Slashdot Mirror
Australian Senate Hears Open Source Is Too Expensive
schliz writes "The Australian Government Information Management Office says that a platform change to open source could cost more than it saves. It was pushed to investigate open source software to reduce its AUD$500m budget at a Senate meeting yesterday. From the article: 'Agencies are obliged to consider value for money on each occasion they apply a software,' spokesperson Graham Fry said. 'If the cost of assessing it [open source] was greater than the cost of the software, you would have to think twice.'"
There is definitely a "certain degree" of lock-in, but it's like being trapped in a prison with a key-making machine and full details on every lock in the place. Sure, it'll take a bit of time and effort, but you can get out pretty simply.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
I'm curious. Who do you get for support for Microsoft products. Does Microsoft offer support? And by support I mean, if there is a bug in Word corrupting your mission critical documents, will they promise to fix it? And will they give you a projected time for completion on the work. And will they give you periodic updates? And will they send you a patched version as soon as it is fixed? How much does that kind of support cost? Are you sure it's really cheaper than an open source project?
And what happens when Microsoft "End-Of-Life"s a product? Can you get support from a third party? Can you develop internal resources to provide support and add small features? Or do you have to simply buy whatever Microsoft replacing it with, regardless of whether or not it fits your needs?
And when you say that finding people able to do internal support (I assume first level support, since you can't really do anything else with proprietary software) is easier and cheaper with more popular software, isn't this simply a training issue? Do you really have such a high turnover rate in your company that most of them were trained in using software at their previous job? Or are most of them trained at your company, meaning that it doesn't matter if it's the most popular software or not -- It just matters that you can find initial training at a reasonable cost?
Certainly I think it's a good idea to get support for software you buy. However, I have never worked at a proprietary company that offered anything resembling what I think of as support. "Support" in the industry means get the off the phone as quickly as possible because every minute on the phone eats your entire profit. Sure we did special one-off deals for customers who bought 10,000 copies of our software, but we gave them a bloody hard time of it. If they didn't threaten to not upgrade to the next version, they wouldn't get anything at all. We might fix their bug in the next service pack, or maybe not, at the whim of the program manager.
Real support, meaning having someone who is contractually obliged to help you when your software doesn't work for you only seems to be available for custom built software. And if you aren't getting source with your custom built software, you're getting ripped off.
Or at least that's been my experience. It would be interesting to see how your experience differs.
It's worth noting that the economies are slightly different if you are a government. By nature, a government is a monopoly and benefits directly (in terms of tax revenue) from increases in the local economy. If software doesn't do what the government needs, they hire local programmers. This means that the money is staying in the local economy, rather than going abroad, and so they get more tax money: They'll get some percentage back immediately in income tax, while they'll get nothing back from foreign purchases. Then they'll get more back from sales tax, and so on, as the local programmers buy things. If they then release their changes, then that means that the software is now better and will benefit companies. Some of them will then be able to use it unmodified, and spend money on other things, rather than send it to a foreign corporation.
Overall, spending $1m on Microsoft software might, for a government, be a worse decision than spending $2m on hippyware.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Similar scenario.
I'm interning at a 25 person non-profit. They were putting thousands into Exchange. I did 4 things:
1. Switched them over to Google Apps for free. Saved them loads of money, and they all love having the ease of access. To the exchange admin below, suck it. Seriously, that one outage was nowhere near as bad as the spam problems and other hassles an offsite exchange server created.
2. Got the people who "just couldn't" use gmail's web interface copies of Outlook 2007 through techsoup. Which, after 3 months of switching, was only the secretary and the president.
3. Switched our 5-computer lab for visitors and program members over to linuxmint. It needs no configuration, let alone administration, and its better than the prior windows 2000 by far.
4. Set up Hamachi for remote file access, because nobody used the VPN anyways (cause "my home computer is so slow and full of WeatherBug!").
5. Set up an open source phone server. It was a PITA, but it was WAY better than renting terrible equipment from the phone company.