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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.'"
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!
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.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
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.
Beep beep.
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...
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
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?