browser history.
If you want to have certain settings exist in the user directory, copy them in from a pre-defined directory, after running the delete.
Don't force a capable athlete to ride in an expensive wheelchair, just because all of your professional experience comes from working with cripples.
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain