Birmingham To Buy More, Not Less Open Source

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."

Re:*BUY* more?

['nother poster]

You need support. You need techs and installers and troubleshooters on staff. You need a support contract so that if anything bites it big time you can call up Novell, or Redhat, and have them find the solution for you rather than tying up your staff that already have other duties. Besides, if it becomes unresolvable you can point to the purchased support as the cause thus covering your very tender and precious butt. Same thing goes on with any software in a commercial/governmental setting.

GNOME usability has several elements

[Anonymous Coward]

1) It is quite different from Windows.
2) It is a newer idea than the desktop metaphor as used by windows (so the wrinkles haven't been ironed out)
3) Hiding configurations. Again *what* needs to be hidden hasn't been 100% worked out

It could be that the system will be fine when bedded down. For those not used to windows' way it may be fine NOW.

Re:*BUY* more?

[ajs318]

Windows is prone to going Tango Uniform for no good reason, and nine times out of ten Windows cab ne fixed simply by rebooting. And you can train a monkey to reboot a Windows machine -- in fact, it wouldn't surprise me one bit if somebody somewhere has actually done this. This means Windows "techies" are cheap, because nine times out of ten they'll just reboot the errant machine (which the user could have done for themself, were they not scared absolutely shitless by the complexity of anything that plugs in and has more than three buttons on it) and it will work -- and the tenth time they'll reboot it a few times, mutter a few sotto voce expletives, realise it's not having it, give up and buy a new one. This means you end up scrapping repairable machines -- but of course, they ultimately come out of departments' own budgets, not IT's budget.

Unix-like systems don't usually fail without good reason. So anybody working on them really needs to know their arse from a hole in the ground. This means Unix techies are expensive -- because they're good. They have no choice but to be. And there's more transferrability of skills between software: much of what you might learn about Linux can be applied to Solaris and the BSDs, some of what you might learn about MySQL can be applied to PostgreSQL or Firebird, Perl is a bit like PHP, ProFTPD and Apache have similar configuration file syntaxes, and so forth.

Basically, if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.

Re:I hope the Gnome folks read this bit ...

[Intron]

They are smart, I think I spent 6 months before abandoning Gnome for KDE. The last straw was when they broke the menu system.

Re:This can't be good

[BigBuckHunter]

Can someone with a bit more insight explain why one would work better in the above scenario since, presumably, both do the same thing?

To Grossly over simplify, Gnome sacrifices customizability for usability and simplicity. KDE sacrifices simplicity for customizability In environments that demand a certain configuration which doesn't match Gnome's ideal usage case, KDE is often a better fit.

They're both great desktop managers, and each has strengths in certain areas. And yes, I know "customizability" isn't a real word.

BBH

Re:I feel vindicated with this piece...

[Demona]

"DVD playback just works in Windows" You misspelled "not available by default in Windows so your DVD drive cannot play DVD's until you install a third-party application".

Re:Gnome: Logical but not Practical

[hab136]

OSX does it exactly the same way...I think Apple probably did some usability studies at some point...

If you're talking about Yes/No dialog boxes - no, they do it differently.

Instead of "Do you want to save the changes? Yes / No / Cancel" you get "You have unsaved changes. Save / Don't Save / Cancel". All of your choices are verbs. This avoids monstrosities like "Click Yes to do xxxx, click No to yyyyy", which I've seen in numerous Windows programs (Microsoft Access comes to mind).

From: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExper ience/Conceptual/OSXHIGuidelines/XHIGControls/chap ter_18_section_2.html [apple.com]
"Button names should be verbs that describe the action performed--Save, Close, Print, Delete, and so on. If a button acts on a single setting, label the button as specifically as possible; "Choose Picture...," for example, is more helpful than "Choose..." Because most buttons initiate an immediate action, it shouldn't be necessary to use "now" (Scan Now, for example) in the label. Don't use push buttons to indicate a state such as On or Off (where it would be more appropriate to use checkboxes).