Valencia Linux School Distro Saves 36 Million Euro

jrepin (667425) writes "The government of the autonomous region of Valencia (Spain) earlier this month made available the next version of Lliurex, a customisation of the Edubuntu Linux distribution. The distro is used on over 110,000 PCs in schools in the Valencia region, saving some 36 million euro over the past nine years, the government says." I'd lke to see more efforts like this in the U.S.; if mega school districts are paying for computers, I'd rather they at least support open source development as a consequence.

Comments

I'd be careful of these stats

[Anonymous Coward]

The region of Valencia has the highest debt of all Spain and has been part of many corruption scandals usually involving stupid expenses, like an airport nobody uses and has cost the citizens millions. Now they claim they are saving money. Yeah, right, only after firing the whole public TV sector in order to save millions. TV sector which coincidentally started to reveal the corruption *after* they were fired, but not while they were being pampered by bribes...

Re:I'd be careful of these stats

[ruir]

One does not need to be the brightest bulb to understand TV reporters have salaries akin to football players for some very odd reason.

TCO

[rsilvergun]

At the risk of being modded troll I'll ask if anyone knows the TCO on these Linux roll outs. If Spain has lower tech wages it might be much lower than Windows, but in the United States at least there's tonnes of cheap Windows IT gurus but if you want someone that can admin your Linux boxes you'll pay through the nose. Google Docs and other web apps might be changing that though, at least until you hit college.

Re:TCO

[cheesybagel]

From my experience you need less Linux sysadmins to begin with. Its easier to do remote admin. So the TCO numbers Microsoft claims are usually bullshit.

Re:TCO

[thesupraman]

This.
Most Microsoft TCO analysis involves:

All equipment being re-purchased to use linux, and then replaced at the standard windows replacement rates, which is BS.
All administration staff to be assumed to be windows trained but zero knowledge of linux, but are retained, and consultants bought in to run linux
All microsoft user end software to still be supported (outlook, windows web frontends, databases, office 'apps', etc), requiring additional complexity and many many retained windows servers and workstations.
Basically they create a horrific hybrid solution required to support any and all historical solutions, keep all the baggage from windows they can, then point out that it costs more.

The fact is that any reasonably well planned transition is just that - a transition.
And the savings are clear and obvious, as more and more locations are finding.
Hell, even the savings of transitioning backend servers to Linux, and frontend software to OSS, while retaining windows for users, are huge.

Re:TCO

[Anonymous Coward]

Given this TCO analysis, nobody should ever switch from an old windows version to a more recent one, the risk of offtime and stolen data would be cheaper.

Re:TCO

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting AC because this will elicit knee-jerk responses:

When I was in college, Macs were primarly used, then Linux. However, the second one graduated, one faced a world that is all Windows. Not Zimbra, but Exchange/OWA. Not Thunderbird, but Outlook. Not OpenOffice, but LibreOffice. To boot, being versed in MS's way of things is the difference between getting a job versus not.

Then there is the vast gulf between Linux enthusiasts versus Linux IT people.

Yes, one can use Linux to route iSCSI over a Wi-Fi connection. However, there is a big difference between doing stuff on a desktop distribution of Ubuntu versus working out how to deal with security rules, regulations, internal company policy, and hardware, then deploying an "approved" distribution, making sure it works with AD and has McAfee installed on it [1].

There is also a difference between installing Linux on an old P3 versus lighting off servers via iLO, having them PXE boot and install with different server configurations.

For maintaining commercial Linux distros, there are supported ways and unsupported. This is important on production machines and clusters. Yes, one can grab source and slap on files, but the real way is to use signed files (be it RPM, .deb, or whatnot.)

Oh, and of course, upgrading willy-nilly is a no-no. Slap RedHat or CentOS 7 on existing 6.5 installs, and shit breaks. Shit will break big time.

tl;dr: The world runs on Windows, and the school does a disservice to the students by not preparing them for reality.

[1]: Linux doesn't need AV, but there are a lot of companies that sign some sheet saying "all servers will have AV protection on them." So, McAfee goes onto the Solaris LDOMs, the AIX LPARs, and the Linux VMs. This makes sure a checkbox is ticked for the legal eagles.

Re:TCO

[julian67]

That's probably the best short description of Microsoft's TCO comparisons that I've seen, thank you.

Re:TCO

[characterZer0]

Because shit won't break trying to upgrade from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2008?

Re:TCO

[LordLimecat]

I agreed with everything until here:

And the savings are clear and obvious, as more and more locations are finding.

This reeks of "Linux is the hammer for every problem" thinking. What if they require Quickbooks server? What if they have tried alternatives, but indicate that they need Microsoft Publisher, or Excel? I have heard all three of these before, and they make me hesitate to say "screw what you think you need, we're changing everything because FOSS!"

Sometimes its feasible. Sometimes you're just creating headaches and big sunk costs of conversion for no real reason.

Re:TCO

[guruevi]

Any sysadmin worth their salt is going to cost a pretty penny. If you cheap out on the workers, you'll get what you pay for including multi-million dollar license fees. The license fees for MS products in EDU is currently at ~$1000/year/FTE or full-time student. You only need to have ~50-150 people total (depending on your area) to pay for a good sysadmin.

Re:TCO

[Culture20]

This is a mistaken belief. Windows is actually pretty easy to mass-admin remotely, even with built-in windows services (not relying on SSH). But... Windows admins who know how to mass-admin boxes remotely usually get paid as much as Linux admins. Usually because once they've gotten to this point, they've gotten *nix under their belt.

Re: TCO

[Anonymous Coward]

When a customer says "I need", what you should be hearing is " I've only been trained on " or "this is what my boss who knows little to nothing about my job is requiring me to choose".

Re:TCO

[Anonymous Coward]

Some time ago someone built their business practices around the tools that were available on the platform they chose at the time. If they choose a new platform there should be an expectation of flexibility in the business practices to match the new platform. It doesn't matter which direction you go or what you're changing. It will never be 100% the same as the old solution.

Re:TCO

[FatLittleMonkey]

Good point, thesupraman forgot one additional MS TCO assumption:

"There's no ongoing transitional costs from Microsoft upgrades."

Microsoft only compares with a stable Win/Office environment. But often these transitions to Linux/FOSS are made in the face of a major Windows/Office upgrade. So the comparison is "Transition to FOSS vs Transition to different MS-ware".

Re:TCO

[CaptainDork]

t hurts the ability to ask questions knowing that people are too emotionally invested about being modded or having a particular karma.

Re:TCO

[Ol Olsoc]

Posting AC because this will elicit knee-jerk responses..

tl;dr: The world runs on Windows, and the school does a disservice to the students by not preparing them for reality.

And will forever, until the end of time. Just like MS-DOS.

Congratulations, bringing biblical style circular arguments to the world of computers.

Windows is the gold standard because it is the gold standard because it is the gold standard. World without end, amen.

Re:TCO

[sjames]

The savings remain clear and obvious, they just can't take advantage of it. It does give them a real measure of the cost of sticking with those apps.

Re:TCO

[Retron]

It's actually nowhere near that, at least in the UK. (Disclaimer: I work in a school in the IT department).

The actual cost is based on the number of full-time *staff*, not pupils, and the rates are far lower than the $1000/year you quote. This gets you Office, Windows, all the CALs you need, SCCM and lots more besides. You still have to pay for server licences (Windows and SQL), but they're deeply discounted.

I don't know what it's like in the States, but in the UK school sysadmins (or network managers, to give them their more usual titles) will be on salaries of around £16K to £30K - or $27K to $50K, more biased towards the low end rather than the high end of the wage bracket. Or, at least, that's the going rate down here in the far SE of England. In our case, that involves using VMWare products, such as vSphere and ESXi, in addition to the various Windows servers.

NB, I got into this by playing games, as an earlier poster mentioned - it's a common thing to use Windows at home for games, as I did over 20 years ago, then start networking PCs, move on to running a home server or using server products on a home PC and so on. I made the jump with Windows 2000 (when I was at Uni), as Microsoft kindly sent out CDs of their server products to anyone who asked. Yes, they only lasted for 180 days unless you tinkered with registry files, but it was enough to ignite the spark. These days of course pupils and students get the full thing from Dreamspark.

I don't have an MSCE. Never saw the point of them, I prefer academic qualifications as it shows you're capable of learning anything rather than a specific method of one vendor's products. I'd never rule out a move to Linux, but for now our Microsoft-based network is serving us well.

Re:TCO

[skovnymfe]

You can use your Puppet/Chef tool to generate DSC information for Server 2012+. Was it hard 10 years ago? Sure. These days? Not so much. There's just the problem that Linux admins are so inherently afraid of Windows that they'd never dare keep up with what's going on with it, out of fear of being rejected by their *NIX peers, and Windows people have a disturbing tendency to stop learning as soon as they figure out they can open up GUI interfaces.

Re:TCO

[ruir]

And there are no antivirus costs for *every* workstation and *every* server.

Re:TCO

[hawkinspeter]

My experience is the opposite of yours with installing Windows/Linux. I've found that ghosting Windows installs requires that the hardware be virtually identical. Having a different disk controller, or switching between ATA and AHCI modes usually causes blue screens and failure to boot. Any modern Linux distro, however can quite happily run even by putting the installed hard disk into a completely different machine.

Re:TCO

[aaaaaaargh!]

The goal of school education in computers is not to prepare pupils to use commercial software and become better consumerists. They already know how to use commercial software anyway, most of them even better than their teachers. What they lack and need to learn is the fundamentals of how computers work, how operating systems work, what safety and security means (especially online), and the basics of programming. In a nutshell: No, Windows is definitely not needed or desirable in schools. To be fair, iPads and Android tablets are even less useful, because it is almost impossible to teach programming on them in a fruitful way.

I'd even go farther and state the obvious that commercial software packages should be banned in public institutions entirely when there is an acceptable free substitute for them.

To give a typical example of how Windows computers are used in such environments, our institute at a public university in Europe has dozens of +5 years old PCs that are overloaded with tons of viruses and trojans and the crappy paid anti-virus we're using fails to detect them. The machines have become even slower after they had to be upgraded from XP to Windows 7 recently. I've test run Ubuntu on one of them for years and it worked better and faster in each and every respect except compatibility of LibreOffice with Word (which is broken intentionally by Microsoft, but strange enough it also breaks routinely between versions of their own software). The tax payer is paying huge fees to Microsoft with no benefits at all - and you have to check your USB stick for viruses each time you've used one of those machines.

Re:TCO

[aztracker1]

The last time I installed linux... I had only my SSD plugged in... when I connected my other drives everything was fine, then I ran updates a few days later... part of the updates included an update to grub, which after said update would no longer boot. This was a fresh install of Ubuntu 12.04 a couple years ago. Prior to that, my attempt for linux as my primary desktop OS was in 2006 which resulted in a lot of effort to get both 3D acceleration and multi-monitor support... prior to that, was a regression issue with intel video drivers on a laptop selected for linux back in 2004 (or so) that made it unable to watch youtube videos, or play frozen bubble... Every time I've tried linux as my primary desktop, I hit a level of frustration that is intolerable. I have a Cubox-i4-pro that was doing XBMC chores (for two months) that now won't boot, not sure why... I use linux without a GUI for servers... I am building a new version of the web apps at work targeting node (to run in linux) and find that android works pretty damned well. All of that said, I'll take my macbook or windows desktop over another attempt at using linux for my primary desktop OS... I don't have the free time or patience to deal with edge cases that seem to pile up to unusable solutions. I've tried Linux on the desktop and it failed repeatedly.

Re:TCO

[hawkinspeter]

It's a shame you didn't persist as most boot/grub errors are generally quite easy to fix. Most of the time, you can boot from CD/usb stick and repair the grub install within about 5 minutes.

Still, if you don't want to use it, use something else. Choice and competition are good.

Re:TCO

[jabuzz]

Problem is that in the U.K. school I.T. is for the most part appalling. I work in I.T. support in the University sector and I see for first hand the difference between that and school I.T. that my sister has to suffer as a teacher as I supplement the rubbish I.T. support with actually useful support that is not a bunch of lies and half truths.

The difference is that pay rate of the staff involved. The university sector pays significantly more than the school sector for the same skills, easily £10k more. I know I have read job adverts for school I.T. support and would not bother applying for the money they offer.

To put it succinctly "pay peanuts get monkies" and £16k for a I.T. admin is going to get you a monkey that is only capable of doing the bare basic desktop support tasks. If you do get lucky and get someone capable of more they will quickly move on because you get better pay elsewhere.

Re:TCO

[Lumpy]

"but in the United States at least there's tonnes of cheap Windows IT gurus "

No we do not have many "gurus" we have a lot of poesurs that THINK they know something about windows and PC's in general and can fake it well enough in front of people that dont know to keep their jobs. but they are NOT Guru level by any stretch of the imagination.

The Windows Gurus that are really good at their jobs command the same salary as linux guys. No matter what Guru level means you get paid a lot. Everyone not getting paid a lot are not even close to Guru.

Want an example? Look at the morons all working at best buy, They can barely use a mouse.

Re:TCO

[Lumpy]

"Oh, and of course, upgrading willy-nilly is a no-no. Slap RedHat or CentOS 7 on existing 6.5 installs, and shit breaks. Shit will break big time."

Oh, and of course, upgrading willy-nilly is a no-no. Slap Windows 8.1 on existing Windows 7 installs, and shit breaks. Shit will break big time.

So please tell me how this is any different?

Re:TCO

[pla]

From my experience you need less Linux sysadmins to begin with. Its easier to do remote admin. So the TCO numbers Microsoft claims are usually bullshit.

You have thought about that in terms of doing machine-by-machine maintenance. A large school district has a similar topology to a large enterprise corporation - thousands of systems spread out over dozens or hundreds of sites, with dozens or hundreds of different user-types grouped by function, having various seemingly-arbitrary blocking and auditability rules, and possible liability for certain types of breach, etc.

For maintaining a farm of identical servers, I agree with you completely. For maintaining Grandma's desktop remotely, I agree with you completely. But for maintaining an enterprise desktop environment, Microsoft simply has the best tools for the job. Linux AD-via-Samba quite simply doesn't even come close for the convenience of centralized GP maintenance, and has aothing anywhere near the convenience of drag-and-drop group-based software installation (though Linux does have non-stock application deployment packages available, like Puppet, that partially fill that last point). Linux has nothing even remotely like (W)SUS. And those two alone count as complete showstoppers when it comes to minimizing the number of people required to maintain a large network.

I love Linux, I use Linux, but Linux at the enterprise scale amounts to a non-starter.

Of course, the biggest irony here, school districts don't tend to use Windows, either - They loooove them some Apple products, which have all the same problems described above, plus the pricetag (not saying Apples still cost more, but they don't come free). So in that sense, yes, I can see how Linux would save school districts a hefty chunk of money; at some scale, however, you'll find that switching to MS would likely save money vs the overhead of sys/net ops and helpdesk staff.

Re:TCO

[Retron]

It's nothing to do with pay, more what managers expect from their staff. Some schools are happy to put up with poor infrastructure and so on, while others, such as the one I work in, pride themselves on offering an up-to-date network for the students. (We skipped Windows 8 though, sticking with Windows 7 x64 - and getting old educational programs working with that was no mean feat!)

You won't have any problems around here recruiting tech support staff for £12 to £14K. I was effectively running the school network on a salary of £17K last year and I wouldn't describe myself as a monkey. Far from it, unless you count administering Exchange, AD, creating build images, SCCM etc as monkey work (which is isn't).

Re: TCO

[gomiam]

No. Unfortunately they usually don't. I support a university campus and I'm tired (not really, but it gets boring) of being asked for copies of university software by students for whom there is no licenced copy available. The reason? The teacher will be accostumed to using that software and doesn't even consider changing to another.

Mind you, I'm not even talking about changing to Linux or some open source program. I'm talking about students (teachers too) persistently asking for Windows XP-compatible software to be installed in their Windows 8 computers when we aren't allowed to do it and asking for us to help them when the magically appearing copy of our licenced software doesn't work with their computers' Windows 7 or 8</semi-rant>

So no, they usually don't know better: they stumbled upon the software (or were taught to use it by someone who already used it) and never looked back. I have even had teachers tell me (because some licenced-software seller told them) that the costless option I suggest is worse when the licenced version is the same software with some useless extras bolted in (and yes, I mean useless extras because they can be substituted with standard Windows software).

Re:TCO

[cdrudge]

No, Windows is definitely not needed or desirable in schools.

And then in 99% of entry level interviews in the Real World, the freshly out of school candidate gets screwed over because while they may be equal in every other way, a job that requires use of Word and Excel is going to take the candidate that has Word and Excel experience over the one that doesn't.

Not saying that it's right or fair, just explaining the reality of the situation. My wife just found a job after looking for the better part of 8 months. It's not entry level, but it's not too far from it. She only had to look at probably a 1000 different job posting at that time an a large percentage of them explicitly stated they were looking for someone with Word/Excel/Office experience. Don't have it? You quickly get moved to the top of the stack in the circular file cabinet.

Re: TCO

[websitebroke]

Sometimes, yes, sometimes, no. Customers definitely DO have legitimate needs sometimes. Sure, for 90% of what MS-Office users do, Libre Office would be fine. Not so with Photoshop vs GIMP. Gimp is close and getting closer, but not enough for the moment.

Re:TCO

[websitebroke]

Yes, I'd love to see more use of open source software in government. Find me an free software replacement for Systems Toolkit, and we'll talk.

Re:TCO

[mpe]

From my experience you need less Linux sysadmins to begin with. Its easier to do remote admin.

Also whilst there might be plenty of MSCEs highly skilled Windows sysadmins are hard to find. (They might even be the same people as Linux sysadmins...) There's also a certain irony in "Power Shell" becoming an important Windows admin tool.

So the TCO numbers Microsoft claims are usually bullshit.

TCO numbers are generally political bovine excrement. It dosn't matter if they are applied to computer software, electricity generation or whatever. Usually trick is to ignore some of costs associated with the "right" choice.

Re:TCO

[mpe]

Some time ago someone built their business practices around the tools that were available on the platform they chose at the time. If they choose a new platform there should be an expectation of flexibility in the business practices to match the new platform. It doesn't matter which direction you go or what you're changing. It will never be 100% the same as the old solution.

That's true even if you "stick with" Microsoft. With many organisations just recently having undergone a very complex and painful migration from Windows XP (plus Office 2003) to Windows 7/8 (plus Office 2010/2013).
With the irony that a change to Ubuntu (plus LibreOffice) may have been less of a shock to the end users.

Re:TCO

[hawkinspeter]

You're right. Most of the updates I've done on a variety of Linux boxes have not caused any problems - even upgrading from different OS versions (e.g. Ubuntu 12.04 -> Ubuntu 14.04) have proceeded fine. There have been a few occasions where Grub has got confused or distribution upgrades have failed due to LD_LIBRARY_PATH being set etc. However, every OS has had issues with bugs and updates.

You shouldn't need to make a bootable USB as typically, you'd have the media that you originally installed the OS with (DVD or USB or network install). If not, then it's easy to borrow someone else's system long enough to download and burn another copy of it (unless you're in Windows OEM hell).

Re:TCO

[Jesus_666]

It's the opposite for me. Setting up a Windows box generally requires a second computer to hunt down various drivers without which Windows can't access the internet. Setting up a Linux box requires only the USB stick you put the installer on and an hour of your time. In my experience, with a distro like Ubuntu or Mint setting up Linux requires zero effort beyond deciding on what your partition scheme should be and you generally get better performance (modulo availability of 3D acceleration) than with a Windows install.

Now, I use all three major desktop OSes. Once it's set up Windows is okay. It just doesn't have the fire-and-forget nature of Linux (where installing most software you need requires nothing more than a short incantation) or the polished UI of OS X (despite Apple's efforts to make it worse).

I admit that my Linux boxen are usually not exactly cutting-edge devices. I don't use 3D acceleration on them and video playback doesn't go beyond YouTube. That may be a factor in why I find the OS to be easy to take care of.

Re: TCO

[mpe]

I support a university campus and I'm tired (not really, but it gets boring) of being asked for copies of university software by students for whom there is no licenced copy available. The reason? The teacher will be accostumed to using that software and doesn't even consider changing to another.

Both the students and the teachers don't understand how software licencing works. Ironically OSS can easily be used the way they want.

Mind you, I'm not even talking about changing to Linux or some open source program. I'm talking about students (teachers too) persistently asking for Windows XP-compatible software to be installed in their Windows 8 computers when we aren't allowed to do it and asking for us to help them when the magically appearing copy of our licenced software doesn't work with their computers' Windows 7 or 8

Even if a piece OSS written for Windows XP refuses to run/install under Windows 7/8 there are several possible ways to fix this. Whereas with proprietary software you are utterly at the "mercy" of the vendor. They may have gone out of businessor only want to sell a much later version.

Re:TCO

[mpe]

My experience is the opposite of yours with installing Windows/Linux. I've found that ghosting Windows installs requires that the hardware be virtually identical. Having a different disk controller, or switching between ATA and AHCI modes usually causes blue screens and failure to boot.

My experience is that it's Windows which is a lot more fussy about hardware and imaging that Linux. This having been the case for at least 15 years. Even to the point of Windows wanting reinstall drivers when a USB device changes which USB port it is plugged into.

Any modern Linux distro, however can quite happily run even by putting the installed hard disk into a completely different machine.

Ironically it's fairly recent additions to Linux, such as UDEV "persistant-rules" and using disk UUIDs which can make this more complex than it was in the past.

Re:TCO

[Mark of the North]

I generally agree except for the install-time bit. My last job was as the technical director for a school division. We ran mostly Windows on user machines and mostly Linux on the back-end. I did a lot of installs of both Windows (XP & 7) and Linux (Ubuntu Server) over those years.

Getting XP or 7 to the point where one could image it onto a bunch of other machines took us at least a day. We didn't leverage AD as much as we could. If that were the case, it likely would have taken less time, but I'm not sure how much. Installing updates was, by far, the most time-consuming part. We tried to schedule that for the end of the day so the bulk of it would be done by morning. Next up was setting up the software suite, and then the virus scan and disk compaction. Finally, the little details about the desktop environment needed to be dialed in before imaging.

Setting up Ubuntu Server on a box took under an hour. Our procedure for setting up a file-server (which included several other services) could be executed in at most three hours. Heck, on Friday, I upgraded an Ubuntu desktop box (with a RAID array that needed to be preserved) from 12.04 to 14.04 in a bit over an hour. The hard part was backing up the most important bits of data. The actual upgrade was painless...except for the corrupt USB-key I made the first attempt with.

We didn't really image Linux machines because they were generally back-end servers, but it was something I looked into with some depth. Basically, because of the effort Canonical put into supporting Ubuntu on VMs, it was a piece of cake. I was actually more interested in network booting ala the Linux Terminal Server Project, but the truth is that I would have been drawn-and-quartered if I put any distribution of Linux onto a machine when a teacher didn't demand it. The teachers ran the show. A situation that was mostly fine, but horrible in some areas (ie. security).

Re:TCO

[mpe]

For maintaining a farm of identical servers, I agree with you completely. For maintaining Grandma's desktop remotely, I agree with you completely. But for maintaining an enterprise desktop environment, Microsoft simply has the best tools for the job. Linux AD-via-Samba quite simply doesn't even come close for the convenience of centralized GP maintenance, and has aothing anywhere near the convenience of drag-and-drop group-based software installation (though Linux does have non-stock application deployment packages available, like Puppet, that partially fill that last point). Linux has nothing even remotely like (W)SUS. And those two alone count as complete showstoppers when it comes to minimizing the number of people required to maintain a large network.

On the other hand Windows dosn't have anything like apt :) or the ability to replace major sections of the system without rebooting.
The whole idea of "deploying" applications is very much a "Windows way of doing things" too. In many cases even Windows applications can run from networked drives.
There's also the Windows profile mechanism, with it's half baked writeback caching, which makes no sense at all in many situations.

Re:TCO

[mpe]

Because shit won't break trying to upgrade from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2008?

How about from Windows 2008 to Windows 2008 R2 :)

Re:TCO

[mpe]

"the world runs windows?" have you ever entered in a real server room? do you know google, facebook, yahoo, rackspace and every other "big player" on internet?

Even if they just ment "on the desktop" Do they mean Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 ? (Not even considering the various sub versions of these.) There might even be some Win95, Win98, WinME, NT4, Windows 2000 still around. Commercial companies can be very reluctant to spend money "fixing" something which isn't "broken".

Re:TCO

[hawkinspeter]

I often delete the relevant /etc/udev/rules.d/ files if I'm installing a virtual image as the changing MACs and UUIDs can be more complex to manage. Sometimes, you know that the machine will only ever have one disk and one network card.

Re: TCO

[LordLimecat]

It sounds indeed like you're hearing, but not listening.

You are there to facilitate the customer's needs, not vice versa.

Re: TCO

[LordLimecat]

If the customer hates it, you arent doing them any favors. Try a 2-3 month trial, if it turns out they hate it and / or have installed office on the sly (I've seen this), give it up and accept that Office is worth the licensing cost to them.

This isnt an ideological fight, its the real world where the goal is to produce things, not prove a point.

Re:TCO

[LordLimecat]

You wanna be the person to tell the guy in charge of Payroll "you need to redo about 3 months worth of work because I have an ideological hangup about proprietary software"? Have fun with that.

Re: TCO

[gomiam]

At the mercy of the vendor and the ability of your sysadmins to fool the program to run on Windows 7/8. I mean, it is an interesting challenge but I could do perfectly without it :-)

Re:TCO

[Culture20]

this "low cost, low skill" Windows admin myth drives me insane

To be fair, it's not a myth (in the colloquial or academic sense). Windows is "easy", allowing for low cost, low skill "admins" who do everything via GUI and one machine at a time (or maybe many if you include AD and GPOs). Same with OSX (with ARD and OpenDirectory for the "mass-admining"). I've known guys that get paid more than myself who didn't want to understand any command line stuff.

But in the *nix world, if you don't know a shell, you're not even a user, let alone a sysadmin.

Re:TCO

[steveg]

That's been my experience as well. Base install of Mint might take 15 or 20 minutes, futzing around to get just the desktop setup I want maybe an hour or two. Cloning the result to different hardware is no problem under Linux, but has always been a problem under Windows.

When I create a base Windows machine to clone, now *that's* a time sink.

Re:TCO

[Culture20]

But to further clarify, our context was mass administration, which actually requires substantial Powershell knowledge to do...pretty much at all.

Bzzzt. A Windows admin at a medium sized org can get by doing mass administration with just Active Directory/GPO clickity clicks. It's not as efficient, but it works.

you're living in another world if you think *nix admins are some sort of gods when compared to their Windows counterparts

Apparently you didn't read my first post in this thread. A competent 'doze admin is on par with a competent *nix admin. But the *nix admin *has* to do things the command line way for mass-admining, because the GUI just isn't there.

And just so we're clear, I've managed (as an admin not a user) numerous versions of Windows (starting with 98se through 2012), Unices (including HP-UX, Solaris, and IRIX), Linux (RedHat, RHEL, Fedora, Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu, Suse, SLE[S/D], Mandrake...), and Macintosh (not counting OSX which is rolled into the Unix bunch). I will admit that there were a lot of GUIfied admin tools for Solaris and IRIX, but nothing like AD's "click a check box and every machine tied to a computer object in tbe OU now has the following mandatory setting that a local admin can't modify".

Re:TCO

[Ol Olsoc]

You know what else does people a disservice? Training people to mindlessly use a certain OS. Anyone with a brain should be able to use just about any OS or piece of software with a bit of reading and exploration.

Come on - mod this guy up!. The insistence on a monoculture by some folks is the source of a lot of problems, and th epursuit ok knowledge is almost always a very good thing.

Just watch me get modded as troll for saying knowledge is good.

Re:TCO

[Rutulian]

(though Linux does have non-stock application deployment packages available, like Puppet, that partially fill that last point).

You're kidding right? In addition to Puppet, which is a relative newcomer, there has been Satellite (http://www.redhat.com/products/enterprise-linux/satellite/) and Landscape (http://www.ubuntu.com/management/landscape-features) among others (Suse has one too). Where do you think the distros make their money? Now you may have meant there is no free application deployment and management software, but last time I checked Windows Server was definitely not free. If you need free, though, you can roll some scripts fairly easily, wrapping things like Kickstart with custom repositories (yum or apt) and services like Cobbler or Spacewalk (which Satellite is based off of), rsync, cron jobs, and ssh (for remote execution).

Linux AD-via-Samba quite simply doesn't even come close for the convenience of centralized GP maintenance,

I don't know what you are trying to say here. Why would you manage linux machines with a Samba domain? If you want the same functionality as AD on linux, FreeIPA is the most mature project, and it can integrate with AD via cross-realm trusts in the latest version. So you can manage a mixed Windows/Linux environment with the same core infrastructure. If instead you meant Samba as an AD domain controller for Windows, Samba4 is (mostly, 95%) a drop-in replacement for Windows Server. There are a few features missing, but you can provision and manage an AD domain via Samba with ease.

Re:TCO

[LordLimecat]

Changing workstations is a huge change, but at least you're not tossing the infrastructure.

Tossing both the enduser side AND the infrastructure side all at once is a surefire recipe for disaster, pissed off end users, and IT staffing changes.

Re:TCO

[beastofburdon]

I take it you haven't used Linux since the floppy disk era of which you speak. I do Windows and Linux installs all the time for my job and Linux is far easier and takes less time to install and update than Windows. Apparently the only distro you are familiar with is Gentoo, since you seem to think that you need to compile everything you install on Linux. We haven't needed to do that for many years.
Why do you think that students will have a hard time with remote access to their data? There are many different ways for them to access data remotely in Linux. And about the cloud, damn near every cloud service works on Linux.
I can only conclude that you have had your head stuck in a hole filled with Microsoft propaganda for at least the last decade.

Re:TCO

[beastofburdon]

Funny you mention such problems. I have had Windows fail catastrophically from updates more times than Linux since I started using Linux.

Re: TCO

[gozar]

As someone who is doing Linux in schools, let me correct a few things. - Imaging isn't done anymore, except for a base image with nothing installed. The tools to manage machines can take care of anything that needs to be set. - To set up our 1:1 Linux desktops we boot from the network, enter the machine name and user name, and walk away. Ubuntu installs with minimal software and Puppet. Everything else is configured through Puppet. Configuration includes software to be installed and creating the username and password of the student that is assigned to the laptop. We haven't hopped on the Chromebook bandwagon. Linux can do everything Chromebooks can do but so much more.

Re:TCO

[jbolden]

I'll ask if anyone knows the TCO on these Linux roll outs.

There haven't been many lately. About a decade ago they were popular. You have to classify 3 groups of rollouters.

a) Companies that never had much of a Windows culture. Often their desktops were mostly Windows running terminals, X-Stations (or windows as an X-client)... The servers were SCO, Solaris, HPUX, AIX... They converted to Linux cheaply and easily.

b) Companies that were mid sized or small and highly motivated. Generally the owner pushed this through over all objections. They converted but often broke enterprise systems.

c) Companies that were highly motivated and larger. IBM, Oracle, Sun are good examples. Dismal embarrassing failures. Costs skyrocketed and they never managed to get off Windows.

d) Institutions that were only moderately motivated and larger but very patient willing to stay with it for a decade or more. Those have had successes and appear to have saved money. But the distraction factor was really high as "migrating to Linux" had to remain near the top of the IT agenda year after year after year affecting all sorts of purchasing and infrastructure projects.

In terms of your thing about support. Linux is much easier to support via. managed services. That's where the saving come from labor wise.

Will they invest any of the savings in Linux dev?

[Anonymous Coward]

Will they invest any of the 36 million Euro savings in Linux development or are they just free loaders?

Not everything that shines is gold...

[Lolaine]

First of all: Valencia is the most indebted region of Spain in relation to it's GDP (and second in monetary value) . Having spent billions on ill-fated projects (F1 track, Americas Cup, Arts and Science City) that have failed to meet economic returns. The former President resigned over corruption charges, Majors being investigated for contract mishandling and enrichment, a former governor in jailed this same week, etc... No thing that comes from this region is out of suspect.

This said, What it is commonly spoken about these projects is that they do not exist to leverage libre/opensource software on the school. They exist to praise regionalism of the different autonomies(regions) of Spain by local politicians, so, instead of viable ecosystems, they become second-choice-dual-boot-distros that exist to fill the pockets of several local companies (distro makers, maintainers, call-centers, certifiers...) that do literaly nothing contributing to the communities they get their software from.

Also, every region spent millions on creating their own distro, duplicating efforts (which is a clear indicator that it is a national-regionalist issue rather than a techno-economical one). If Extremadura has it distro, Andalusia also wants it and Valencia too.

Moreover, I put in doubt the claim that a somewhat high amount of Euros were saved whatsoever because educational licensing is usually done on a gubernamental level and not on a seat level.

So, this is only one more sample of PR-BS for me.

Re:Not everything that shines is gold...

[wvmarle]

At least in this case they made significant savings - or at least, so they claim. The question is now of course, how was this calculated, and will it pass muster if an independent accountant checks the figures.

It's harder to give economic returns of a F1 race track; even harder to make an overall profit on one.

Re:Not everything that shines is gold...

[ccguy]

First of all: Valencia is the most indebted region of Spain in relation to it's GDP (and second in monetary value) . Having spent billions on ill-fated projects (F1 track, Americas Cup, Arts and Science City) that have failed to meet economic returns. The former President resigned over corruption charges, Majors being investigated for contract mishandling and enrichment, a former governor in jailed this same week, etc... No thing that comes from this region is out of suspect.

Thank fuck someone replies knowing what they are talking about.

The last thing Valencia needs is someone putting it as an example of how to do things. Valencia is a corrupt region, and one where corruption is pretty much impossible to eradicate because voters continue to support corrupt politicians election after election, with justifications like "yeah, he stole a lot but he also built a great hospital", and shit like that.

If they moved to linux most likely is because they can't pay for Windows anymore. Or worse - they haven't paid invoices from Microsoft for years and MS is just fed up.

Re:Not everything that shines is gold...

[paugq]

In Valencia, they have actually replaced every Windows, Microsoft Office and any other non-FLOSS software with LliureX. It was done last year, when Microsoft threatened to take legal action after the regional government failed to pay for Microsoft licenses. LliureX had been languishing for years before that, after a huge hype, excitement and first deployments about 10 years ago.

Had Microsoft not threatened to take legal action, Linux would not be in use today. Thank you, Microsoft!

Re:Not everything that shines is gold...

[CronoCloud]

They exist to praise regionalism of the different autonomies(regions) of Spain by local politicians

What is up with that? Here in the states no one would even think of doing something like Californi-ux or Tex-ux, or Illini-ux. If some school district or state school administration wanted to switch to Linux they'd just choose edubuntu, or CentOS and be done with it. Why roll their own when they're perfectly suitable distros out there already.

Re:Not everything that shines is gold...

[mpe]

I wonder how much influence the absence of Valencian Catalan support in Windows but availability of support for at least large parts of Linux systems influenced the adoption of this system (Windows can apparently be made to display some of its UI in Catalan, but the translation is incomplete, and the local Valencian dialect of the language is entirely unsupported).

You also see something similar with the "English" version of Microsoft Windows. With only US specific spellings being used whatever the location is set to...

Re:Not everything that shines is gold...

[CronoCloud]

It's Spain, it's been united under one government for what...500 years now? It's time to give the regionalism a rest.

Re:Will they invest any of the savings in Linux de

[Skarjak]

The very first line of the summary says they're making available their own custom distro. So they're obviously not free loaders. FFS, I know that most people don't RTFA, but at least RTFS before bitching.

the difference is in the definition.

[nimbius]

European governments can easily claim theyve saved money by switching to open source software, whereas its almost impossible for the american governments education system to do so. Why? because europeans consider employees a resource whereas american government considers its employees an expenditure or overhead.

extra IT and teacher training are considered an expense in america, whereas outsourcing to Azure cloud services means only having to pay the license. We factor pensions and holiday pay into the cost of an educational employee, and morosely enough consider excess vacation time a financial liability. that license fee represents avoiding the cost of all this, so while it might add up in the long term to larger costs, it wont cost nearly as much as 14 new IT staff and 11 new teachers..

Re:Its all because of graphics drivers

[thesupraman]

Um, what?
Firstly, you are thinking that gaming is a primary must have application for schools? I am thinking you are a teen, right?
Secondly, you dont even know that NVidia linux graphics drivers are almost exactly on par with their windows cousins?

Sure, you wont run windows games on them - those are developed for WINDOWS, dumbarse.
OpenGL runs very will on both platforms, and certainly with NVidia with equial performance and stability. Linux is a fantastic graphics platform.
DirectX is continuously playing catchup.

Perhaps if you actually used computers, rather than treating them as a gaming console - you may learn something...

Re:Will they invest any of the savings in Linux de

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is FREE for anyone to use.
No such thing as a freeloader, or are you now saying large organisations must be forced to pay ?

Re:Will they invest any of the savings in Linux de

[cascadingstylesheet]

Will they invest any of the 36 million Euro savings in Linux development or are they just free loaders?

That's an odd perspective ... you can't have it both ways. If you want the freedom of the GPL, then you get ... the freedom of the GPL.

Re:LINUX ON DESKTOP HAS SAVED; ME!

[FatdogHaiku]

I think you're pronouncing that wrong...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSC11hLbM1w

Re:LINUX ON DESKTOP HAS SAVED; ME!

[FatdogHaiku]

I'm positive YOU are pronouncing that wrong...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSC11hLbM1w

Total Cost of being Owned

[Anonymous Coward]

I was once given the task to connect PERL DBI to a MS SQL Server. I searched for it and found that "SQL Server" is a Sybase dialect, and FreeTDS can read it's native format. I had the perl program in no time.

There are almost always effective libraries to read data from Microsoft products from Linux. Real SQL databases are large and hard to move, but most MS files can just be moved onto a Linux disk and used.

The Total Cost of being Owned by proprietary formats is quite high.

Re:Total Cost of being Owned

[LordLimecat]

Maybe.

Im just saying that sometimes the right answer is "yea, I guess you do need (/want) Office", rather than "I will make LibreOffice work or die trying".

Re:Its all because of graphics drivers

[jeIIomizer]

hence they learn windows

And they can learn other operating systems, too. Or do most people lack the cognitive ability to use more than one OS, and need crappy 'Microsoft Essentials' classes to teach them anything beyond how to game and access their Facebook accounts?

cheap shot

[Anonymous Coward]

> This is a mistaken belief. Windows is actually pretty easy to
> mass-admin remotely, even with built-in windows services

Just ask anyone running their own botnet!

Re:Will they invest any of the savings in Linux de

[DNS-and-BIND]

There is a perception among open source advocates that if open source software saves you money, you now owe some of that money to them. If you don't pay, you get called a freeloader. This agrees with the "from each according to his abilities" part of Marx's famous saying.

Re:Will they invest any of the savings in Linux de

[hawkinspeter]

Huh? I've heard of commercial companies getting criticised for not giving back code changes even though they're making money from OSS, but I think you're very mistaken.

36 million euro

[korbulon]

or 48 million dolla.

Re:Will they invest any of the savings in Linux de

[paugq]

There are/have been several Debian developers in their payroll: Jordi Mallach, Miquel Gea and others.

Good use of GCompris

[xarma]

As the developper of the educational software GCompris ( http://gcompris.net/ ), I am glad to see how far they went in their project. Just looked at their documentation and it is really impressive. It is really motivating for free software developpers to see our work is useful.

Wont happen here in the USA for two reasons....

[Lumpy]

1 - Schools in the USA do not hire competent IT or Teachers that can handle a powerful Operating system like Linux. Actually paying for competent staff is outside of their budget.
2 - Microsoft will quickly give the schools all the free licenses they want for the OS, Office, etc.. if they even threaten to switch to anything else.

Microsoft knows that if you dont get the children hooked when they are young, they might use their curiosity and explore other operating systems. And we cant have that.

Re:Its all because of graphics drivers

[gomiam]

Or do most people lack the cognitive ability to use more than one OS, and need crappy 'Microsoft Essentials' classes to teach them anything beyond how to game and access their Facebook accounts?

They lack the interest the same way someone who learns driving an automatic usually has little interest in learning to drive a stick-shift (actually, here in Spain there are very few automatic transmission cars so everyone needs to know about the stick-shift, but I digress).

I deal with last-year undergraduates who still don't know about Word styles, who still write the content tables by hand (because they don't know about the possibility of using the title styles in their Word documents). Believe me, they don't care to investigate in most cases.

Actually, most of them still will put text walls in their Powerpoint presentations so they can read them. And yes, they usually had classes about it in high school. But they didn't care.

Re:LINUX ON DESKTOP HAS SAVED; ME!

[NotDrWho]

Actually, 2023 will actually be the year of Linux on the desktop. Unfortunately, it will also be the year of the alien invasion.

Re:Distro's popularity...

[ruir]

I wonder why at regional level, and not only spain, there are a proliferation of local-made distros, and "local made" computers, when a customised preseeding would do the job on a current distro, and a contract with a twainese supplier would be so much better and cheaper.

Re:Will they invest any of the savings in Linux de

[Osgeld]

what does saving tax money have to do with contributing back to open software

Re:Will they invest any of the savings in Linux de

[hobarrera]

Making it available doesn't mean they're giving back any of those 36M though. It's pretty cheap to make it available once comparted to creating it.

The real question is: how mucho of those 36M will be reinvested into FLOSS development.

Re:Will they invest any of the savings in Linux de

[Skarjak]

I honestly don't think they have any duty to give back any more than they're doing now. Do you donate 100$ everytime you install linux on a computer? Cause that's what it would have cost you otherwise. I know for sure that almost no one does. It's nice if they decide to give back but they have no responsability to do so. The whole concept of "freeloaders" is laughable to be honest. I thought one of the primary visions behind FLOSS was that information should be free? I guess if you view open source as merely a means to an end, you might think such a thing as a freeloader could exist, but I completely disagree with that vision.

Re:Will they invest any of the savings in Linux de

[hobarrera]

I honestly don't think they have any duty to give back any more than they're doing now.

Nor do I. They have no obligations. Nobody implied that. We just said not doing so made them freeloaders.

Do you donate 100$ everytime you install linux on a computer? Cause that's what it would have cost you otherwise.

I do not. I do collaborate by open sourcing most of me development, and contribute into various proyecto thourgh various means. Also, I'm not saving $100 by using linux in my computer because I have not migrated from something propietary.

I know for sure that almost no one does.

Relevancy?

It's nice if they decide to give back but they have no responsability to do so. The whole concept of "freeloaders" is laughable to be honest. I thought one of the primary visions behind FLOSS was that information should be free? I guess if you view open source as merely a means to an end, you might think such a thing as a freeloader could exist, but I completely disagree with that vision.

No, they have no responsability to give anything back. Nor I, nor GP stated that this was the case.

Can you please describe why the concept is laughable?

Re:Will they invest any of the savings in Linux de

[Skarjak]

Do I really have to explain to you that the word freeloader is pejorative? Also, don't do that "quote piece by piece" thing. It prevents you from seeing the big picture and basically pigeonholes you into nitpicking. Every question you asked is answered in the comment I already made, if you take it as a whole. There's a reason this is frowned upon in forums.

Re:Will they invest any of the savings in Linux de

[hobarrera]

No, you don't need to explain why it's pejorative; what I asked is for you to explain why it's laughable, something competely different.
I quote by-piece, because you make different statements, and I reply to each one individually. Replying inline has been proper etiquette for several decades now.
Finally, no, none of my statements were replied above. But since this is your second reply attempting to divert attention from the subject at hand, I'm guessing your merely using a Red Hering to disguise your lack of proper argument.