How Do I Start a University Transition To Open Source?

exmoron writes "I work at a small university (5,500 students) and am in a position to potentially influence future software purchasing decisions. I use a number of FOSS solutions at home (OpenOffice.org, Zotero, GIMP, VirtualBox). My university, on the other hand, is a Microsoft and proprietary software groupie (Vista boxes running MS Office 2007, Exchange email server, Endnote, Photoshop, Blackboard, etc.). I'd like to make an argument that going open source would save the university money and think through a gradual transition process to open source software (starting small, with something like replacing Endnote with Zotero, then MS Office with OpenOffice.org, and so on). Unfortunately, I can't find very good information online on site licenses for proprietary software. How much does a site-license for Endnote cost? What about a site license for MS Office for 2,000 computers? In short, what's the skinny on moving to open source? How much money could a university like mine save? Additionally, what other benefits are there to moving to open source that I could try to sell the university on? And what are the drawbacks (other than people whining about change)?"

Comments

Easy!

[alukin]

Get all your responsible staff and ask them publicly how much money they get as payback from M$.

Re:Have you ever tried to re-seed a lawn?

[Alex Belits]

A "nothing but open source" policy is as terrible as a "no open source" policy. Use what's best for the job, not what fits your ideologies.

Why? Why OTHERS are allowed to push their ideology, and only software should be firmly in "realpolitik" realm?

New media departments, for example, aren't going to switch to whatever bullshit the OSS world flogs when they have Maya/3DS Max, Photoshop, and Illustrator. Blender's good but nonstandard and nobody really uses it, the GIMP sucks for all the reasons everybody already knows, and Inkscape simply does not step to Illustrator.

Oh, of course, everyone knows those "reasons". That's because you and your friends in Adobe and Microsoft marketing departments repeat them constantly.

Except, of course, they are not real. Inkscape is the closest thing to a reference implementation of SVG that exists. Gimp and Cinepaint are used for movie production. Gimp provides the same useful functionality as Photoshop, except its user interface is not designed by a marketing department, so the user has to SELECT A TOOL IN A MENU for it to appear. And, of course, every fucking PRINTER DRIVER handles RGB/CMYK conversion now. Best of all, overwhelming majority of Photoshop-educated, Photoshop-using graphics artists still can't color-manage their way out of a wet brown paper bag (that is, the bag looks more orange or green when the picture of the bag is finally printed in whatever magazine they work for), and yet Adobe and Microsoft spare no effort making sure the world knows how important it is to use the great color management techniques that jump out at you and fix everything in your work automagically when you buy a copy of Photoshop and run it on Windows.