EU Commission Study Finds OSS Saves Money

PS3Penguin writes "Groklaw has up a story about an EU Commission's recent findings on the costs savings available from using Open Source Software. From the article: 'Costs to migrate to an open solution are relevant and an organization needs to consider an extra effort for this. However these costs are temporary and mainly are budgeted in less than one year. The major factor of cost of the new solution - even in the case that the open solution is mixed with closed software - is costs for peer or ad hoc training. These are the best example of intangible costs that often are not foreseen in a transition.'"

Comments

Training cost?

[Realistic_Dragon]

I am a manager with a masters degree in engineering. My charge rate is well past $180/hour.

I spend about 1 hour a day telling other members of staff how things work in Excel. That's Excel 97 by the way, which we have had deployed for over 6 years.

Retraining costs only apply if your staff are trained in the first place. In the world where *everyone* puts "Office expert" on their CV almost no one is trained - at least not to a high enough standard to do anything beyond typing a letter.

With the interface also changing in the next version of Word this cost is even more fictional than ever - but it was never legitimate in the first place.