Slashdot Mirror
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
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