Birmingham To Buy More, Not Less Open Source 232
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."
Site getting slow; article text (Score:5, Interesting)
Birmingham City Council has defended its year-long trial of desktop Linux, claiming it to be a success, despite an independent report showing it would have been cheaper to install Windows XP.
In an exclusive interview with Techworld, head of IT for the council, Glyn Evans, argued that the higher cost resulted from the council having to experiment with the new technology and build up a depth of technical understanding, as well as fit it with the complex system already in place.
The 105,000 saving that the report says would have resulted from going with Windows XP has also come under question as it was calculated using the special discounted licence rate that Microsoft offers councils - something critics argue is a calculated effort to prevent public bodies from building up technical knowledge of open source offerings.
With Birmingham's trial period over and with lessons learnt and understanding gained, the Council now expects to make cost savings over time, and contrary to press reports which claimed Birmingham had scrapped the Linux initiative, it will in fact "significantly increase" its use of open-source software, Evans said. The trial also had other positive results, he claimed, such as demonstrating the ease with which Firefox and OpenOffice.org can be substituted for Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office.
The trial was carried out with the government-backed Open Source Academy (OSA), and planned to install Linux on 330 desktops in the council's libraries service, split between staff PCs and public access terminals, in an effort to build up practical experience that could be drawn on by other public-sector bodies.
It ran from April 2005 to March 2006, but is still ongoing, with the council refining its Linux desktop image and planning further rollouts next year, according to Evans. "The project did not end when the element of original funding ended, because it is part of the Library Service strategy," he told Techworld. "This project is still very much ongoing, and now that a stable image... has been developed, we would expect significant movement forward."
Over-ambitious
He admitted the council's original plans were over-ambitious, with rollouts of Linux-based staff and public PCs originally scheduled during the one-year trial period. In reality, ongoing testing of the desktop configuration means no Linux desktops have yet been installed. Instead, 96 public desktops and 134 staff desktops are running open source applications such as the OpenOffice.org office suite and the Firefox browser.
The council does plan to begin migrating those desktops to its Suse Professional 9.3-based desktop OS, however, a plan that should go into action in the near future, according to Evans. He said that far from scrapping the Linux initiative, as has occurred in some other high-profile cases such as the London borough of Newham, Birmingham is planning to "significantly increase" the number of desktops involved with the project.
Evans' description of the project is a sharp contrast to the findings described in a case study authored by iMpower Consulting at the formal conclusion of the trial in March, which is available from the OSA's website [pdf [opensourceacademy.org.uk]]. The case study found that the council had failed to make a business case for its Linux desktops, largely because the half-a-million-pound cost of designing and implementing the system cost more than the estimated cost for a Windows XP installation.
The difference is largely down to high "team costs", including setting up the project, technical definition and design, development and testing and training, all of which amounted to roughly 100,000 more than the estimated team costs for a Windows installation. The total cost of the trial was 534,710, compared to an estimated 429,960 for Windows XP.
"The project showed that there are considerable costs incurred in de
Wisdom vs Intelligence (Score:3, Interesting)
With all of the rigged numbers originating in incumbent market dominators showing up in city council policy and budget analyses, it's obvious the councils need guidance. I know that the NYC City Council doesn't have any resources with "BS logs" of ongoing vendor distortions, except for consultants like me. State/federal or even international organizations that serve the people administered by these city councils should produce research to weed out the lies. Sort of like a "City Council Consumer Reports". In the US, the GAO (now "Government Accountability Office"), or the Office of Management and Budget, or some team at Treasury at the federal level, could produce them. Or the state Comptroller. Or maybe a "City Councils Association", that could reach internationally.
Government is really big. In the US it's about 25% of our economy, though that includes the military (about 30% of total). So maybe these guidelines are already being produced, perhaps redundantly. The government response would be to produce similarly obscure guidelines on finding the guidelines. That's how government gets so big (especially the military). Is there a better way for City Councils to share wisdom, not just knowledge, about the information used to make these decisions?
I hope the Gnome folks read this bit ... (Score:4, Interesting)
At one point, realising that most of the usability issues were attributable to Gnome, which had taken three months to configure, staff ripped out Gnome and replaced it with KDE.
I use Gnome, but it sure has usability issues. I hope the Gnome developers will take the trouble to understand why Birmingham dumped Gnome - sfter selecting it initially.
This can't be good (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't (yet) run Linux but have fiddled with a Slack 10 and Debian installation but the above comment can't be good for the folks developing Gnome.
Can someone with a bit more insight explain why one would work better in the above scenario since, presumbably, both do the same thing?
So far behind? (Score:2, Interesting)
What's the logic of going with a version that is so far behind? I know that you don't go bleeding edge with such a project but 9.3 is ancient. I guess it is still supported but it seems like being *that* far behind would be leaving yourself open to a number of security/compatibility issues.
Under question? (Score:5, Interesting)
How could the savings be "under question" because of the discounted rate? What, do you expect them to calculate the savings while pretending that they would have had to pay full price? If so, Microsoft would have rightly stated that they were massaging the numbers just to make open source look good.
What's more interesting is whether their numbers for open source included the costs of Windows XP, as they didn't actually install any Linux systems. (Not exactly a big win for Linux there, either.) How do you spend £534,710 on installing OpenOffice and Firefox on 230 Windows computers, and playing around with Suse for a year, anyway?
Re:This can't be good (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Teach a man to fish... (Score:4, Interesting)
Now if you are a programmer, and your desktop linux is somehow reducing your ability to write code (IE you spend an hour each day dealing with software updates or something) then windows is a better fit... Although I'm much more productive coding under linux than windows....
Show a man the ocean (Score:3, Interesting)
I feel vindicated with this piece... (Score:4, Interesting)
I have long said that Gnome had a problem for most users in a typical business environment, and was met with comments referring to me as a troll and as one who was just a KDE fanboy.
This article articulates just one of the problems with Gnome.
For this particular problem, there are folks who say that I should use "ctrl + L". Though this keyboard shortcut is not even documented anywhere near where one would want to use it. Imagine that.
These are just *some* of the issues that make Gnome a non-starter for me and I am glad the Britons found out as well. This will make the developers think about what users want. How can a desktop environment take three months to configure? This is insane! These are not my words but quotes from the article.
Re:NO! (Score:2, Interesting)
one of the problems with adoption of foss is in my opinion that people don't know how the whole mentality works. i sometimes wonder if the average worker goes into his local computer shop, doesn't find any software on shelves for linux and therefore concludes that there isn't any. it wouldn't occur to him/her, that you can download software which would for windows cost tens of thousands of dollars free of charge from the net for linux, because he/she just wouldn't look there for software.
Re:*BUY* more? (Score:3, Interesting)
I remember times when people I worked with have been paying hundreds of dollars for sets calls to M$ on the same topic where they didn't get the answer they needed. In a truly competitive market that just wouldn't fly.
Re:I feel vindicated with this piece... (Score:2, Interesting)
Uh... what file selector dialog and where? And what are you trying to type in it anyway? File names? Love letters?
Because GNOME-VFS is basically inadequate and no one has got around to writing a system that actually works.
Oh, wait, that should be written instead as:
Because implementing network awareness at "open this file for reading" level is not the responsibility of the high reaches of the app layer. That's the operating system's job.
Unix assumes you're on a local system. Go install Plan 9 or something, or wait until someone comes up with a really awesome FUSE hack.
Both GNOME and KDE are doing this the hacky stop-gap way, and the only difference is that KDE folks have a solution that works, kind of. The elegant way would be to allow this stuff to work on any application. I'm not calling the present situation elegant until I can do "cat http://slashdot.org/ [slashdot.org] ".
(Oh wow, someone's actually working on the age-old mount -t webdav problem... We may actually have a great working filesystem one day!)
That said, as a GNOME user, I'm not terrified by the apparent lack of net transparency. If I want to open something from the web, it's Firefox's job to save it to /tmp and open up the appropriate document viewer. If I want to work on the file further, I'll save a local copy anyway.
Because people said "I want a file selector, not a file selector + submarine control dialog?" The fact that you can do something on a dialog that's not really none of the dialog's business is usually a symptom of excessive featuritis.
(Agreed, I think it'd be nice if the dialog had a button that says "open in Nautilus" for the rare cases where file management is needed.)
Re:NO! (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is not that $39 is really unreasonable. The problem is that the lock-in makes it so that more and more can be added to that $39 as time rolls on.
TCO hype --debunked! Up yours, Microsoft! (Score:3, Interesting)
Interviewer: So, Linux cost you more?
IT guy: Yeah, we had to learn stuff all over again and reconfigure everything. We blew so much money on that!
Interviewer: So, I guess it's a no-go for Linux, and you're going back to Microsoft?
IT guy: Are you kidding me? We already spent so much on Linux --why would we want to throw away everything we worked so hard for?
Bravo, Birmingham, for going through with the trial. I hope the word gets out --the bogeyman of TCO is what is keeping companies and institutions from taking the plunge.