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."

Comments

Teach a man to fish...

[russ1337]

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.

Re:Teach a man to fish...

[dasunt]

I think we need a new saying:

"Threaten to learn how to fish, and get a discount from the fishmonger!"

Since MS seems to give discounts to anyone who looks at OSS, if I was the head of a large city's IT department, I'd put a cheap student intern on the job of writing up a migration plan and publicize the plan loudly. It may be impossible to get everyone to move to OSS (especially with local politics and entrenched technologies), but Microsoft seems to be willing to give discounts on the next round of pricing. ;)

Re:Site getting slow; article text

[indifferent children]

I suppose each session would be a new user with their own /usr/random directory . Once they are done, the user got deletedd.

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.