You are absolutely correct, Glonoinha, when you consider costs of a developed country.
Talking once more about me experience in Brazil...
One of the companies I consult for has just renewed their campus wide anti-virus licence (about 1200 desktops running Windows). The cost of the licence alone was comparable to the salaries paid to 5 avarage-to-senior full-time supporters for that same year (if you disconsider the almost 100% government taxes on labour).
And that was for the anti-virus alone. Think about the OS, office production package, ERP, DB, server licences etc.
Those numbers are completely different when you have costy labour, but in our case here, just the licences make A LOT of the TOC.
I am an IT consultant and I get a lot of clients who ask about the real cost of free software. Most business here are very cautious to choose switching for open source mostly because support for this solution is still somewhat more expensive than for the old paid solutions.
In the few companies I consult that are currently switching or have switched in the past, the Total Cost of Ownership of their computer infrastructured has lowered significantly, even though the cost of the support staff is truly higher.
But, anyway, support here is somewhat cheap, as I am in a developing country that pays a lot more for software than for the people running then in a number of times.
One of the most flexible packages I ever saw is Interact. I have tried some, but all of them seem too restricted to the model designed by the developer.
So, for example, WebCT (whish I used some years ago) you have a place to put material, a place to do quizzes, but no way to make more "complex" arrangements of the capabilities.
Interact, for example, operates using a "component" model. You have a number of components to choose from and you can group them in any way you like inside "Folders".
Currently available components are: forum, group, dropbox, sharing, chat, journal, gradebook, quiz, folder, file, weblink, note, page, calendar, KnowledgeBase and NoticeBoard.
Interact is aimed at being a complete school support system, as such, it has a unique student and teacher login for all the content, and each subject has its own "site". So teachers of a subject have administration priviledges on this subject's site, and students have access to all sites of the subjects they are currently taking.
A neat feature is that each component has a unique ID, and it can be "shared" among different sites. So I can have two disciplines to share the same messages of a forum, for example.
Components can be copied, as to use older subject's sites on a new subject too.
Interact's site is http://cce-interact.sourceforge.net/ where you can also find a demo to play with.
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You are absolutely correct, Glonoinha, when you consider costs of a developed country.
Talking once more about me experience in Brazil...
One of the companies I consult for has just renewed their campus wide anti-virus licence (about 1200 desktops running Windows). The cost of the licence alone was comparable to the salaries paid to 5 avarage-to-senior full-time supporters for that same year (if you disconsider the almost 100% government taxes on labour).
And that was for the anti-virus alone. Think about the OS, office production package, ERP, DB, server licences etc.
Those numbers are completely different when you have costy labour, but in our case here, just the licences make A LOT of the TOC.
India?
No, Brazil.
I am an IT consultant and I get a lot of clients who ask about the real cost of free software. Most business here are very cautious to choose switching for open source mostly because support for this solution is still somewhat more expensive than for the old paid solutions.
In the few companies I consult that are currently switching or have switched in the past, the Total Cost of Ownership of their computer infrastructured has lowered significantly, even though the cost of the support staff is truly higher.
But, anyway, support here is somewhat cheap, as I am in a developing country that pays a lot more for software than for the people running then in a number of times.
One of the most flexible packages I ever saw is Interact. I have tried some, but all of them seem too restricted to the model designed by the developer. So, for example, WebCT (whish I used some years ago) you have a place to put material, a place to do quizzes, but no way to make more "complex" arrangements of the capabilities. Interact, for example, operates using a "component" model. You have a number of components to choose from and you can group them in any way you like inside "Folders". Currently available components are: forum, group, dropbox, sharing, chat, journal, gradebook, quiz, folder, file, weblink, note, page, calendar, KnowledgeBase and NoticeBoard. Interact is aimed at being a complete school support system, as such, it has a unique student and teacher login for all the content, and each subject has its own "site". So teachers of a subject have administration priviledges on this subject's site, and students have access to all sites of the subjects they are currently taking. A neat feature is that each component has a unique ID, and it can be "shared" among different sites. So I can have two disciplines to share the same messages of a forum, for example. Components can be copied, as to use older subject's sites on a new subject too. Interact's site is http://cce-interact.sourceforge.net/ where you can also find a demo to play with.