Large FLOSS Study Gets the Real Facts

Hans Kwint writes "The European Commission's enterprise and industry department has just released the final draft of what could be the biggest academic interdisciplinary study on the economic / innovative impacts of free/libre/open source software (1.8-MB PDF). The study was done by an international consortium led by the United Nations University / University of Maastricht. The lead researcher, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, has overseen a large volume of FLOSS studies in the last few years, including ones on FLOSS policies and worldwide FLOSS adoption. This academic-grade study has a very broad scope and has collected real-world information that is valuable for both companies and government bodies thinking about migration. The study is about the economic impact of FLOSS, not excluding the hidden indirect impact. It compares scenarios of open and proprietary software futures of Europe. The study looks at the FLOSS's competitiveness compared to proprietary software and also provides a few TCO comparison case-studies.

Comments

Well?

[RealGrouchy]

This study compares... This study looks at... It's the biggest FLOSS study since sliced breadboards

Yeah, sure. It's a study. That's nice. What does it say?

I'm not going to read a 1.8 mb PDF TFA unless I know whether or not its conclusions agree with my predisposed bias!

- RG>

Re:Well?

[nxtr]

I'm not going to read a 1.8 mb PDF TFA unless I know whether or not its conclusions agree with my predisposed bias!

You must be old here!

Re:Well?

[Technician]

I'm not going to read a 1.8 mb PDF TFA unless I know whether or not its conclusions agree with my predisposed bias!

You don't have to. Start in the table of contents and you will find the conclusion is on a single page. It's on page 283. It's a PDF so I can't cut and paste and If you are not going to read it, I'm not taking the time to retype the conclusion page.

For me, I like the conclusion. MS will not.

Re:Well?

[Anonymous Coward]

12.7. Conclusions

Our analysis has been performed on six organizations in different European countries.
The majority of them are public bodies. The organizations have followed different types of
migration on the base of their context.

We have investigated the costs of migration, and the cost of ownership of the old and
the new solution differentiating them between the costs of purchasing and the costs of
ownership of the software solutions. Special attention has been put on the intangible nature of
the costs. Costs have been classified in categories defined trough existing studies and selected
by a top down approach called Goal Question Metric. This instrument has been also used to
define the questionnaires used to collect the data.

Our findings show that, in almost all the cases, a transition toward open source reports
of savings on the long term costs of ownership of the software products.

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 manly 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. On the other
hand not providing a specific training may cause and adverse attitude toward the new
technology. Fortunately those costs are limited in time and are not strictly linked to the nature
of the new software adopted.

We also investigated the productivity of the employees in using Microsoft office and
OpenOffice.org. Office suites are widely used and are a good test bed and representative for a
comparison on issues like effort and time spent in the daily routine of work. Delays in the
task deliveries may have a bigger impact than costs on the organization's management. Our
findings report no particular delays or lost of time in the daily work due to the use of
OpenOffice.org.

Re:Well?

[perlionex]

I have no qualms about extracted good, useful conclusions from well-researched academic papers so others don't have to download a 1.8MB file. (Thanks for pointing out the usefulness of the conclusion, though).

From page 283 (emphasis mine):

Conclusion

Our analysis has been performed on six organizations in different European countries. The majority of them are public bodies. The organizations have followed different types of migration on the base of their context.

We have investigated the costs of migration, and the cost of ownership of the old and the new solution differentiating them between the costs of purchasing and the costs of ownership of the software solutions. Special attention has been put on the intangible nature of the costs. Costs have been classified in categories defined trough existing studies and selected by a top down approach called Goal Question Metric. This instrument has been also used to define the questionnaires used to collect the data.

Our findings show that, in almost all the cases, a transition toward open source reports of savings on the long term - costs of ownership of the software products.

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 manly 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. On the other hand not providing a specific training may cause and adverse attitude toward the new technology. Fortunately those costs are limited in time and are not strictly linked to the nature of the new software adopted.

We also investigated the productivity of the employees in using Microsoft office and OpenOffice.org. Office suites are widely used and are a good test bed and representative for a comparison on issues like effort and time spent in the daily routine of work. Delays in the task deliveries may have a bigger impact than costs on the organization's management. Our findings report no particular delays or lost of time in the daily work due to the use of OpenOffice.org.

Re:Well?

[Wolfbone]

"Start in the table of contents and you will find the conclusion is on a single page. It's on page 283."

No it's not. That's only the conclusion page for section 12, "Appendix 2: Report on user-level productivity and relative cost of FLOSS / proprietary software." The executive summary is the where the overall conclusions can be found in this paper. The whole thing is considerably more than just a TCO study.

Re:Well?

[WaZiX]

It's a PDF so I can't cut and paste and If you are not going to read it, I'm not taking the time to retype the conclusion page.

I Can:



12.7. Conclusions

Our analysis has been performed on six organizations in different European countries. The majority of them are public bodies. The organizations have followed different types of migration on the base of their context.

We have investigated the costs of migration, and the cost of ownership of the old and the new solution differentiating them between the costs of purchasing and the costs of ownership of the software solutions. Special attention has been put on the intangible nature of the costs. Costs have been classified in categories defined trough existing studies and selected by a top down approach called Goal Question Metric. This instrument has been also used to define the questionnaires used to collect the data.

Our findings show that, in almost all the cases, a transition toward open source reports of savings on the long term - costs of ownership of the software products.

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 manly 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. On the other hand not providing a specific training may cause and adverse attitude toward the new technology. Fortunately those costs are limited in time and are not strictly linked to the nature of the new software adopted.

We also investigated the productivity of the employees in using Microsoft office and OpenOffice.org. Office suites are widely used and are a good test bed and representative for a comparison on issues like effort and time spent in the daily routine of work. Delays in the task deliveries may have a bigger impact than costs on the organization's management. Our findings report no particular delays or lost of time in the daily work due to the use of OpenOffice.org.

12.7.1. Considerations

With our analysis we achieve a good level of understanding of the costs, benefits and productivity of a transition. The following are the considerations we have drawn upon.

1. Before buying, upgrading proprietary office software one needs consider that: OpenOffice.org has all the functionalities that public offices need to create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations Upgrading office programs is time-consuming and expensive. It requires installation time, potential document conversions, and new training. It also poses a risk because some documents containing code or macros may not be readable anymore OpenOffice.org is free, extremely stable, and supports the ISO Open Document Standard.

2. In our study the motivations to transit to OSS are: the exchange of documents in an open shared format (ODS), reuse of old hardware in some cases, and being independent of software vendors even when creating a distribution or an application for local needs. Employees may perceive that their work is under-valued using 'cheap' OSS products or changing operating model to OSS is problematic. Economic impact of FLOSS on innovation and competitiveness of the EU ICT sector © 2006 MERIT. Prepared on November 20, 2006 284 To overcome these pre-conception it is recommended to adopt a policy of both ad hoc and periodic training to fill the lack of knowledge/experience in relation to what OSS products are appropriate and how they might be deployed.

3. It is not always justified to base the migration on the promise of lower license costs, although in our study initial purchasing costs are lower for the OSS (they includes deployment and customization for the first run of the configuration). This is because these costs are too much influenced

Re:Well?

[El_Muerte_TDS]

Our findings report no particular delays or lost of time in the daily work due to the use of OpenOffice.org.

Crap, there goes my excuse. I hope my boss didn't see this.

Re:Well?

[strider44]

Look at his UID - he's not old, but he's learning very quickly.

Re:Well?

[Anonymous Coward]

However these costs are temporary and manly

Conclusion
If yoo use tha Microsoft, yoor jussed like dat Beel Gates -- a weak girlieman!

Re:Well?

[Daemonic]

these costs are temporary and manly

It's official - OSS is manly.

Re:Well?

[Paradise Pete]

MS will not what???

We'll never know. They got him.
Too bad he wasn't dictating. Then we'd have seen the aaaargh.

Re:Well?

[ThePhilips]

To be honest, when I first saw the line, I also wanted to make similar post.

But then - just before hitting "Reply to This" - I recalled all the nightmares of supporting M$Office documents my company have had in past. All the bugs and regressions of OO.o cannot cover experience with M$Office in networked environment.

Our favorite biggest sucker is M$O document with global system architecture spec: opening from network drive of the 20 page (about 200k thanks to diagrams) document takes 2 to 5 minutes. Always. Nobody knows what M$Word does - but it basicly hangs and then later happily pop-ups from background with open document reporting neither error nor warning. Copy the document from networked repository to local harddrive - and it opens instantly. Open it as it is supposed to be open - and locked - on servers and ... here we go. (Actually we also have several document which take ages to open regardless of where from you open them: locally or remotely. But it just everybody has to work with sys arch spec often - so it is major P.I.T.A.)

OO.o is bloated, ugly, slow, feature-poor, buggy and inconsistent. Its macro language is total and utter undocumented crap (N.B. I hate VBA - no language could be worse. Or so I thought. Before I have seen StarBasic (or whatever that thing is called)). BUT. In three years of deployment we found no single major blocker, which prevented us from using OO.o internally.

Re:Well?

[CastrTroy]

Well, you can also program macros in Python an Javascript if you like. Nobody said you had to use StarBasic, or OO.O basic, which is what it's called on my version.

Re:Well?

[ThePhilips]

Okay, smart one, then try to find a single document describing hierarchy of internal OO.o objects - accessible from such scripts.

OO.o documentation is ill with what I call "plug-in disease" and has very nice reference "everything is implemented with plug-ins and thus documented elsewhere" with link to dummy OO.o documentation page. There you can find the same plug-in reference quoted above. With no link to actual DOM documentation/specification/anything.

Analogy. In past we used to joke around "know how to program in assembler": knowing insn op-codes gives one nothing. Programming in assembler is impossible with knowledge of assembler syntax alone - knowledge of computer's architecture is essential. Syntax is simple and fits several documentation pages - computer architecture is described on many hundred pages. So here we have the same situation: I know Python/Java/etc but I can't program anything for OO.o in it since DOM - main subject of programming - is documented nowhere.

VBS is shitty, but you can always record macro and correct it to your needs. For sake of experiment try to record macro in OO.o and see/correct the results. Even "steep" isn't proper adjective for the learning curve.

Re:Well?

[fitten]

But only temporarily ;)

MOD PARENT DOWN

[Anonymous Coward]

As the article summary clearly states (as does the Wikipedia article on FLOSS), FLOSS actually stands for Free/Libre/Open-Source Software.

Re:FLOSS

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

For those that don't know, FLOSS stands for 'Free Linux Open Source Software'.

Nonsense! The 'L' stands for "lossless" - FLOSS is much better than the lossy Closed Source Software out there ;-)

Re:FLOSS

[perlionex]

Rubbish.

Both the article summary, original paper (page 9) and Wikipedia article you linked to clearly state that FLOSS = "Free/Libre/Open-Source Software (FLOSS)".

Or were you too busy trying to get First Post?

Has everyone remembered to...

[denmarkw00t]

FLOSS and get out all of that grimy, proprietary software - wait, I think you still have some M$ in your teeth!

Summary of Conclusions

[sameeer]

this is pure laziness by the story poster. I don't come to slashdot to read 286 page documents, the whole purpose of a news site is to give me news, and then link to the complete document.

Anyway, for the benefit of others, I shall attempt to quote relevant sentences from the conclusion.

Our findings show that, in almost all the cases, a transition toward open source reports of savings on the long term costs of ownership of the software products.

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 manly are budgeted in less than one year.

OpenOffice.org has all the functionalities that public offices need to create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations

We also investigated the productivity of the employees in using Microsoft office and OpenOffice.org....Our findings report no particular delays or lost of time in the daily work due to the use of OpenOffice.org.

Employees may perceive that their work is under-valued using 'cheap' OSS products or changing operating model to OSS is problematic.

To overcome these pre-conception it is recommended to adopt a policy of both ad hoc and periodic training to fill the lack of knowledge/experience in relation to what OSS products are appropriate and how they might be deployed.

It is not always justified to base the migration on the promise of lower license costs

Another good crucial reason of costs is training. Although training costs are a substantial part of the migration costs their benefits can be realized over time.

There are no extra costs due to lack of productivity arising from the use of the OOo.

Someone who reads the whole thing might be able to do justice to the summary of the document, but for many, this should suffice.

Re: Summary of Conclusions

[Black Parrot]

> 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 manly are budgeted in less than one year.

Got that, folks? These are manly costs, so tell your boss no one will think he's gay for switching to OSS.

Interesting facts

[omeg]

If you don't want to read through the entire PDF (which I can understand, since it's 287 pages in size), there are some interesting figures in the first paragraph which highlights the study's key findings.

"Europe is the leading region in terms of globally collaborating FLOSS software developers, and leads in terms of global project leaders, followed closely by North America (interestingly, more in the East Coast than the West), Asia and Latin America face disadvantages at least partially due to language barriers, but may have an increasing share of developers active in local communities."

"Weighted by regional PC penetration, central Europe and Scandinavia provide disproportionally high numbers of developers; weighted by average income, India is the leading provider of FLOSS developers by far, followed by China."

"The existing base of quality FLOSS applications with reasonable quality control and distribution would cost firms almost Euro 12 billion to reproduce internally. This code base has been doubling every 18-24 months over the past eight years, and this growth is projected to continue for several more years."

"The existing base of FLOSS software represents a lower bound of about 131.000 real person-years of effort that has been devoted exclusively by programmers. As this is mostly by individuals not directly paid for development, it represents a significant gap in national accounts of productivity. [...]"

"Defined broadly, FLOSS-related services could reach a 32% share of all IT services by 2010, and the FLOSS-related share of the economy could reach 4% of European GDP by 2010. [...]"

"[...] FLOSS and proprietary software show a ration of 30:70 (overlapping) in recent job postings indicating significant demand for FLOSS-related skills."

There is a huge amount of information in this PDF, and while it pertains directly to Europe, it's also interesting to read for people who don't live there. Basically, it discusses the role of software libre in the European economy (both its direct and indirect impacts), and its general trends, scenarios and policy strategies. Everything is in great detail, too.

Load of FUD

[bh_doc]

This is stupid! It's the biggest load of crap I've ever seen! I wonder who paid them to write this?

What? Generally favourable?

Well, it's about time someone did a proper study! I'm glad to see there are some people who aren't complete corporate shills!

An even shorter Executive Summary...

[perlionex]

(of pages 9-12 of the PDF article)

FLOSS role in the economy

• FLOSS applications are first, second or third-rung products in terms of market share in several markets
• FLOSS market penetration is also high
• Almost two-thirds of FLOSS software is still written by individuals
• Europe is the leading region in terms of globally collaborating FLOSS software developers
• (more details on specific role in Europe in paper)

Direct economic impact

• The existing base of quality FLOSS applications with reasonable quality control and distribution would cost firms almost Euro 12 billion to reproduce internally... code base has been doubling every 18-24 months
• This existing base of FLOSS software represents a lower bound of about 131 000 real person-years of effort that has been devoted exclusively by programmers... it represents a significant gap in national accounts of productivity
• Firms have invested an estimated Euro 1.2 billion in developing FLOSS software that is
• made freely available... represent in total at least 565 000 jobs and Euro 263 billion in annual revenue
• FLOSS-related services could reach a 32% share of all IT services by 2010, and the FLOSS-related share of the economy could reach 4% of European GDP by 2010
• (more statistics in the paper)

Indirect economic impact

• Strong network effects in ICT... risk leading to innovation resources being excessively allocated to defensive innovation. There is a case for a rebalancing of innovation incentives... (to target) publicly available technology for new functionality.
• FLOSS potentially saves industry over 36% in software R&D investment
• ...a large and increasing share of user-generated content is not accounted for and needs to be addressed by policy makers
• Increased FLOSS use may provide a way for Europe to compensate for a low GDP share of ICT investment relative to the US

Trends, scenarios and policy strategies

• Doubling the rate of FLOSS take-up in Europe would result in a software share of investment at 1.5% of GDP, reducing but not closing this investment gap with the US
• Europe's strengths regarding FLOSS are its strong community of active developers, small firms and secondary software industry; weaknesses include Europe's generally low level of ICT investment and low rate of FLOSS adoption by large industry compared to the US
• FLOSS provides opportunities in Europe for new businesses, a greater role in the wider information society and a business model that suits European SMEs
• Europe faces three scenarios: CLOSED, where existing business models are entrenched... GENERIC, where current mixed policies lead to a gradual growth of FLOSS... VOLUNTARY, where policies and the market develop to recognise and utilise the potential of FLOSS
• (goes on to suggest policy initiatives to support FLOSS)

But will it change people's religion?

[heretic108]

I've never seen such a thorough and methodical compilation of real-world evidence in favour of F[L]OSS.

However, the 'proprietary vs FLOSS' debate is a battle which each day seems to more resemble the 'biblical literalism versus evolution' debate. Just like the biblical literalists who hang on to their denials of evolution, despite the evidence, there'll be those who'll never be convinced about the benefits of FLOSS, and will always be there as suckers to sustain the likes of Microsoft.

Kinda puts an ironic twist on the old adage: "To those who believe, no proof is necessary. To those who disbelieve, no proof is possible."

Re:But will it change people's religion?

[paniq]

I don't think you can compare a discussion about whether to use FLOSS or not with whether to believe in "intelligent design" or not.

Unlike with the Open Source issue, believing in evolution or not does not matter. No matter what you believe how the world was born, this will not change the past, and it will certainly have no influence on the way you work.

The benefits of Open Source are nothing you can discuss about once the research has been done. And so far we are only talking about those objective business figures. The whole subjective part of it has only been covered in a handful of books, Eric S. Raymonds "Cathedral and Bazaar" being one of it.

Now this is entirely subjective, and needs to be backed up by objective research, but I'm confident I'm not the only one:

I am 26. I started programming when I was 9. For 15 years, I was exclusively using non-free products. Since I switched to working with open source products 2 years ago, my productivity has boasted. I have more work-related contacts than ever. I participate in various projects. I learn so much every day - about programming, and especially about working with other people. Because of those contacts, I get inside scoops and information that in non-free terms would be regarded as "classified". I feel that I shape myself into someone who will be able to do quite good consulting one day. I can safely say that my knowledge has never grown this fast.

Now show me anyone who can claim the opposite: "I used free software for 15 years, now I switched to non-free software, boy my productivity sky-rocketed! And I know so many people now!" - in fact, try to twist arguments and see if the shoe still fits. I can not see free software going away, and I can not see longtime users migrating back to Windows.

This is not a question of religion. This is a question of performance and optimal work flow.

Re:But will it change people's religion?

[10101001 10101001]

No matter what you believe how the world was born, this will not change the past, and it will certainly have no influence on the way you work.

I have to disagree pretty substantially with what you've said. For starters, the discussion of evolution vs intelligent design/creationism isn't one of the creation of life. Instead, it's the creation of most species. The difference is pretty significant. The former is a very dynamic viewpoint while the latter two are more static (well, unless intelligent designers think that their "designer" is still around). This is important because there are many jobs that involve nature, and one that views species as fundamentally unalterable creates all sorts of problems, from the overuse of antibiotics to the short-sightedness of becoming dependent on a pesticide without any long-term plans to research and develop new pesticides as current pesticides are adapted to. Hell, even non-life evolves (viruses). If there's enough people who refuse to acknowledge evolution and they vote into office politicians who cut funding and research into combat ever evolving microorganisms, the consequences could be rather catastrophic economically and mortally. Until we're in a situation where there isn't a reliance on large government funding to do the sort of research that seems necessary because of evolution, I think it does rather matter what people think.

FLOSS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when did Libre get added? Is this another lame attempt at a cute acronym? At one time it was open source, then the acronym weenies attacked and we had OSS. The GNU zealots came along and insisted that we beat the definition of "free" into the ground, thus FOSS was born. Libre? Idiotic.

Re:FLOSS?

[elf-fire]

Well. You know. Libre as in beer.

Re:FLOSS?

[perlionex]

The Wikipedia article on "FLOSS" states:

"Libre software" was first used publicly in 2000, by the European Commission... The word "libre", borrowed from the Spanish and French languages, does not have the freedom/cost ambiguity problem that "free" does.

"FLOSS" was used in 2001 as a project acronym by Rishab Aiyer Ghosh as an acronym for Free/Libre/Open-Source Software. Later that year, the European Commission (EC) used the phrase when they funded a study on the topic.

Note that Rishab Aiyer Ghosh is the same author of this academic paper.

Re:FLOSS?

[arpy]

Maybe tag with !dental to avoid confusion.

Makes sense

[Freedom451]

M$ is 'intelligent design', and FLOSS is punctuated equilibrium.

No one gets fired for buying Microsoft is similar to the fall from grace: simple ideas that stop thought in it's tracks and stop the discussion of a whole host of inconsistencies in the record.

Remember, "Balmer doesn't play dice with the Operating System..."

Re:Makes sense

[ajs318]

No one gets fired for buying Microsoft

They would if they worked where I did.

Re:FLOSS

[Potor]

a slashvertisement here, but it is of topical interest: I am putting together a peer-reviewed journal issue on the ethics of floss - the deadline is past, but the panel will still consider papers. see the link in my sig. please contact me via the link if you have any interest.

Document Properties

[OhneWorte]

Well, if you look at the document properties what do you find? It was created with PScript.dll under Windows.
I hope they have learned their lesson from their study themselves... :-/

Ohne Worte

Funding sources

[l2718]

Based on project homepage, especially the list of parnters, it seems that this study was mostly financed by the EU. The secondary sources include interested parties (an association of Indian IT companies, Mitsubishi) and non-interested ones (e.g. the Soros foundation). This leads me to trust the study more than ones funded by Redhat and Microsoft.

Current Usage

[Anonymous Coward]

Figure 12 claims FLOSS systems used in European public bodies (900 bodies across European Governments):
46.6 % GNU/Linux
33.7 % MySQL
33.4 % Apache
26.0 % Mozilla
24.1 % PHP
21.5 % OpenOffice.org
17.0 % Samba
14.1 % Squid
10.2 % KDE
10.2 % Perl
05.5 % Gnome
04.7 % Zope
03.0 % Free/Open BSD
33.9 % other

FLOSS and Moore's Law

[Jeff_Kaplan_88]

Reading stats on open source makes me wonder whether there is some equivalent to Moore's Law that applies to expansion of the open source code base.

Re:FLOSS in PDF??

[Anonymous Coward]

Use xpdf on Linux to read them. If you want to stick to proprietary, FoxIt Reader is much better than Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Invaluable for Execs in Open Source companies

[PHPfanboy]

If you're on the commercial side of an open source company, it is imperative you read this report.

This report answers bucketloads of questions about where to approach the market and how to do so. It also provides clear impartial metrics which you can present to decision makers and strategy people at your customers. Miss this at your peril.

Re:Invaluable for Execs in Open Source companies

[SiggyRadiation]

This report is a must-read for anyone interrested in questions regarding open-source versus closed-source/proprietary.

For example, there is a complete chapter about user benefites, interoperability, productivity and cost savings. About cost savings a lot has been said on slashdot (and on the "get the facts" advertisments). When the report talks about TCO and the compatibility-problems that result from switching from (for example) MS-Office to Open-Office: (pag. 98)

The issue of compatibility losses could be taken furgher. Arguable, the losses of compatibility, and the losses caused bu migration in general, can be devided into two categories: those that would be incurred by migrating to a specific new system, and those that are incurred by migrating away from a currently used system. Compatibility losses are in the latter category - migrating away to any alternative system would result in the compatibility losses (assuming the use of proprietary standards, without which compatibility losses could nog occur). Such exit costs should be evaluated as part of the cost of the current system, not the future system.

Such insights are truly invaluable!

FLOSS in Europe - In reality

[PietjeJantje]

FLOSS in Europe is mainly about leaches. Here in the Netherlands for example the government has subsidized various FLOSS studies and initiatives..GOOD you might think. But then you look a little furhter. First, what you see is they never pour money into the open source projects themselves, so to all you code monkeys, tough luck, but thanks for all the fish. No they are pouring it into Commities to Determine How Good The Fish Is. You got organisations who pretend to be -the- portal to open source, but it's only for companies to want to deploy it. You got studies how open source fares compared to closed source, they are very good at pouring 50K here and 100K there to find out what's best and what the consequences will be.

Now this is all very good. (Until you realize it's always the same people and it's more about networking, the money and the jobs involved). Except, again, they never ever put money into development. To me, this is shameful, all these people going after the money and getting it, and not a single eurocent to what should be the first priority if you're giving away money. But they don't have to - that's not the point. Just start USING open source and stop talking about it/studying it for once, because it's a make money quick scheme, and don't waste tax payer's money on for example 286 page studies.

Re:FLOSS in Europe - In reality

[mwvdlee]

Actually, I think the Netherlands are funding a national group which is working on the Dutch spellchecker and thesaurus for OpenOffice. They are funding the work that programmers don't do, that's why you're not seeing it.

As for the need for studies; I'm thankful they are researching before making decissions.
You seem to assume OSS is always better and think a government should assume the same. What studies like these show is parameters for when moving to OSS is a good idea.

There are already pretty large scale OSS migrations in the EU, so they are actually using OSS. I wouldn't be surprised if non-development related use of OSS is far greater in governments than in corporations at the moment.

Re: Difference of opinion is not religion

[heretic108]

< For someone who has actually studied religions, I deem it ill-advised to continue describing any contrary policy about how to use a legal framework as "religion"

It's obvious you've never been in an IRC channel during a flamewar on vi versus emacs, or gtk+ versus qt etc.

FYI, the word 'religion' has grown a new usage, largely in technical circles, to describe a dogmatic adherence to a choice or set of choices of software tools or components, where the adherent steadfastly refuses to be 'converted' to another, possibly superior set of choices despite even the strongest evidence in favour of making the switch.

This study doasn't have a real impact

[laplace_man]

The truth is that every country in EU made their own study on office software. I live in Slovenia and I just found similar study comparing transition of government 11.800 workstations to Open Office. It clearly says NO to open source for 3 years. It's a document dating 14.11.2005. This study has a conclusion that migrating software from MS to Open Office is possible and functionality of both packages are more then enough for government needs. The things that changed their mind and are considered greater risk that brings higher costs over this 3 year period are:

- retraining people
- doc-> odf conversion (especially concerned about automatic conversion of documents-especially macros in doc files)
- and of course very concerned about support (there is no company's supporting Open Office - or they have no real business plans) what they see as the greatest risk migrating to ODF !!

This is 5 page document giving some numbers WITHOUT ANY EXPLANATIONS where those numbers came from. The only thing I noticed is that they ware waiting what happens in Munich at the time.They clearly know for IDABC initiative for ODF - ISO format. Their strategy is making public tenders to create support Open Office.
What I'm really concerned about is that there is no plan for gradual adoption of ODF. If there is a serious intent for adopting ODF I'd expect at least .gov sites offering ODF formats as well as .doc and .pdf. THIS IS THE PLACE WHERE REAL TRANSITION SHOULD START AS WELL AS INSTALLING OPEN OFFICE ON GOV COMPUTERS FOR TESTING AND GRADUAL ADOPTION.

Anyway I see this document as excuse to FLOSS community without any REAL intent to change things in the future.
This is the real picture of FLOSS support in EU. The point is that country's in EU take this reports as consideration but on the end they make their own conclusions based on MS deals because they can't make or don't want to make a real cost comparison.

Groklaw has the Conclusions

[giafly]

Conclusions and Comment

One interesting negative point concerned those people (sometimes found here too) who believe that you only get what you pay for.

Employees may perceive that their work is under-valued using 'cheap' OSS products.

Re:FLOSS

[Aeternus]

Free can be either Gratis or Libre, stating Libre in the acronym emphasises that the intent of the acronym is to describe software that can be freely developed on and is not encumbered rather than describing software that is free as in price.

Re:Excellent paper! But...

[strider44]

Don't be idiotic. I might just extend my assumption of "not read the paper" to "not read any serious paper". Your "conclusions in the paper" were the conclusions for the last section in the appendix. It wasn't even part of the paper - you obviously flipped to the end and read a subsection called "Conclusions" without realising it wasn't part of the actual paper. (even though there are several other subsections throughout the paper labelled "Conclusions", and you never ever put conclusions for the entire paper in a bloody subsection) Look at the Executive Summary for the real findings - that's what the Executive Summary is for.

code or functionality

[jesterpilot]

FTFMS: The existing base of quality FLOSS applications with reasonable quality control and
distribution would cost firms almost Euro 12 billion to reproduce internally.

It's surely possible make that many lines of code for 12 billion euro's. But could it provide the same functionality? One of the strengths of FLOSS is the recycling of code. A closed system would need many more lines of code to get the same functionality.
 
On the other hand, would a closed system build 287 different end-user apps for playing mp3's?

Religion or dogma?

[HangingChad]

However, the 'proprietary vs FLOSS' debate is a battle which each day seems to more resemble the 'biblical literalism versus evolution' debate.

To me it's more like dogma. There are so many people who accept conventional wisdom without spending any time actually learning anything and refusing to listen to those who do. I'm continually surprised how many managers exhibit a depth of understanding of IT issues that one might get skimming an in-flight magazine.

Business Opportunity

[ajs318]

There's a business opportunity out there, migrating users to Open Source, and somebody is set to coin it in.

"I want to totally own you. I want to hold your data to ransom, and if you don't keep paying me, I will make it unreadable. I want to force you to upgrade your software and your equipment when I say so. I will send my hired goons around when I feel like it, just to make sure you're behaving yourself, and if I so much as suspect you're even thinking of doing anything I don't like, you'll pay" really isn't much of a sales pitch, and the only reason anyone falls for it is they don't know there is an alternative. Well, ignorance is curable.

Start by recruiting a bunch of school leavers, all of whom must hate Microsoft with a passion; just put "Send CV - NO MS WORD DOCS" on the advertisement. And mean it. You'll need one or two machines running Windows and Office; but these will be on a private network, air-gapped from the Internet, so no need for anti-virus/anti-spyware. Files will be transferred from the Linux machines on this network to the rest of your network by physically transferring hard disk drives. One of your staff must be absolutely fluent in some distribution; and it's best if you have at least one expert from each side of the deb/rpm wall.

Document conversion isn't the problem you imagine it's going to be. Most of any user's old documents only occasionally ever need to be looked at, maybe reprinted, but probably not edited. So first off, archive all those legacy documents as PostScript files. (Emulating a standard JetDirect print server is as good a way as any of doing this.) You can (and should) gzip or bzip2 the files to save space, since none of the standard Linux file viewers mind about compressed files. In the course of doing this, you will identify those documents which might conceivably need to be edited and can begin prioritising. You will also, in all probability, run into a situation where a newer version of Microsoft software has trouble with a file generated by an older version of Microsoft software. If this happens, milk the sucker.

Now work on replacing existing Office macros. This will come as a bit of a shock to the Windows power users, but: Many customers don't actually use macros for much, because they simply don't know how to. It's not uncommon to see people cutting and pasting between Word and Excel, or even dictating from a screen to another person at another terminal. And don't just go for straight work-alikes: look at the bigger picture. If data is coming in regularly by e-mail and normally gets handled by some contrived manual process, you want an end-to-end solution, beginning with a procmail recipe, that will do the whole thing automagically. "As good as" is not good enough. You have got to do better.

Some documents will need to be recreated from scratch by hand in order to render them editable. This should not be overlooked. Slightly less drastic than retyping everything is transferring as plain text, then recreating the formatting -- which doesn't take long if done properly. Don't forget you have the Postscript "reference renderings" to work against.

If you can get a foot in the door with a business that has recently been raided by FAST (and they don't suspect that the raid had anything to do with you), so much the better. Just convince them you can convert them to 100% FLOSS for half what they'd be expected to pay for licences for the proprietary stuff they're using.

OOo API -- whatever happened to "discoverable"?

[zooblethorpe]

Okay, smart one, then try to find a single document describing hierarchy of internal OO.o objects - accessible from such scripts.

I know Python/Java/etc but I can't program anything for OO.o in it since DOM - main subject of programming - is documented nowhere.

VBS is shitty, but you can always record macro and correct it to your needs. For sake of experiment try to record macro in OO.o and see/correct the results. Even "steep" isn't proper adjective for the learning curve.

Thank you for making these points! I've had to use MSO with VBA for years due to in-house automation requirements (joy), and while the language isn't exactly fun :\, the DOMs and application APIs are immediately discoverable thanks to 1) generally extensive and useful documentation, and 2) autocomplete. So I can get something simple up and running usually inside of an hour.

Meanwhile, in OOo land, I've spent hours simply trying to dig through the documentation to figure out the hierarchy of objects and APIs for one frigging object. Who the hell wrote the API docs? I'm not familiar with Java, but the docs seem very Java-oriented -- is that terrible disconnected API soup a Java thing? I'm baffled. And frustrated enough (by other things as well*) that I've been unable to seriously recommend OOo.

* Lousy Asian-language support makes OOo a non-starter in my field of Japanese translation. It's galling, because OOo is sooo close to being a good idea, yet falls painfully far from the mark. <sigh.>

"OpenOffice.org -- it's almost a Good Idea!" TM