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Birmingham Drops Open Source Initiative
Posted by
Hemos
on Mon Nov 20, 2006 12:50 PM
from the sad-day-for-adherents dept.
from the sad-day-for-adherents dept.
eldavojohn writes "Birmingham, England put a stop to a half million pound project to put Linux and open source applications on library access PCs across the city. From the article, 'The council planned to roll out Linux software and applications on 1,500 desktops in libraries across the city, but in the end went no further than a 200-desktop project. Several industry watchers have voiced their concerns about the project, particularly around the number of PCs rolled out. Birmingham's expenditure averaged over 2,500 pounds per PC.' Why did they stop after 200 PCs? Because they claimed with Windows, the project would have been 100,000 pounds cheaper. One may wonder if they paid for initial training of their workforce making the first 200 more expensive than the rest but the article does not say whether or not this occurred."
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Politics: French National Assembly Embraces Open Source 88 comments
eldavojohn writes "The French National Assembly is in the news as they have recently switched to Linux, OpenOffice.org & open source software at the request of several deputy members. Bernard Carayon wrote it it into the proposal entitled 'On Equal Terms' [French PDF]. From the article, 'IT staff at the National Assembly have almost six months to prepare the switch to open source.' The same document urged France to adopt ODF as a standard. Hopefully things go more smoothly for them than the Birmingham library effort."
[+]
Birmingham To Buy More, Not Less Open Source 232 comments
K-boy writes, "Last week, the press (and Slashdot) reported that Birmingham City Council had decided to ditch its open source project because a report said its trial had cost £100,000 more than it would have cost to buy Windows. However, Techworld has discovered that the opposite is true, and the Council is actually planning to use more open source software as well as to roll out Linux in the next few years. The head of IT was interviewed and he gives a fascinating rundown of the problems he had getting open source working with his systems. More interestingly, he points out that now the trial is over and he and his staff have the technical skills, they expect to save lots of money in future by going open source. Oh, and the report's figures were based on the special rates that Microsoft gives Councils just to make sure the short-term budget look worse — £58 for a Windows license as opposed to the normal £100."
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And now a word from our sponsors... (Score:3, Funny)
"Microsoft: Where do you want to go today?"
Re:And now a word from our sponsors... (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft: Where do you want to go today?"
Not Birmingham, thats for sure.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Incompetence (Score:5, Interesting)
I feel sorry for Birmingham. Not so much for having to use Windows, but for having to live with an IT staff like that one.
In related news... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Incompetence (Score:4, Insightful)
Install it
Customize it
Deploy it
Support it
In the past I've said many times that Linux has problems making inroads on the desktop because it's hard for endusers to use. In this particular case, though, it's a matter of IT staff expecting it to be easy and not bothering to familiarize themselves with Linux enough to competently deploy it.
Linux should "just work" for Joe Six-pack, but IT staff need to know it as well as they know Windows if they're going to use it. Where I work we don't use Linux because we don't have sufficient knowledge of the OS and don't have the time or money to get good training. If and when we can learn it well enough, we might start using it.
Parent
Re:Incompetence (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Maybe it failed for bureaucratic reasons? (Score:5, Interesting)
Ideally you would want to hire expert sysadmins on contract to conduct a pilot project such as this one. However, there is likely to be language in the union contract forbidding a contract employee from taking a job that might be done by a unionized employee. Unless a sufficiently far-sighted employer included specific language covering a Linux deployment, the deployment would necessarily default to the in-house IT people.
And you had better believe that the union folks would be vocal about it. Especially if they -- as Windows experts -- could be replaced by Linux sysadmins in a wholesale system turnover. In fact say they believed that Linux might require fewer sysadmins, thus threatening their jobs. Maybe they wanted it to fail for that reason? Again, pure speculation, but plausible given my previous interactions with unions.
This is not to say that unions are useless or evil. Or even that any of this happened or was a factor in Birmingham. But unions do form part of the institutional culture, and if not taken into account, they can cause projects like this one to fail.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Back in the 3.1 days, my Windows (and MS Office) training involved watching half a dozen VHS videos. Does that still happen? I think not.
Today I had to ZIP some files onto a USB drive because my 40 year old boss didn't know how. He's a lead engineer in charge of a 650 million pound project but things like Zipping a few files together aren't interesting to him. Why should they be?
I work with others in their forties who cannot map network drives, don't understand
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
As Linux matures in the marketplace you will have more people competent in undertaking a process
Re: (Score:2)
Why didn't I use preview. I'd like to correct that I do know the difference between "hear" and "here". It was some subconcious demon that took over and typed it for me.
Not in my experience. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not really. Anyone who knows *nix can adapt to Linux in a couple of days. And there are lots and lots of people who know *nix out there.
True, they might be more expensive than someone with an MCSE. But the MCSE you'd hire/contract for a migration of this size would be more expensive than the MCSE you'd hire to maintain a site that has already migrated.
Migration specialists cost the same whether they're Microsoft, Linux, Sun or whatever.
Again, not really. The problem is when people do not look at it as a real migration. If you've ever done an Oracle/Sun migration, you'd know the costs involved and the amount of planning. And those are the kind of experts you'd be calling in for a project such as this.
The strange part is how they could spend so much money, so quickly, on so few PC's.
Realistically, they should not have spent 1/20th of that before finding that Microsoft would cut their sales price to come under the Linux figures.
And most of that money would have been spent on identifying all the apps used and which could be ported and for how much.
Linux desktops are cheaper to run than Windows. Particularly if you're using them in a diskless environment.
The HUGE costs are porting the apps or migrating the data to Linux-based apps. This is because most vendors have spent time locking your data up in their proprietary formats in order to make it as expensive as possible for you to dump them.
Which is why migrations such as this are STUPID to rush into.
It makes far more sense to plan them over 5 years. That way, the cost of migrating/porting those apps can be compared to the cost of upgrading them (or migrating anyway when the ISV goes out of business) and the real savings can be seen.
And you can realize the easy savings sooner to off-set the more expensive projects later.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
(1) Retraining existing Windows admins, not hiring Linux ones (Common for a gov't job, admin has no motivation for success)
(2) Hiring lots of cheap admins for Linux (Works badly for Windows, but functional. Doesn't work for Linux)
(3) Too m
Re:Incompetence (Score:4, Interesting)
I see this as a problem with linux (and *nix OSs in general), not an asset. I don't have a study to point to, but IME, a competent Windows admin can manage 2x or more in terms of machines than a normal Windows admin. As your point #2 points out, throwing more monkeys at the problem can work (albeit poorly) with windows, it can't with linux. This reflects a strength of Windows. This is a major problem for many when it comes to the adoption of linux, because in many areas the talent pool is simple too thin, and finding quality people is not easy. Add in the government factor, and you can all but forget finding anyone competent enough to handle the migration.
If I had a buck for every time someone said "The problem is your stupid Windows admins. Just hire some competent people and migrating to linux will be easy.", I could probably buy an extra gig of memory for my wife's computer.
To the issue of "competence" - For linux, I would define a basic level of competence as having an understanding of basic UNIX concepts, an understanding of the UNIX security model, a decent grasp of TCP/IP, and the ability to make #!/bin/sh carry out repetitive tasks. For Windows I would define a basic level of competence as having as having an understanding of basic Windows concepts, an understanding of the NT security model, a decent grasp of TCP/IP, and the ability to make cscript.exe and cmd.exe carry out repetitive tasks.
Every employed *nix admin I've ever met in person meets my definition of "competent", but I've yet to meet an employed Windows admin in person that meets the definition.
That doesn't mean I don't think linux can be adopted successfully. I think the government factor, not linux, is the biggest problem here.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
In business the contract generally goes to someone who can talk the talk.
Unfortunatly where as any moron can knock up a windows environment (they should chaneg the cert to mcm=microsoft certified moron) it takes more than a gas bag mouth to deploy linux succesfully.
The project was likely a falire due to this.
Initially:
Gas Bag Moron: Hey I can save you money with linux?
Birmingham: Ok
After getting this contract
Gab Bag Moron (internal dialogue): So what's this linux thing, can't b
Re:Incompetence (Score:5, Interesting)
It will only take a small number of stories like this before IT managers around the world take the decision not to look at Linux at all. Adding the threat of the pointless wrath of the community to that (as per your post) and the decision not to even look at Linux is a really clear one.
Parent
Give us a break (Score:4, Insightful)
While it is fun to lay the blame outside of Linux, the community should really be looking at the product provided and working out how to make it deployable for every one of the 6.2bn folks on the planet if it is going to get the pervasive desktop deployment that some seem to be looking for.
I've been using Linux as my primary (and only at home) OS since 1996, and I code on it for a living now.
I know this argument sounds reasonable, that "the community" should put in "more effort" to make Linux pervasive on the desktop, but it hasn't worked this way, and will not.
"The Community," in the guise of various volunteers and companies, (e.g. Ubuntu) have done a lot already, and this pervasive adoption hasn't happened, and it won't.
People will not just use Linux because they don't want to. They don't care. They are not interested. They like Windows because it comes on their computers by default, "everyone else uses it," they didn't see how much it cost, and it looks pretty, even though underneath it's pretty ropey.
"We" (whoever that is) should stop wasting our valuable time casting pearls before swine. OK, that's maybe a bit harsh, but the work has been done now (shiny user-friendly distros and Microsoft-compatible apps), it is up to them to take it if they want it.
What is far more important to me, and I suspect most of "us", is a healthy and diverse hardware and software ecosystem where everyone can play and compete, through open standards so that no one is left out if they don't want to be, and healthy progress can proceed.
"We" do not need Linux (as only one flabour of *nix) to be pervasive, to replace one monoculture with another. It would be better if everyone ran a better OS (i.e. not Windows) but that isn't going to happen.
"We" should be quietly confident and work to improve "our" software, and when any of the Heathens feel ready to convert, we should offer them our patient and friendly support.
If they don't want to convert, respect their decision, whether is is due to ignorance, laziness, fear, legitimate need or personal taste.
There ends my rant for today.
Parent
Re:Incompetence (Score:5, Interesting)
Claiming that it's the fault of incompetent staff isn't really an excuse. In every deployment I've seen, the staff has known nothing about the product when the deployment starts. You learn as you go. What you rely on is good whitepapers and documentation provided by the company on how they expect a rollout to occur. Along with some experience on proper communication, testing strategies, rollout scheduling, etc.
Furthermore in every deployment you encounter obstacles... problems interfacing with some piece of hardware or software. This could be a case of them encountering more obstacles than they assumed initially, and/or having no good reliable source for help to solve them quickly.
I realize this is
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Claiming that it's the fault of incompetent staff isn't really an excuse. In every deployment I've seen, the staff has known nothing about the product when the deployment starts.
What!?! You've never hired people familiar with the platform you're deploying to deploy it? You just hire random minimum wage people or what?
What you rely on is good whitepapers and documentation provided by the company on how they expect a rollout to occur.
They parted ways with two consulting firms that were both experience
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
How often do you see an ad like "Wanted: Systems installer for large Windows deployment. Must have five years experience deploying Windows Vista"?
Perhaps they believed that Linux was free, and they didn't need pay for it?
Good (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
[YES] NO CANCEL
*click*
TFA Headline says it all (Score:5, Informative)
This is a followup on the project being discarded, mainly focusing on critical comments of how the project was managed.
Notable quote: 'Mark Taylor, whose Open Source Consortium also exited the project in the early stages, said: "I have no idea how anyone could spend half a million pounds on 200 desktops, running free software".'
Half a million pounds, with free software (Score:3, Informative)
Windows can be cheaper than Linux... (Score:2, Funny)
would have been (Score:5, Insightful)
Its not surprising that they spent a lot of money to achieve seemingly nothing - Birmingham City Council BOASTS all over the place that they are "the biggest employer in the West Midlands". Probably cos it takes 10 muppets to do the same job that 1 competent employee should be expected to do.
Here's the plan: (Score:2)
Let's reiterate: 1. Save £100,000 2. Save £++ by using free software 3. ??? 4......you know the joke by now.
Hmm, Not in my Birmingham (Score:4, Interesting)
And before everyone moans about the cost (Score:3, Interesting)
What about virus, spyware and downtime costs? (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft and the RIAA - Twins Under the Skin (Score:5, Interesting)
The RIAA has to win every every court case because, by the legal principal of non-mutual estoppal, if they lose once they cannot use the same legal arguments in any future case they might wish to bring (i.e. if P2P music sharing occurs through an IP address you pay for, you're automatically responsible, guilty, and owe them lots of money regardless of what you actually did, or didn't, do).
Microsoft has to win every desktop every time because, if a large-scale commercial Linux deployment succeeds as a viable alternative to Windows, it will be considered seriously as a candidate in every future large-scale deployment of PC's. Microsoft will have to fight for every future desktop contract, instead of being the de facto only option for 99% of them.
And both groups are willing to do whatever it takes to win at all costs!
Ignorance is the biggest enemy of Linux (Score:4, Insightful)
We have to put Linux awareness on computer education. Else people would behave Linux as Windows and once they fail they would blame that on Linux. Administrators of Windows think that they know everything due to their computer training and once they encounter something different, they think its broken 'even though they did everything right'. Users thing applications 'do not work', or 'does not do something' because they can't see their familiar GUI in front of them. They don't even check other places, or don't even know where to look at it.
Technical personnel can't report bug reports, can't realize what causes the problem. They mostly get used to 'reinstall' or 'restart' to fix stuff never in need to knowing cause of previous problems.
And even worse, since they don't know deep working of some basic stuff, they design current systems platform specific. They don't use standards but rather using platform specific tools or ways to handle things due to their 'buggy training'. And when they need to change platforms they have to reinvent lots of other fixes they had before.
Summing all that up, they stay in the middle of vendor lock-in. if we can't educate people well on computers, and they think they are educated enough, they would not blame their knowledge but the products.
Even further (Score:4, Insightful)
I've already done the same for my car. I won't drive one, until I know how it works. Right now, I'm busy growing rubber trees so that I can make my own tires so I can change one myself. I'm pretty excited. Only another 5 years to go, and I'll have enough rubber to make a tire! After that, I have to learn how to mine iron to make steel for the steel belting in the tires. But hey, I'm not ignorant! I figure in another 200-300 years, I should have the know-how needed to drive my car.
Does anybody know how to make a tire stem and valve? I can't put air in my tires until I know how these little bastards work.
Parent
Initial training? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's like considering switching all traffic so that vehicles drive on the *other* side of the road. Even if it made more sense, it would be expensive as hell to do. And it's silly to take into account the learning curve of all those who had to initially learn to drive on the current side of the road. What matters is solely the cost of any changes going forward given that they have a staff already trained and familiar with Windows. If it's cheaper in the long run to stay Microsoft and everybody's already reasonably happy with it then, technical and ideological reasons aside, why switch?
Why is Linux so hard for them? (Score:3, Interesting)
1. Build each computer with 1GB of RAM and no hard drive. A fast CPU is not needed, but the ability to net-boot is required.
2. Set up a Knoppix image on a net-boot server, which the workstations can net-boot from. (The Knoppix image might need to be customized for this purpose, but even if no modified Knoppix image already exists with this feature, it shouldn't be overwhelmingly hard to make one.)
Thus, everything runs off a read-only NFS filesystem, and is impossible to vandalize a workstation on a software level (a reboot undoes any vandalism). Furthermore, Knoppix has proved itself to be very good at autoconfiguring itself on a wide range of hardware. And I don't know ANYONE who couldn't figure out how to use Knoppix if they tried.
Another option:
1. Build each computer with 512MB+ of RAM and at least a 5GB hard drive. The ability to net-boot is not needed.
2. Install Knoppix on one computer's hard drive, and copy the disk image to all other computers. Many tools exist for this, of which Norton Ghost is merely the best-known (open-source alternatives do exist).
Thus, you get the same advantages of the first solution, but with a local hard disk. The first solution would offer easier clean-up on workstations, while the second would result in higher performance. Of course, you could get even higher performance by configuring a net-booting Knoppix to load to RAM, but you'd need more RAM (I'd guess at least 2GB) on each workstation.
Why is it so hard for them? Did they get brainwashed by Microsoft's P.R. trolls, or am I way smarter than than Birmingham's IT staff?
odd numbers .. (Score:3, Interesting)
Unit cost for a Windows desktop = £2,433.00
Where did the money go
Dog bites Man (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, except the new UK Health Service IT system which has just gone waaaay over budget....
Alabama or England, say what? (Score:4, Funny)
Who the hell is Equal?
Way too much (Score:4, Insightful)
I realize lots of folks here see this as a Linux vs Windows issue. It's really not. The OS in this equation just isn't that much. The issue is total cost of installed base: dollars (pounds) spent divided by number of machines. These were 2500 POUNDS! That's got to be something like $4700 per machine.
Somebody screwed up.
At our school (UK)..... (Score:5, Informative)
We installed XP Pro on a volume licence (£35) and then duel booted with Ubuntu Breezy.
Total cost £16800 + the time to build. Without XP these would have been £12600.
Installation of XP consisted of install, update, install all applications and create disk image to be rolled out using Dolly. Install of Ubuntu consisted of popping the disk in, booting, clicking a couple of buttons, upgrading and imaging. The Ubuntu install took much less time as all the apps and drivers were installed at the same time. At the time of building a script was added to run a prompt for a machine name followed by winbinding to the domain.
The image is easy to roll out via our Gigabit LAN using Dolly. Network wide software installs can be done on Linux using a script that checks a directory on the server and after doing an md5 check uses apt to install whatever we want it to.
Given the ease of all this, the Birmingham thing just has to be down to incompetence. Excluding people who know what they're doing from helping is an arrogant act but ultimately one that probably caused the laughably huge bill.
I think that writing to the National Audit Office would be a good move by those Open Source Organisations involved as someone really needs to be held accountable for such a blatant waste of public money. Then again, maybe it was an overtime fiddle by those involved with or, more likely, another public body using Linux to beat Microsoft down on price.
Re:How can windows be cheaper than a free OS? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
A: *nix requires real hardware, boatloads of cheap pseudo hardware that offloads all the work to poorly written windows drivers has flooded the market over the years.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:How can windows be cheaper than a free OS? (Score:4, Interesting)
Its Birmingham fucking council, the council tax (a tax on your house that does not vary with income, only with size) goes up every single year, yet they still cannot even pick up rubbish bags without making a mess of the whole area.
I love my city but everyone knows that Birmingham council are a bunch of absolute losers, so this does not comes as any big surpise.
Parent
Re:How can windows be cheaper than a free OS? (Score:5, Informative)
The problem of course is that around here it's commonly understood that because I installed Fedora on the two Celeron boxen in my room and didn't spend a dime, that deploying 25,000 desktops across an enterprise should be no more complicated or expensive.
This is a strawman argument. No one else said it did not cost money to roll out 25,000 desktops in an enterprise. The discussion is should it cost as much as they claim to roll out 1500 desktops as workstations in public libraries. The consulting firm that they parted ways with called their costs "ridiculous" and they have a lot better idea of what the project entailed than anyone here.
And looking at the general direction the comments on this story are going I'd say we have a winner. Another great day for Slashdot ad impressions and another "look at what teh evil Micro$haft did" data point to use in the next flamewar.
Who's talking about Microsoft? We're talking about the incompetent shmoes in charge of this project who decided to stop working with two different Linux deployment consulting firms and "do it themselves" with current staff who had no experience and questionable purchases.
Parent
Re:How can windows be cheaper than a free OS? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not making an "argument" here...
You made an unsupported assertion about what you claim people think. That is an argument.
After 30 minutes my predictions are correct.
Really? Not according to the posts I read in this discussion.
For both my points, take the time to go through the comments posted so far.
I did thanks, I just don't see how they support your assertions.
Now did you have a specific point about what I posted or are you just looking for a scrape?
Here's my point, you're making baseless assertions about "what people think" and are ponderously close to being a troll. You throw around random large numbers and apparently did not bother to read the article being discussed. Just because you say, 'Slashdotters all think this" does not make it so and does not mean there is anything valuable at all in what you've posted. How about instead of generalized jabs at your opinion of the consensus here you try addressing specific posts from someone or *gasp* the article itself.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Windows:
Hardware: $$$$ (As needed to support new OS)
Software: $$$$ (Yearly license fees)
Training: $$$$ (As you add new people. If you are going to save it may be here since Microsoft's dominant position in the market make it feasible that employees already know the system
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How can windows be cheaper than a free OS? (Score:4, Interesting)
The person signing the order's primary concern was probably not "is this value for money?", but rather "will I be able to deny all responsibility for this?"
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The first thing to remember, is that the public user does not need any specialized applications. The staff may need a special app for their check-in/out cataloguing system, but as