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

No surprise

[kamochan]

This does not come as a surprise for people having worked in IT and with OSS for some time.

Now, if this report gets public bodies to use and require use of OO/ODF, the large corporations (whose customers or legislators the public bodies tend to be) might move to OO/ODF as well, and then also us small subcontractors could finally junk the P-O-S, all-defaults-are-nonsensical, pay-for-incompatible-upgrades MSOffice. Someone just needs to get the ball rolling...

Damn, it's good to see the EU bureaucracy sometimes produce sensible results!

Re:No surprise

[rs232]

"This does not come as a surprise for people having worked in IT and with OSS for some time."

Stand by for a least one patent-imdemnification-fud post in this thread ..

But

[El Lobo]

One of open source's most touted benefits is its price. Download the software, install it--and don't pay a penny. That's the theory. But to a surprising number of companies, the price tag--or lack of one--is irrelevant. Believe it or not but in my university there are no problems to choose software. We are not looking the philosofical part of the questin (this is OS, this is not). We literally don't care for that. We look at what does the job best. And we buy and use it. And don't care for the price.

Re:But

[Leftist Troll]

But to a surprising number of companies, the price tag--or lack of one--is irrelevant.

Many of those still choose open source software. There's a reason GNU, Linux, BSD and Apache are so widespread, and it has nothing to do with price.

Re:But

[CantStopDancing]

Please explain what you mean by "aggregated a [good] group", what "aggregating a group" is, and how a group can be aggregated to a style.

Please tell us, specifically, which closed-source software you run that would have been of lower quality if open sourced.

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.

Re:Training cost?

[Coryoth]

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

Heh, I don't. I can get by with office applications but I can only barely use a spreadsheet - I'm a mathematician so computers I work on tend to come equipped with rather more interesting power toys for any calculation/plotting needs and I simply never learned how to use spreadsheets. Likewise, due to my profession, I tended to use LaTeX for documents. Sure, I can bash out a letter or a simple document in a word processor, but anything fancy like tables, headers and footers and the like are things I would have to look up, or muddle through - I honestly don't know. Luckily for me, however, office application skills aren't that highly prized in the sorts of jobs I apply for. I do sometimes wonder how much of an odd one out I am though - I mean, am I alone in having "basic competence" in office apps, or is it common and everyone else just lies?

Re:Training cost?

[donaldm]

I have just recently put Fedora Core 6 on my new HP dual core 64 bit AMD laptop which I purchased (no dual boot ether). I did have a few minor issues which could have been solved with a HP configured install and recovery disk instead of the Microsoft XP professional it came with. So far I can actually do nearly all my work with this OS with the exception of some Microsoft specific solutions that requires I use my company laptop but 95% of my work can be done using FC6.

For a scientist or professional engineer I would strongly suggest a Linux solution (FC6, OpenSUSE, Scientific Linux ... etc) than a Microsoft one even though you can get most of the applications you like for a MS OS (sometimes free as well) at least you will fully own all your data and never have to be dependent on a proprietary Operating System. Actually IMHO LaTeX is actually easier to use than IMHO most word processors and the result is normally very professional. This is especially true if you need to write mathematical papers. You still need to know how to use a test editor though. As far as any type of development that requires maths a good Linux distro can provide everything you need (if you do any type of statistics have you tried "R" since it is like "S Plus") and again for free or cheaply.

If anyone writes to me stating "Oh you had problems with a Linux install on your laptop then there is a problem with Linux". My simple answer is I will give you FC6 or OpenSUSE and Microsoft XP (legitimate copy) and then ask you to install the OS and configure it on a reasonably new laptop (I am being fair here) and I am quite sure you are going to have more problems with the Microsoft OS than with a Linux OS. Since I now have a working Laptop with FC6 (what do you think I am using to type this) I can easily create a recovery disk that could be used to configure all laptops of this type. The first install is always the hardest after that you can easily roll out an OS on equivalent machines, this is how most PC vendors install an MS OS.

Now back on topic. If you are a manager and it has been put to you that you need to spend vast amounts of money to retrain your staff to the switch from MS Office to Open Office, then I would suggest firing people and I am not just speaking as a professional engineer I am speaking as a manager. Most MS documents can be imported into Open Office (including many with macros) with little if any changes needed. The only problem you have is when you try to read an OO document back into MS Office. That in itself should tell you how standards compliant Microsoft is.

The biggest problem an organisation is going to have making a switch to Open Standards (note I did not say Open Source) are the managers who will most likely say "Oh it is not like MS Windows" or who have made bad business decisions although to be fair to them they may have made the right business decision at the time, that have locked the company into proprietary solutions.

Sometimes you have to force change (the engineer in me speaking) otherwise things will never change since most organisations are very conservative and won't change unless a decision comes down from the top but sometimes the top managers are even more conservative or love to organise committee's, which usually means nothing changes.

I've Been Saying This For Some Time

[Master of Transhuman]

No mattter WHAT it costs to transition your people, those costs can be amortized over time. Whereas paying proprietary software license fees is FOREVER. By definition, sooner or later OSS HAS to cost you less - not even taking the intangibles of avoiding lock-in, flexibility, etc. into account.

The only issue is whether you can afford the upfront costs - and that has to be decided on a case-by-case basis. And you solve that issue by doing your migration over time according to a PLAN.

Planning? A novel idea for most IT management who are usually locked in to a crisis management mode...

Re:I've Been Saying This For Some Time

[Volante3192]

Have tou ever heard someone in the next office over going click, click, clock rapidly about 50 times? I'll bet you they were using Excel.

If that was me, it's Minesweeper.

A surprise for some people

[mollog]

I've seen Microsoft advertisements and white papers that assert that there are many hidden costs of using FOSS. You and I know that it's FUD or at least naieve, but people like Gartner Group lap that kind of 'research' up and repeat it.

More interesting would be to do the research on the hidden costs of using Microsoft OS and applications. I, for one, waste plenty of time dealing with updates, reboots after updates, etc. with the various Microsoft OS's that I have to use.

Expect a response saying the exact opposite

[fatphil]

... commissioned by a company that's a Microsoft partner. But no, honestly, it will be independent; we even paid extra for them to put "an independent study" in their abstract.

It /always/ happens, and I've not seen a "Upgrading to Vista is cheaper than Linux" report yet this year, so it's due some time soon.

Re:Expect a response saying the exact opposite

[Amazing Quantum Man]

[SARCASM]
Don't you know Vista is Free with purchase of a PC?
[/SARCASM]

Training costs

[Coryoth]

It would be interesting, then, to see a comparison of training costs between switching to an OSS solution and upgrading to Vista and Office 2007. Certainly a pure OSS solution is going to require more training because there are more changes involved, and some of the differences are significant. Still given the easier incremental transitions you're likely to get on the OSS upgrade treadmill (which tends to have more regular, smaller, upgrades) compared to MS, you might be able to claim an offset in future training costs. At the very least it would be interesting to see how such costs stack up in a variety of cases. If training to the only really significant cost for OSS then this next upgrade round from MS might see a few more companies deciding to do an OSS roll out when they finally get around to upgrading.

Where is the control group?

[Anonymous Coward]

I always see the studies about the costs of migrating to Linux. But they never adequately explain the control group.
To be of any real value, you have to compare the Linux migration costs to some control group.

Here are some possible control groups:
1. Group transitioning from Windows95/98 to Window XP to Windows Vista
2. Group transitioning from Windows95/98/XP to Mac
3. Group transitioning from Mac to Windows Vista
4. Group transitioning from Windows95/98/XP to LTSP
5. Group transitioning from Linux to... Linux?
6. Group transitioning from Windows NT to Windows 2003 to Windows Vista

It seems that the control group in most of these studies is only imaginary: Windows XP with no transition.
That control group doesn't exist. It is never actually included in the studies. It is only conjectured.

What is the value of a study that uses an imaginary control group?

I guess they never got the memo

[oOo Shiva oOo]

Wasn't it well established in an open letter that open source is dangerous and could derail the European economy? :)

At this point, I would somewhat dissagree

[pembo13]

The forces who do not want to see OSS succeed for their own financial reasons will do what ever it takes to make sure your costs go up. If Linux usage spikes next month (for example) I would except to see a rise in underhanded tactics as well.

Four more of open source's most touted benefits

[Mateo_LeFou]

-It complies with published standards and therefore creates longer-lasting documents
-Since the source code is available, you are not locked in to a single vendor
-There are far, far more people who know the internals of the code and can offer you customizaton services.
-Security holes are easier to spot.

Who wants to do the next four?

Lies

[schabot]

Of course the EU would say that, Europeans are socialists and Linux is communism.

Want the truth? Get the facts where they are totally straight and objective, from honest American corporations.

(Insert tongue in cheek)

That loud clapping noise you hear..

[Rob T Firefly]

..it's the sound of millions of Slashdotters facepalming at once.

Fine, I'll do them

[Mateo_LeFou]

-(of particular interest to govts.) Instead of spending money on licensing fees that go into the Redmond, Washington tax base, you spend it on training, customization, etc. that can be performed by your constituency, and thereby have many generations of return
-Any feature you want/need badly enough can be added. You don't have to hope that your desires are common enough to merit MS's attention.
-You do not have to worry about whether sensitive information about your computers is being sent to Microsoft as part of some newfangled Automatic Updates or DRM "feature"
-On the offchance that your government believes in individual liberty, F/OSS should give you a warm fuzzy feeling.

Price doesn't matter

[duffbeer703]

Vista will make cost irrelevant.

Lots of companies and most governments are going to be mandated to use whole-disk encryption for laptops and desktops in the next year or so. The easiest way to do this is to get your hands on Vista Ultimate or Vista Enterprise.

This is a problem.
Vista Ultimate is a consumer product and you cannot get it via a volume license agreement, so that's out.
Vista Enterprise is available via volume & enterprise agreements but you must have software assurance agreement in place.

To get software assurance, you pay Microsoft a "seat fee" equal to the number of computers that you have that aren't:
  - Servers
  - Applicances (VPN devices, Google Search boxes, etc)
  - Kiosks (ATM's, POS terminals, etc)
  - Embedded devices (Treos, Blackberries, etc)

That means that you'll pay Microsoft for Macs, Linux machines, FreeDOS machines... anything that is a workstation. So switching to Linux won't save a time, because you'll pay Microsoft anyway!

Re:Price doesn't matter

[Hymer]

IBM's laptops have hardware encryption of the disk on board... and got it for something like 10 years. You don't need Vista for harddisk encryption... and Vista's encryption is even not the best solution (for Vista) available, there are several 3rd. party solutions wich are fairly cheap, powerful, and runs on several versions of Windows. You don't even neesd that TCP chip for running real safe encryption...

OSS might save money...

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

... but I still prefer ALSA.

Re:There is OTHER software than Office

[papal_authority]

True enough, if you want a POS system, you need Windows.

Fifth and sixth reasons

[mangu]

This is why I prefer OSS: I can test at will anything I use. With commercial software they either give me crippleware or a limited test period. And if I later find I chose the wrong product, I don't have to write a report to management saying I made a mistake and, please, could I have more $$$ to buy the right (I hope) software.

And my second reason: with source code I don't have to worry about the supplier dying. I'm currently trying to find what to do with a software my company has; we do have the source code, 400k lines of Fortran, but it's VAX-FORTRAN and runs on VMS. The VAX/VMS suppliers have died twice already, when DEC was taken over by Compaq and when Compaq was taken over by HP. The best solution would be if HP released the source code to VAX/VMS under the GPL, but no such luck.

Amazing

[HangingChad]

Hell, there isn't even a good equivalent for Quickbooks/Peachtree that's OSS. It's absolutely mind-boggling that any small businesses could ever go completely open source WITH NO FINANCIAL SOFTWARE (Yes, I know about GNUCash: it's a joke).

Simply amazing that those crazy Europeans manage to get by without Quickbooks. A miracle I manage in my own business(es) without ever once missing Quickbooks. I run OSS almost exclusively and actually spend less time dorking with my computers, which tend to stay working for extremely long periods of time. What is it I can't do without Quickbooks? Because I manage to track mileage and expenses, do billing, proposals and make financial projections with, what to me feels like, a minimum amount of effort. I must be living a torrid, pathetic existence. How sad for me to be so happy in a slime pit of unrealized potential. I don't have Quickbooks and I'm too cheap to spring for a copy of CrossOver to run it. But I do have a lot of fun with the money I'm not spending on MSFT products, so it's not a complete loss.

I'm not sure what makes that mind-boggling, because I think I'm doing just fine without MSFT. Perhaps you're easily boggled?