EU Commission Study Finds OSS Saves Money

PS3Penguin writes "Groklaw has up a story about an EU Commission's recent findings on the costs savings available from using Open Source Software. From the article: 'Costs to migrate to an open solution are relevant and an organization needs to consider an extra effort for this. However these costs are temporary and mainly are budgeted in less than one year. The major factor of cost of the new solution - even in the case that the open solution is mixed with closed software - is costs for peer or ad hoc training. These are the best example of intangible costs that often are not foreseen in a transition.'"

No surprise

[kamochan]

This does not come as a surprise for people having worked in IT and with OSS for some time.

Now, if this report gets public bodies to use and require use of OO/ODF, the large corporations (whose customers or legislators the public bodies tend to be) might move to OO/ODF as well, and then also us small subcontractors could finally junk the P-O-S, all-defaults-are-nonsensical, pay-for-incompatible-upgrades MSOffice. Someone just needs to get the ball rolling...

Damn, it's good to see the EU bureaucracy sometimes produce sensible results!

But

[El Lobo]

One of open source's most touted benefits is its price. Download the software, install it--and don't pay a penny. That's the theory. But to a surprising number of companies, the price tag--or lack of one--is irrelevant. Believe it or not but in my university there are no problems to choose software. We are not looking the philosofical part of the questin (this is OS, this is not). We literally don't care for that. We look at what does the job best. And we buy and use it. And don't care for the price.

I've Been Saying This For Some Time

[Master of Transhuman]

No mattter WHAT it costs to transition your people, those costs can be amortized over time. Whereas paying proprietary software license fees is FOREVER. By definition, sooner or later OSS HAS to cost you less - not even taking the intangibles of avoiding lock-in, flexibility, etc. into account.

The only issue is whether you can afford the upfront costs - and that has to be decided on a case-by-case basis. And you solve that issue by doing your migration over time according to a PLAN.

Planning? A novel idea for most IT management who are usually locked in to a crisis management mode...

Expect a response saying the exact opposite

[fatphil]

... commissioned by a company that's a Microsoft partner. But no, honestly, it will be independent; we even paid extra for them to put "an independent study" in their abstract.

It /always/ happens, and I've not seen a "Upgrading to Vista is cheaper than Linux" report yet this year, so it's due some time soon.

Where is the control group?

[Anonymous Coward]

I always see the studies about the costs of migrating to Linux. But they never adequately explain the control group.
To be of any real value, you have to compare the Linux migration costs to some control group.

Here are some possible control groups:
1. Group transitioning from Windows95/98 to Window XP to Windows Vista
2. Group transitioning from Windows95/98/XP to Mac
3. Group transitioning from Mac to Windows Vista
4. Group transitioning from Windows95/98/XP to LTSP
5. Group transitioning from Linux to... Linux?
6. Group transitioning from Windows NT to Windows 2003 to Windows Vista

It seems that the control group in most of these studies is only imaginary: Windows XP with no transition.
That control group doesn't exist. It is never actually included in the studies. It is only conjectured.

What is the value of a study that uses an imaginary control group?

Re:But

[Leftist Troll]

But to a surprising number of companies, the price tag--or lack of one--is irrelevant.

Many of those still choose open source software. There's a reason GNU, Linux, BSD and Apache are so widespread, and it has nothing to do with price.

At this point, I would somewhat dissagree

[pembo13]

The forces who do not want to see OSS succeed for their own financial reasons will do what ever it takes to make sure your costs go up. If Linux usage spikes next month (for example) I would except to see a rise in underhanded tactics as well.

Re:Training cost?

[Coryoth]

Retraining costs only apply if your staff are trained in the first place. In the world where *everyone* puts "Office expert" on their CV almost no one is trained

Heh, I don't. I can get by with office applications but I can only barely use a spreadsheet - I'm a mathematician so computers I work on tend to come equipped with rather more interesting power toys for any calculation/plotting needs and I simply never learned how to use spreadsheets. Likewise, due to my profession, I tended to use LaTeX for documents. Sure, I can bash out a letter or a simple document in a word processor, but anything fancy like tables, headers and footers and the like are things I would have to look up, or muddle through - I honestly don't know. Luckily for me, however, office application skills aren't that highly prized in the sorts of jobs I apply for. I do sometimes wonder how much of an odd one out I am though - I mean, am I alone in having "basic competence" in office apps, or is it common and everyone else just lies?

Re:But

[El Lobo]

There is also a reason why Windows, Photoshop, Visual Studio, Premiere, Office, Maya, AutoCad are also popular even if they cost A LOT. Have you been thinking about that? OS is not the holy grail. There are a lot of underfeatured are mediocre OS applications that sadly are overrated just for being that.

Re:Did you miss a decade?

[El Lobo]

It's easy, in many cases it's not so har to understand. We use a lot of Photoshop at work. When you find us a package that does the same that Photoshop (please don't dare proposing me GIMP, don't make me laugh) then we will change be it OS or not. We don't care. AutoCad is used by our reactor designers. Don't try to push anything else to them. They have tried, believe me. And we pay gladly 8000 USD per licens... And so on... The philosophy and puritanism of OS=good and hip, commercial = bad and pest is not relevant...

Fifth and sixth reasons

[mangu]

This is why I prefer OSS: I can test at will anything I use. With commercial software they either give me crippleware or a limited test period. And if I later find I chose the wrong product, I don't have to write a report to management saying I made a mistake and, please, could I have more $$$ to buy the right (I hope) software.

And my second reason: with source code I don't have to worry about the supplier dying. I'm currently trying to find what to do with a software my company has; we do have the source code, 400k lines of Fortran, but it's VAX-FORTRAN and runs on VMS. The VAX/VMS suppliers have died twice already, when DEC was taken over by Compaq and when Compaq was taken over by HP. The best solution would be if HP released the source code to VAX/VMS under the GPL, but no such luck.

Amazing

[HangingChad]

Hell, there isn't even a good equivalent for Quickbooks/Peachtree that's OSS. It's absolutely mind-boggling that any small businesses could ever go completely open source WITH NO FINANCIAL SOFTWARE (Yes, I know about GNUCash: it's a joke).

Simply amazing that those crazy Europeans manage to get by without Quickbooks. A miracle I manage in my own business(es) without ever once missing Quickbooks. I run OSS almost exclusively and actually spend less time dorking with my computers, which tend to stay working for extremely long periods of time. What is it I can't do without Quickbooks? Because I manage to track mileage and expenses, do billing, proposals and make financial projections with, what to me feels like, a minimum amount of effort. I must be living a torrid, pathetic existence. How sad for me to be so happy in a slime pit of unrealized potential. I don't have Quickbooks and I'm too cheap to spring for a copy of CrossOver to run it. But I do have a lot of fun with the money I'm not spending on MSFT products, so it's not a complete loss.

I'm not sure what makes that mind-boggling, because I think I'm doing just fine without MSFT. Perhaps you're easily boggled?