Australian Senate Hears Open Source Is Too Expensive 365
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samzenpus
from the you-get-what-you-pay-for dept.
from the you-get-what-you-pay-for dept.
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.'"
Do this guys know the definition of user lock-in? (Score:5, Insightful)
> Australian Senate Hears Open Source Is Too Expensive
Well, dear senators, this is a normal consequence of vendor lock-in:
"In economics, vendor lock-in, also known as proprietary lock-in, or customer lock-in, makes a customer dependent on a vendor for products and services, unable to use another vendor without SUBSTANTIAL switching COSTS. Lock-in costs which create barriers to market entry may result in antitrust action against a monopoly."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendor_lock-in [wikipedia.org]
So, of course, there will be a substantial cost for switching ;-))
In the end, it all depends on how long you wish to stay locked-in. You have to consider the matter in the long term to see the advantages, and long-term thinking is seldom seen in modern politics ;-))
Re:Do this guys know the definition of user lock-i (Score:5, Insightful)
Switching cost includes more the just the cost of the software its self. Just because you're using open source does not mean you don't face a certain degree of lock-in.
Re:Duh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Do they really think it's better to pay for an egg every day than for a chicken today and then nothing for the foreseeable future?
....then pay a little for the chicken feed and pay a little for cleaning up the cage and pay a little vaccinating the chicken etc.. Clearly, you have never bought a live chicken for the eggs :)
Re:Do this guys know the definition of user lock-i (Score:5, Insightful)
As usually, price is the only criterion. (Score:5, Insightful)
As usually, price is the only criterion. And I remember a letter of prime minister of Peru to Microsoft. He explained clearly and plainly that the TCO was moot. It doesn't matter if the analysis is good or bad. It matters that proprietary software is not suitable for government.
Government must not allow for vendor lock-in. It must not create a situation where their data is hostage to a private company.
Government must be transparent in all its processes. Their software included, being open for public scrutiny.
Government must use secure software. No black-box encryption can be considered secure.
Government's duty is to be as accessible to wide public as possible. That means, amongst all, open API for their services, and software available to all citizens no matter what their material status. No paywall of any kind to let only the rich have their way.
OSS is not a choice of "cheaper". It's the choice of "doing things the right way".
Hidden costs of open source (Score:3, Insightful)
What the very short article DOESN'T mention is what we in the industry have known for years:
1) A software LICENSE isn't always cheaper than software SUPPORT. And you DO need support for your platform, open source or not.
2) Using a well established vendor software (like say windows), means it's easier (cheaper) to educate people in the software they'll be using, and similarly easier to find qualified support (in house and outsourced alike).
3) Open source doesn't mean the software is FREE, it just means it is open source. Many companies supply the source code for review when they sell their software to customers.
4) The lifecycle of "well established" products is well documented (and generally very long lived), and may factor into the choice, as noone wants to scrap the software again in 3 years (and incur another switchover cost) when there's no longer any support for whatever you chose as your platform.
5) Techonologically, a lot of software just inst available as open source. You may be unable to find the software you need for your platform, thus again driving the costs up if you have to develop it yourself. Noone wants to be stuck with a legacy system for the next 15 years (again).
So for a long term saving, it's often cheaper to stay with what you've got (or for a new installation, choose the same as everyone else) and pay a lot of licensefees, than to change to something that's cheaper in licensing and have a shitload of other costs.
That said, I LOVE linux, open source and free software. But for commercial use, it just isn't always optimal.
Re:Duh... (Score:1, Insightful)
I hate to break it to you but that's not how governments work. Long-term sustainability is no longer on anybody's agenda.
These people sell public real estate to private companies and then rent them back because it gives them more money NOW. Who cares that it's going to cost more in 1-2 years. That's the next guy's problem.
They get a fat bonus from the private company that got the great deal and they don't have to deal with a deficit. Nothing else matters.
Re:Duh... (Score:4, Insightful)
The egg production industry has economies of scale and security of supply that a single-chicken-owner can't match.
Re:Do this guys know the definition of user lock-i (Score:5, Insightful)
The bureaucrats last far longer than that and ultimately they are often the ones that make decisions by undermining decisions more often based upon power plays and ego, rather than upon sound economic decisions. In this case one person was making statements full of if, could, necessarily, assumption, all to cover the fact that they had not bothered to conduct any research. The reason for the lack of research, that research could cost more than $500 million dollars a year, one could only guess that Graham Fry was intending to contract out the research into using open source software to a closed source proprietary software company.
Obviously Fry has no concept of foreign debt, no understanding of maintaining control over software upgrade cycles, no idea about monitoring historical trends and how many times they have bought the same software, no concept at all of life cycle costing, believes the lie that closed source proprietary software is free of maintenance costs and, fails to understand how governments choices in this sector impact upon private industry choices and further impact foreign by a nominal factor of 10 (500 million becomes 5 billion). A true asshat that does not belong in a role that legacy, longevity and, political astuteness has provided him, rather than expertise, national economic awareness or even basic common sence. Sounds like the Green Party in Australia is far more technologically aware than the rest (they also oppose censorship).
It seems that global trend of the right shifting to the loony bin and the left shifting to the right of centre leaving the humanity and environment (over greed and power) based parties, in this case the Greens, to take up the centre left position, holds true. With FOSS the bulk of the money in software can always be spent locally and that's down to state and city level, not just country.
Re:As usually, price is the only criterion. (Score:4, Insightful)
Obviously the issue is the people who are doing the analysis... consultants...
This is the reason [despair.com] why this kind of thing is all screwed up:
If you're not a part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem
Frustrated by the lack of a staggered approach. (Score:4, Insightful)
I work in state government and what bugs me is we don't put at least say Open Office on every single machine.
It literally costs nothing to do and could at least begin the transition to open source solutions.
Sadly we use document management crap for users incapable of using a filesystem properly, so the saveas and save dialog boxes are replaced by a front end which hands documents being loaded to a specific server. I am not aware if this system can tie in to the open office system.
Stage 1 should be, firefox on every workstation, open office on every workstation, imgburn on every workstation and VLC on every workstation. We should also be virtualising with Virtual Box.
We do in my dept actually put VLC on as default (in conjunction with media player and so on) but it's not enough.
Slowly slowly get the users used to multiplatform open source packages, it doesn't matter if it's a 10 year, very very slow transition, it results in completely free systems in the long run.
I for one am a Windows guy at home but I'd be more than happy to be forced to learn that stuff and support it, from what little I know of linux is it may be missing some UI polish and some enterprise level administration stuff, you can on the other hand lock things down exceptionally well, diagnose problems remotely very well and overall have a pretty reliable system.
It's really sad, but I guess this goes back to the 'no one ever got fired for buying intel' saying, it likely applies to MS applications and OS's as well :/
There's also functionality to consider (Score:5, Insightful)
Different solutions, open source or not, aren't always as functional in the ways you need as what you have now, or what you are considering buying. Now, it's easy to say "Well it's open source! Just hire some programmers to write the functionality you need." However that is a problem for three reasons:
1) That costs money. All of a sudden the "$0 per copy" thing isn't true anymore. You have to factor in the cost of the development team. That is not cheap, at least if you want it done well. Good programmers don't work for minimum wage. So that cost must be factored in.
2) You have to support it. If you are doing major development to something you need, you'll then have to support that development for yourself. This means ongoing support personnel costs. While you might not need to keep the whole dev team on, you'll still need some of them because they are going to have to maintain the software. Again, most costs to factor in.
3) It won't be ready right now. If there's an off the shelf solution that meets you needs now, you have to weight that against the development time for what you'd need to add. It isn't as easy to put a dollar figure on, but it factors in. Saying "Oh just wait 18 months," isn't so easy to do.
One area I've personally seen this as a real problem is video editing software. The OSS solutions are pretty abysmal next to things like Sony Vegas Pro or Apple Final Cut Pro. Now those aren't cheap, but in most cases I bet they are way cheaper than trying to fix up an OSS solution. I mean say you've got a shop with 20 editors that all need their own copy of Vegas. That'll run you $12,000 for the licenses. You decide that the included 40 network rendering licenses are enough for the farm for the workload. You also decide that you want to purchase their yearly-ish upgrades, so about $5,000 in maintenance per year. This assumes no discounts.
Ok, you think you can develop OSS to be the same level of quality for that price? Not likely, you can't even hire a programmer for that, never mind that it'd probably take more than one as well as other people (like designers to make it nice and usable). Never mind that your work either has to wait until its done or you need to buy something now. Makes much more sense to just buy the commercial solution.
So while OSS can be a cheaper solution, and can be a better solution, there is no guarantee it is. All the costs have to be evaluated and that includes things like "Does it do everything we need?" and "Is it easy for non-technical users to make use of?"
Re:Hidden costs of open source (Score:5, Insightful)
So for a long term saving, it's often cheaper to stay with what you've got (or for a new installation, choose the same as everyone else) and pay a lot of licensefees, than to change to something that's cheaper in licensing and have a shitload of other costs.
In the long term it's NEVER cheaper to follow a vendor's lock-in.
That said, I LOVE linux, open source and free software. But for commercial use, it just isn't always optimal.
Oh, the hallmark of Microsoft astroturfers.
Misleading headline (Score:3, Insightful)
According to the headline, the Australian senate says that open source (I guess they mean free software) is expensive, but they actually said that switching is expensive. The headline is supposed to provide us with the best possible understanding of the whole article, given the restricted space, not require us to read the article just to check if it agrees with the headline. Set higher standards, Slashdot!
In what timeframe? (Score:3, Insightful)
Switching costs > Licencensing costs
X$ > Y$ per year !? something about this equation doesn't make sense.
Wouldn't you have to know how many years we're talking about?
Re:Do this guys know the definition of user lock-i (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes. in this case it also includes the cost of training people that have never worked with anything but Windows. That is, of course, if you assume you *have* to retrain your existing admins, rather than firing two of them and replacing them with a single Unix admin. 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.
Re:It could be legitimate (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly, the amount of business critical applications buried in excel macro's is shocking. And, as we all know, the person who wrote the macro never leaves his/her job. This is especially dangerous for government who, for particular branches, have to be able to transparently show how they came to certain decisions. Any responsible official will stay away from excel for all but the most menial of tasks.
Re:Hidden costs of open source (Score:5, Insightful)
But for commercial use, it just isn't always optimal.
We're not talking about COMMERCIAL.
We're talking about GOVERNMENTAL.
In this case cost is a far secondary issue.
1) while License is usually cheaper than full IP rights for one item, when it comes to deployment of thousands it's often cheaper to purchase IP rights and be free to deploy as much as you wish (one per every citizen of the country...?) Also, starting your own support dept. in this case may be desirable, especially if the problem is in the software and the vendor is not willing to fix it.
2) Cheaper. Safer? More available? Without creating dangerous lock-in? Without danger of losing backwards compatibility?
3) Yes. It doesn't have to be gratis. It must be open.
4) The life cycle of a well established product ends when the vendor says so, and that's the final end. The life cycle of an open-source product ends when you're not willing to support (pay for) its development. Nobody can force you to upgrade if the current version is better than the new one.
5) A lot of software could be written for the cost of licenses of purchasing software that is already written. It's taxpayer's money better spent if the taxpayer gets a piece of software they can use in return, than if a foreign firm gets to sell some licenses.
And? (Score:3, Insightful)
* there is a cost for running proprietary, closed source software - usually made up of licence costs plus support costs
* there is a cost for running FOSS - not licence costs, but support costs
* there is a cost for implementing any new software to an organisation, in terms of cost of change, reskilling, downtime, training etc.
Just because an app is free, doesn't mean it costs you nothing to implement it. Any decisions regarding moving from one set of software to another should consider the total cost of change
On top of this, governments do not consider the long term - they want to make finances look good for the period they are in power, so they can get a good economic soundbite at the end of a term and hopefully get re-elected.
Let's dumb it down, shall we? (Score:1, Insightful)
> "If the cost of assessing it was greater than the cost of the software, you would have to think twice."
We don't understand it. Do you understand it? This stuff is hard. Have you tried rebooting?
> "While open source software may reduce licensing costs, the cost of support could be an issue."
I was flipping burgers last week and now I are teh IT guy. Have you tried rebooting?
> "Centrelink, the Australian Bureau of Statistics and National Archives of Australia were known to use open source products; however, it was up to individual agencies to make procurement decisions, AGIMO said."
Yes, yes we do. And so do quite a few others. Betcha no-one in the proprietary software world knows who we all are. We're here though, and we're not going away.
Re:Whats interesting (Score:3, Insightful)
But this article is really about IT. Its a blue collar occupation. My brother does it. He trained as a cook. He earns more than me too. The CS people are off working for CSIRO, DSTO and the BOM or contractors.
I work for one of those contractors and frankly, 70% of the CS graduates who work for us are glad to be given a safe little windows box with a copy of outlook to organise their meetings, while the rest of us either put up with the corporate linux install or overwrite it with something more inspiring.
Re:Do this guys know the definition of user lock-i (Score:3, Insightful)
Still too soon. His wiki page makes sad reading BTW.
Re:Hidden costs of open source (Score:4, Insightful)
1) But proprietary software needs support as well. So there's no real difference here between open source and non-open source.
2) That's application training, and regardless if it's open source software or not, people will need training. Again no real difference.
3) Many companies do NOT let you review source code. SOME companies allow you to license the source code for a LOT of money.
4) This is silly.. Would you say Windows is 'well established'? They fudged up the successor to XP for a long time, otherwise you have to change to the latest flavor of Windows in 3-5 years. In fact, they will actually not SELL it to you anymore! No such problems with open source.
5) True, a lot of stuff isn't available in open source. However developing your own apps in-house is not necessarily a bad thing as you say it. I've seen plenty of big time commercial packages just fail again and again due to bugs or in the end just not fitting it's purpose for what it was bought for. The advantage of in-house custom made, means it should fit 100%, you have debugging in your own hands, can be cheaper in the long-run, you don't have to worry about the product being discontinued and if it's good, you might even sell it to other similar companies.
So I will have do disagree with your final conclusion. I'm not saying open source is ALWAYS cheaper, but you'll have to look better into the situation before you can make that assessment.
Re:Who ever said anything about microsoft ? (Score:4, Insightful)
But when all else is said and done, show me another OS that'll run for instance a SAP gui, Toad
A Wii will run Toad [mariowiki.com].
Quest Space Manager
Why do these software companies have to make their products names sound so much like video games?
Business Objects, Dimension and Oracle
Wasn't Oracle moving toward Java, which "runs everywhere", and web apps, which also run everywhere?
has decent text editing, integrated network support
What desktop operating system doesn't?
spreadsheet
Apple Numbers. OpenOffice.org Calc.
and is intuitive.
No interface is intuitive; even the nipple must be learned. By "intuitive", did you mean "almost any employee that we hire will have already been trained on the software by another firm"? In that case, GNOME is close enough to Windows for it not to matter until you try to administer the system.
Graham Fry = idiot (Score:3, Insightful)
"If the cost of assessing it [open source] was greater than the cost of the software, you would have to think twice."
Newsflash Mr Fry - if you're using free software that's what you'd expect. Since when did zero multiplied by anything become a number?
Imbecile.
an interesting thread, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
...software costs are so low that for me they're not even on the radar. For me the biggest factor in TCO is people costs, not hardware or software.
In the quantities I procure what used to be called the MS Desktop Pro license (a copy of the current desktop OS, copy of the current version of MS Office Professional Plus and Windows server and Exchange CALs) costs me ~$200 per year per workstation - chickenfeed, really.
A call to the helpdesk costs about $25, a deskside visit costs about twice that but since it isn't my field I'm not gonna address application development costs, even if I did think our developers were smart enough to code in something other than Windows. Hell, they can't even figure out how to make existing applications compatible with IE8.
But I digress - support types generally have little love for software developers and vice versa ;-)
Anyway, over the long term open source software would probably save money but in the short- and medium-term (let's say three years) migration costs would be ridiculously expensive - sticker shock alone keeps it out of the budget.
Part of the up side is I'd be able to extend PC and server lifecycles for a year or so since Linux generally requires less hardware than Windows, but as mentioned earlier OO Spreadsheet is not an acceptable replacement for MS Excel for power users and there is no direct migration between MS Access and OO Database - the only way you can get them to play nice with each other is through an ODBC connector.
I've got one 500-user Access database (yeah, the person who thought that up should be fired but it happened before I hired in) that simply can't be migrated to OO - right now I'm trying to get it migrated to either SQL or Oracle.
Government != Corporate (Score:3, Insightful)
For governmental use open-source is preferable even if it initially costs more -- you end up paying to your local software support and programmers, creating more jobs, supporting local IT industry and, most important, contributing to own GDP. Money payed for foreign company is money lost for your country, while money payed to local developers stays and works.
Re:Hidden costs of open source (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Who ever said anything about microsoft ? (Score:3, Insightful)
[...] and is intuitive.
I don't know about the rest of your comment but this tends to suggest you're biased. Different people find different interfaces more or less intuitive. Microsoft operating systems for most are more _familiar_ which trumps intuitiveness for initial use.
Software should adapt to my business, my business shouldn't have to adapt to the software.
It's somewhere in between. Upgraded to MS Word with the ribbon UI? Then your business just adapted to the software.
Re:Hidden costs of open source (Score:5, Insightful)
Project foo stops being actively maintained. You hire 5 developers, 2 testers to work on it. You pay them ~50-60k/yr. (5 devs, 2 testers - This is for a smallish project.)
If you're the only one covering development costs, this implies that you are the only one using the software. How long do you think a commercial software company would keep supporting a program with one user, and how much do you think they'd be charging you? If there are other users, then you can share the maintenance costs with them. Typically, you'd get a company like Sun or IBM to adopt it and sell support to the current users.
Re:Do this guys know the definition of user lock-i (Score:4, Insightful)
This is the Australian Public Service. Sacking people is all but impossible based on my experience.
In related news (Score:4, Insightful)