MA Dept. of Revenue consider Linux 407
hansroy writes "Massachusetts Department of Revenue is still using Windows 95 on the desktop. Faced with upgrade costs of $500-600 per user, they're considering Linux at about one-third the cost. This comes at a very good time, as the new governor of MA is making significant budget cuts this year."
The very least they could get out of it... (Score:5, Insightful)
Which in itself is not bad. It is just M$ feeling the weight of competition.
Hang in tight, Bill. It will get worse
Win95 no longer working? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't understand this "we must upgrade" mindset. If the wiz-bang product worked wonders when it was new, isn't is still working just as good today? My office recently replaced hundreds of P3/933 machines (running Win2K + Office2K) with P4/2.5G machines running WinXP + OfficeXP. Aside from the different default color and button theme, nobody really noticed a difference.... other than having to migrate files to the new boxes. The new machine rollout wasn't needed and was expensive... but the IT department said it "NEEDED TO BE DONE".
I don't get it.
Re:I dunno (Score:5, Insightful)
Up-front costs for interoperability will likely pay for themselves in the long run because the infrastructure will open itself up to a cross-platform environment, allowing for best-of-breed solutions regardless of the platform.
Re:I dunno (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I dunno (Score:5, Insightful)
The OS is just a mouse for them to double click icons. It would not be very hard to create a new interface to run in linux, and slap an icon on their desktop to run that interface, which looks very familiar to Windows, and still allows them to work comfertably in the custom software they have been using for some time.
It really all depends on what apps they have been using to determine if they need to retrain MANY things or not.
What about when this issue comes up again in 2010? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I dunno (Score:5, Insightful)
Put WinXP, Gnome, KDE, and Win95 next to each other and click around a little. (Make sure you don't set up some wierdo theme - just use the defaults.)
WinXP is less like Win95 than either Gnome or KDE. You could just as easily argue that the retraining costs for XP would be greater than for Linux because MS gratuitously messed with the user interface.
As for interoperability - it's pretty straightforward and you only have to do it once. After that you duplicate the configuration on the rest of the machines.
Reason: MAnager needs to justify existence. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Win95 no longer working? (Score:5, Insightful)
Familiarity, ha! (Score:5, Insightful)
That isn't to say UI can't ever be changed (I'm not arguing against progress, nor making any comments on whether XP's approach is progress), but the "familiarity" argument for staying with MS is total bullshit.
The "ease" argument is bullshit too. You have to turn off the firewall that comes with XP to use Win98's SMB printer. Yeah, that's really intuitive and easy. Today, somebody paid a couple hundred dollars for that "ease."
Applications: this one is true; you might be locked into MS. Tell your vendor you want the next wave of custom apps to be platform independent. It is inexcusable for most business software to not be super-portable these days: PYTHON ROCKS and there's almost nothing it can't do (well, not counting realtime stuff, like monitoring the neutron rods in your reactor ;-). And I'm sure
the Java and perl guys have something to say as well. If your vendors are
still creating unportable apps, either find other vendors, or at least
tell them that their decisions are costing YOU money.
BTW, I mean that about portability. Don't trust Linux either. Just be able to use anything and then whatever platform comes out on top .. will come out on top. I don't see Tux's flippers shaking with
fear over that prospect.
Re:I dunno (Score:5, Insightful)
So, they've got to buy more hardware, and do the almost the same amount of work as they would if they migrated to Linux. Sounds more expensive to me.
Not to mention that they could chuck some of the cash they save at IBM or Sun for some nice back-end application servers, so that the next time they "upgrade", it's a transparent process to the users.
Re:I dunno (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Wait a second. $500-600? (Score:3, Insightful)
It'd make a gorgeous X-terminal though.
This will benefit them greatly (Score:5, Insightful)
We are talking about windows 95.. Guess what? It is broke. It has a MTBF of about 180 hours,
The product is no longer supported by the manufacturer. This means no more security updates. Windows 95 was never a very secure networked computer OS. I am sure that the Massachusetts Department of Revenue, could use some security.
The way to the desktop .. through business? (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyway - the point!!!
People will use *anything* at work. If the average user is sat in front of a well controlled desktop with easy access to the software they need, they'll care "not a jot" whether it's Linux, Windows or "Whatever"-soft (bought from "Whatever" local company who can supply the goods cheap enough).
As long as the Linux desktop crashes *less* than Win95 (ahem) then at least this may be an another outlet which exposes Linux to the average person in a positive way - as long as they can get stuff done on it.
In businessess I have worked in, price has always been the deciding factor and this might just be where Linux has the perceived edge to the business. Maybe business is the (indirect) way to the user desktop?
Re:But (Score:5, Insightful)
No, he meant processors. Not as in multi procs for one system, but as in multiple machines. Obviously it's not newsworthy if Mass. is upgrading one machine. He meant multiple machines, processors with cost over many machines.
It's compatible with more than koffice. Word isn't compatible with much other than word. If Koffice is all you're using, why the fuck do you need it to support word?
Because word is the world standard for written documents in the professional business world. Hate to break it to you, but where I work, we don't have but 2 windows machines, and one running VMware, out of about 80 computers. We get lease documents, legal notices, business proposals, ad nauseum, in word or excel format. If you can't read it, you limit your professional image and connectivity.
K-office is compatable with k-office. Open/Star office at least has basic word compatability and functionality.
Please, microsoft may suck for their draconian EULA's, their extremely high prices, their business model, etc. But they make a good office suite. Plus, like it or not, it's the world standard.
Touche, troll. Touche.
~Will
Re:Why upgrade? (Score:1, Insightful)
They are probably using Windows under a site-license, instead of having actually purchased copies. That means they don't own any copies at all, they have to periodically renegotiate with Microsoft. If Microsoft says they don't want to license Win95 anymore, then they can't use Win95 anymore.
This is one of the dangers of licensing software instead of buying it. Don't do it, unless you have very smart lawyers read the contract first.
Considering wha ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I dunno (Score:3, Insightful)
True... except that many employees (certainly not all, but enough to have an impact on costs) would already have been using Windows XP elsewhere (eg, at home).
Re:I dunno (Score:1, Insightful)
The transition to KDE/Gnome is much steeper of a learning curve. Plus, in lots of small offices, they have some 'advanced' regular windows user who doubles as a sys admin/troubleshooter. Instead of taking advantage of that, they now have to get someone who knows Linux (BSD, whatever) to do this job. That's usually going to be a new hire that will be required.
The free software is nice, but it does come at a considerable initial investiment in training and getting in someone who actually knows the system and can set it up and troubleshoot it.
Politically, I like the transition to opensource, but I see it as often a potentially much more costly option in real dollars/productivity.
Re:I dunno (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux is only free if your time has no value
Don't forget that in the public sector, there is a profound dislike of actually firing people (whether they deserve it or not).
In an era of budget cutting, expenditures on non-people items are the first to go; then the raises, and only then, the employees themselves.
That being the case, it is quite possible to chop IT spending down to Linux levels and to steathily reabsorb the retraining costs because you have the employee sitting around anyway. Once the retraining costs have been absorbed, you will have accomplished the upgrade and be unshackled from MS expensive licenses in the future.
[This is kind of like how charging for computer time has a lower threshhold defined by the cost of electric power.]
Re:I dunno (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't just assume that WinXP would take no "interoperability time" and that it would take no retraining.
Windows XP is radically different from Windows 95. It's going to take people time to learn how to get around.
You're assuming they have Windows Servers, maybe they have Novell servers, maybe they telnet to a mainframe application. In the latter case configuration of Linux would be a snap.
If they think ahead well enough they'll mount /home and /usr from a file server. All of the machines will have the same software and the users will have their home folder, no matter what machine they get.
I've worked as a tech in a Windows environment, migrating users (including a finance department) from Windows NT 4/Windows 95 on Novell to Windows 2000 on Active Directory. It certainly didn't get done by itself, and I would have a hard time proving that Linux would take longer if done right.
It's all about planning.
Re:One third? (Score:3, Insightful)
I take it they mean training, right?
I think that that would also include licensing (read: support) costs as well.
Linux itself may be free, but -- as good as you may think it is -- it's going to require some support. Might as well pay for that up front and know that you're going to get good support.
This is the attitude that RedHat expected, and they do seem to be making a profit off of the business model. I'm betting that they'd be happy to give a $100/machine bulk support license to the MA government.
Sometimes it's nice to know that you can escalate a problem to the people who helped write the software. Even if you don't use that capability verfy often, when you need it: you tend to really need it. That by itself can sometimes be worth the price of the rest of the support licenses.
Re:I dunno (Score:2, Insightful)
And I'm not talking about the admin / servicing aspect. Basic Joe-Desktop stuff. Come on, start listing them.
I'm sure the WinXX to Linux list would be considerable longer. And more frustrating.
Thats quite a buzz-word collection you have going in the second paragraph by the way. I wrote it down for tommorrow.
Re:I dunno (Score:2, Insightful)
Govt Guy with experience here... (Score:5, Insightful)
The third group, system administrators, don't really count. True, they have the highest learning curve, and they're success if often tied to a particular platform, but since they're upgrading from Windows 95, they're screwed no matter what you do...
In short, the greater the number of power users, the more of a problem you will have. I'm guessing MA Dept of Revenue has a lot of data entry clerks, accountants, lawyers, and bureaucrats (all group 1 types). The people who maintain the databases and manage the data (group 2 types) will be greatly affected, but they'll probably be pleased to get away from Win95. And as usual, the SysOp gets the shaft.
Re:I dunno (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I dunno (Score:5, Insightful)
"Radically" is going a little far. From a system administration point of view, XP could be called radically different. To the end user, XP is very much the same. When changing from 98SE and Word 97 to XP and Office XP, my mom had no problems doing the exact same tasks in Word. Same with Freecell. Sure, she doesn't know the new way to change the IP of the computer, but she didn't need to know in the first place.
Recently at work, we moved from NT5 to XP. Almost all people had no issues whatsoever with the new OS. Some little things behaved differently, but the general feel of the system was the same.
My point is, for everyday tasks, and to a "normal" computer user, Windows* is the same as Windows*.
Retraining Costs? Much ado about nothing. (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, what exactly are the retraining costs when the majority of users utilize maybe three applications? On the whole, office workers don't utilize "advanced" features available in the software anyway.
For example: how many secretaries are using Word Styles to author documents? Even though Word Styles are available, and take some amount of training to understand, if they're not being used, why worry about it?
What it boils down to is the applications. If those applications are available, and operate in a similar way, it doesn't matter what platform they are running on. The overhead involved in user training is much ado about nothing.
Now, don't get me wrong, there's a number of reasons why continuing down the Microsoft treadmill could make more sense (for now). But retraining isn't one of them.
Re:The very least they could get out of it... (Score:1, Insightful)
Other than some delay in startup time both for the OS's and the office apps (OS doesn't differ much, when it comes to Office apps, MS Office beats Open Office quite a lot), the combinations are very useable.
Considering the way most office (non-techie) people work, they probably start their office app in the morning and then spend their day with it running in the foreground or background writing different memos etc.
Re:I dunno (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, OK - five years ago when you HAD to know UNIX to use linux, that may have been true. But today it's not only possible but easy to give a Windows-trained user a Linux desktop that looks and functions almostidentically to a Windows desktop.
Wnat to open an application? Double-click the icon or select it from a menu. Want to boldface that text? Press the "bold" button in the toolbar, or the keyboard command.
I mean, really, exactly what needs to be retrained? For the end user, the interface is almost exactly the same. Linux is finally at the point where I COULD sit my mother down at a linux desktop and have her creating documents, surfing the web, and sending email within a few minutes. It's not as if Linux applications work significantly differently from the most common Windows applications. All the same things are there - icons, radio buttons, drop-downs, spinners, toolbars, and so on.
Granted, the system administrators often definitely require retraining. But the end users? With an intelligently set up Linux box, the learning curves for common tasks for end users is rapidly approaching nil.
Re:I dunno (Score:2, Insightful)
The transition to KDE/Gnome is much steeper of a learning curve
much - How? The learning curve from ms Office to say, Star Office; eudora to evolution, ie to mozilla.
Ms Office to Star Office - OK, reasonable learning curve for those that use "advanced features", but not that much harder than re-learning how to do a mail-merge on word xp rather than word 6, on a Correctly configured system. They are likely to get a course on it either way.
Eudora to Evolution - easier than the office part. Those that used the calendar in something like outlook, will need a little more hand holding - won't the company get tax relief for "investing in people" (UK) or something.
IE to Mozilla - I've had plenty of complete technophobes sit down at my PC and use Mozilla instead of IE and not know. Tell then to click on the red star/dinosaur rather than the "E" (I don't know which is worse a red star or and E...)
I would suggest the biggest problem will be in the Tech department, training/replacing the techs so that the opensource stuff is sufficiently wired down so as not to be a problem.
However, given that the desktops are running 95, may I guess that they would probably have to invest in new hardware to run XP and by moving over the a x-teminal opensource based solution they could probably build the back end servers, test them and then migrate people over one at a time by reformating there existing PC's as X-terms cheaper and in a comparable timeframe?
Re:I dunno (Score:3, Insightful)
Linux not always the answer. (Score:2, Insightful)
few things on state/local govt. (Score:2, Insightful)
Secondly, in many state and local governments, employees are required by the state or the feds to use particular software for reporting, fund transfer, etc. Sometimes the other government entity only supplies Windows binaries. Their support even on their own Windows programs ranges from grossly incompetent to altogether nonexistant. Throw trying to run it on some other platform into the mix and they are not even going to talk to you. This isn't something that lower-level government entities have any say in. They can't choose to not use these programs, especially when it comes to funding.
Thirdly, IMO the choice and quality of 3rd party apps for other platforms just isn't there yet. If you have a large group of talented engineers that have used Autodesk products for years and are well-versed and highly efficient using them, what products could you offer them as an viable alternative? (and maintain a straight face).
I'm just amazed that Windows 95 was such a long-lasting solution in Massachusetts. MS should be commended for continuing support for W95 as long as they did. Well I gotta go now; I have to go upgrade all my Redhat 7 boxes that EOL this month.
Re:It's the secretaries, stupid. (Score:2, Insightful)
That is a good point. Someone else mentioned they didn't believe retraining would be that bad due to the fact that typical users only use a small subset of the available features. What I think that overlooks is that in some cases, that user who only uses 10% of the features of MS Word required two years to learn that much. Ugh.
On the other hand, if you are wise and able to effect organizational change, you should really do something about those employees, because they are the type of employee who spends an entire day trying to figure out how to print something. They don't have to be fired -- they could be sent to a full-time, two-month-long intensive general computer literacy training program. In the end, this will greatly benefit the organization, because these employees will start to have a general clue about how to use the tools they need to use to do their job.
Also, if the IT person is smart, they will never ever ever name anything something as stupid as "/mnt/winserver/docs". The whole point of an advanced OS like Linux is that you're not forced to do stupid things to accomodate the weaknesses of the OS. Like using stupid names that require people to understand esoteric details like drive letters. A smart IT person will utilize the automounter and give stuff really logical names that don't expose implementation details like what server the files are on. So if these are docs from the team that handles tax audits, then they'll be under /teams/audit/docs.
Then when asked about drive letters,
the IT person can say, "Hmm... Don't
you think trying to remember drive letters is
a big waste of time? Me too. Linux doesn't
make you worry about technical details like
that. For the audit team's docs,
look under /teams/audit/docs."
Of course, it's my contention that an IT person's job is not to fix the computers and install software. An IT person's job is to know about making computers useful, plan for making the organization's computers more useful overall, and do the tasks that make the computers useful.
Re:XP requires hardware upgrades too (Score:4, Insightful)
Ok-- if they are running Windows 95, chances are these are 80486 or Pentium I. Chances are to have a meaningful production workstation you would have to upgrade your hardware too.
I would probably not look at the hardware on this one.
Re:I dunno (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I dunno (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No, that's less accurate (Score:3, Insightful)
At worst, Linux becomes an "opportunity cost" and that is only real for an economics professor.
Nobody mentioned (Score:1, Insightful)
I read all the level 3 and up responses, and a few of the lower threshold responses, and no one mentioned:
audit costs
audit compliance costs
audit fines (averaging about $150,000 per individual instance (computer/application), according to the bsa, prior to negotiated lower fines)
Why is it ok to leave this out of the total cost of ownership figures?
Hopefully on some of their servers as well (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:No, that's less accurate (Score:3, Insightful)
And "retraining" is a bit of a red herring since Microsoft likes to change it's interfaces anyways.