Australian Senate Hears Open Source Is Too Expensive 365
schliz writes "The Australian Government Information Management Office says that a platform change to open source could cost more than it saves. It was pushed to investigate open source software to reduce its AUD$500m budget at a Senate meeting yesterday. From the article: 'Agencies are obliged to consider value for money on each occasion they apply a software,' spokesperson Graham Fry said. 'If the cost of assessing it [open source] was greater than the cost of the software, you would have to think twice.'"
How about the other side. (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, there are costs to adopting open-source, that's the basic message when you use a bureaucrat to English translator.
How about these from TFA:
A 2007 AGIMO survey revealed that 68 percent of government agencies were either piloting or using open source software.
Centrelink, the Australian Bureau of Statistics and National Archives of Australia were known to use open source products;
Looks like it's getting a fair hearing.
It could be legitimate (Score:5, Informative)
On the developer front:
If you have a lot of database stuff, Visual Studio can be much cheaper to develop for, so long as you ignore Microsoft's Architectural Group. For me, moving to Linux isn't just about saving money, really, its to break free from the corporate brain cramp that is Microsoft Architectural guidelines. Visual Studio and C# are great tools, but, if you have to use evaporate 2x as productive multiplier to do 10x as much stupid stuff, there's hardly a savings.
On the office front:
OpenOffice's spreadsheet is not even close to Office 2007 Excel. We developers can say Open Office spreadsheet is good enough, but telling that to someone who lives and breaths Excel is only for laughs.
Re:It could be legitimate (Score:5, Informative)
"OpenOffice's spreadsheet is not even close to Office 2007 Excel. "
95% of the users I know use it to make phone lists and such with no calculation at all, because they never saw that Word and its companions can do tables too.
Re:As usually, price is the only criterion. (Score:2, Informative)
You're certainly referring to this [archive.org], which someone should point to the *ahem* honorable gentleman from the Australian Government.
Re:I'll do it for $250 Million (Score:1, Informative)
Great. So those 50 employees are going to manage to train the thousands of users to use the new software, train the help desk to deal with the problems, double (triple? quadruple?) the help desk as there will be increased problems from users, write all the new custom software that has no equivalent on linux, and still have money left over to purchase proper support contracts from businesses that will support mission cirtical software?
Yeah, no you wont.
Yes, assessing it isn't free (Score:3, Informative)
cost(assessing) > cost(software) where cost(assessing) > 0 and cost(software) = 0
That's true, but doesn't mean anything, so it's a bullshit reason.
Whats interesting (Score:3, Informative)
Australia did not just print out MS CS degrees, they actually funded real Unix CS.
We like our mini military-industrial complex and did fund some maths/CS aspects of our top educational institutions.
So where is the brain *gap* ? We do not have a bunch of xbox playing cubical chumps running our
Someone fixed something with this.
As someone in Australia did with Saddam Hussein and wheat, Australia can do with software and Redmond.
Re:It could be legitimate (Score:5, Informative)
On the developer front:
If you have a lot of database stuff, Visual Studio can be much cheaper to develop for, so long as you ignore Microsoft's Architectural Group. For me, moving to Linux isn't just about saving money, really, its to break free from the corporate brain cramp that is Microsoft Architectural guidelines. Visual Studio and C# are great tools, but, if you have to use evaporate 2x as productive multiplier to do 10x as much stupid stuff, there's hardly a savings.
On the office front:
OpenOffice's spreadsheet is not even close to Office 2007 Excel. We developers can say Open Office spreadsheet is good enough, but telling that to someone who lives and breaths Excel is only for laughs.
However people that use their spreadsheets for statistics will tell you that using Excel for you calculation is about as productive as using substituting rand() for your equations.
Here is one of several papers [csdassn.org] about the fact that Microsoft has no interest in fixing the broken nature of excel for statistical work.
The difference in administrating systems (Score:4, Informative)
Sounds like we have a difference in administration approach between open source and closed source software.
Open Source
- It's Free
- But if you want something special you will need specialists to write the software and test it for you - Cost lots
- You'll have to pay for your own training
- If you change your computers in future, chances are the software may still be able to be made to work
Closed Source
- It's expensive
- Carefully researched product - will probably meet the needs of your business without much tailoring
- Training will be provided as part of package
- If you change your system in future, chances are you will need to buy the latest version of the software at greater expensive
Options for legacy systems
- virtualisation or emulation - but both have their own administration costs
However, there is one factor that I haven't discussed yet, that is the attitude and stability of the software vendor.
- Some vendors write such highly specialised versions of software that they change little between versions. If you are using such a system then is it probably worth risking the software being closed source.
- But some vendors want to maximise profit, so they will revise the software with short lifecycles and sometime be sneaky enough to remove commonly used features on more basic versions of the software, so that when you do upgrade you have to pay even more or change your processes around the lack of that particular feature.
The horrible truth is that IT companies have a habit of pulling wool of the eyes of governments. This is partly due to the fact that the requirements are often vague and incomplete, but also due to the complexity that governments insist on without understand the consequences. Fact is programming time is like any other engineering type function, it costs money.
With regard the the article, there is too little information to say whether the Australian Government have made the right choice. However, if you want to base the information on the experience with UK government, chances are the politicians have made a complete hash of whatever decision they have made, because they when want a system to perform too many different functions without realising that they are trying for levels of efficiency that could never be achieved, cost more money and finally ending up with a system that doesn't work properly due to fundamental design structures.
Sometimes it is best not to try and implement a one size fits all policy, but too break parts down into their constituents and build systems on a more modular basis. For example two departments may use software from different vendors and have to exchange data, with each other in a define way - the interface software could be open source based and maintained either by the company/organisation/government or a contractor. However, there will be a point when you get to the lack of diminishing returns when trying too hard costs even more, at which point you implement risk management and move on. The problem is that governments are full of people that think they "Know it All", but they in fact "Know everything about nothing" and don't understand when to stop arguing a case as they is no more benefit to what they are saying, obstructing proper process.
So to answer, Open Source or Closed Source - it depends on the application and how you understand the pitfalls.
Re:Duh... (Score:3, Informative)
If you can call the product of a pumped-full-of-chemicals, non-species-appropriately fed, mentally crazy chicken, still an “egg”.
Have you ever tasted the egg from a chicken that lives and eats, like it’s supposed to? After that, a industrial cooked egg tastes like a piece of nasty jelly, void of any taste.
And with the healthiness it’s even worse.
You get what you pay for...
Re:Duh... (Score:5, Informative)
Users of open source software don't exist in isolation; the economy of scale is huge in their case, too.
Clearly they forgot to ask my department... (Score:1, Informative)
we're running Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with Open Enterprise Server 2 as our core infrastructure, with a bunch of open-source services providing critical functionality to the entire department across all states. Sure, we pay for support, but in the three years I've been there we've used that support on a total of 7 occasions.
Exactly right (Score:5, Informative)
In the end, it all depends on how you make the calculation. Sure, a switch *could* cost more, but it *could* also cost less depending on the scenario you choose to follow.
Having actually replaced proprietary systems with open source alternatives, I can tell you none of the expense talking points that usually get thrown around by people invested in Microsoft products have ever materialized. There are always minor disruptions, but no worse than moving to the next version of a proprietary product. The license savings have been huge, but it's more than that. You don't realize how often proprietary companies come back and back for another drop of blood until they're gone. It's like Little Shop of IT Horrors. The up front license costs are only one layer of cost savings.
This may not be a great example, but the last company I worked at saved big when we replaced Exchange with Gmail, which I don't consider an open source product. Not only did we scrap Exchange and the associated server OS licenses, we let the Exchange admin go and replaced them with a lower cost developer. That saved a ton of money and we were able to channel that savings into increased productivity. Double bonus. Gmail is simple enough the help desk could manage the administration.
Really, it's all in how you implement the changes. The barrier for most companies is that their IT decisions are being made by people invested in proprietary technology. They'll never get out from under it.
Re:It could be legitimate (Score:3, Informative)
Were you going for a funny there? If you use the spreadsheet as a Base database you can perform SQL operations on it. You can even create a form for data entry if you want to. You think OOo Calc doesn't have filtering?
Re:Hidden costs of open source (Score:2, Informative)
I really love [WHATEVER] but... [REASON THEY DO NOT LOVE WHATEVER]"
is a classic astroturfer pattern.
Re:Exactly right (Score:3, Informative)
Asterisk.
Threw it in an old desktop server, added some magic, and POOF.
It was infinitely cheaper than their current solution.
Re:Exactly right (Score:4, Informative)
I run asterisk in a VPS. For $15 a month I get a private PBX that I can tap from anywhere in the world. Takes about 2-3 hours of work to get it up and running with extensions & voice-mail, if you're following the O'Rieley book. I pay $1/month for my phone number and 0.4 cents per minute incoming. Since I pay by minute, I don't have a limit on the number of calls. For about $9-15 a month you can get unlimited incoming and outgoing minutes, but it's usually limited to 2 simultaneous calls.
The practical limit is about 48 simultaneous calls or 96 active connections - above that and I would need to upgrade my server. For me, I get a business phone line, with the ability to do a conference call with more people than I care to talk to, for about $18/month including usage.
For people worried about backups etc, the VPS company has 4 locations with auto roll over and I get a backup stored on their servers and I can keep as many backups as I can be bothered with on my own. If they went out of business tomorrow, I could upload my image to any Parallels VPS provider and be back in business with an IP address change on the server and at my DID provider. Your mileage will of course vary depending on your VPS supplier.
If you want more info on the server itself, check out either Asterisk [asterisk.org] or Voip-Info [voip-info.org].