EU Commission Study Finds OSS Saves Money 128
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.'"
Re:No surprise (Score:3, Interesting)
Stand by for a least one patent-imdemnification-fud post in this thread
Training cost? (Score:5, Interesting)
I spend about 1 hour a day telling other members of staff how things work in Excel. That's Excel 97 by the way, which we have had deployed for over 6 years.
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 - at least not to a high enough standard to do anything beyond typing a letter.
With the interface also changing in the next version of Word this cost is even more fictional than ever - but it was never legitimate in the first place.
A surprise for some people (Score:3, Interesting)
More interesting would be to do the research on the hidden costs of using Microsoft OS and applications. I, for one, waste plenty of time dealing with updates, reboots after updates, etc. with the various Microsoft OS's that I have to use.
Training costs (Score:3, Interesting)
There is OTHER software than Office (Score:1, Interesting)
Case in point... the main software that I need is point-of-sale. There is NO OSS point-of-sale software that is anywhere near as good as any of the closed source products.
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).
Hell, we don't even use any office software at my business (text documents are done with Textpad).
So, while Open Office and Linux is nice and all, it only meets a fraction of common, every day business needs. (Unless you're a multi-billion dollar internation corporation, then you can just pay a team of people to write something OS, and not care if your competition uses it or not).
Oh, so my point is that these studies are ridiculous. The custom OSS software we would have to have written would have to be amortized over ~20 years in order to save us money. OSS is grossly more expensive for me than shirnk-wrapped products.