January 6, 2006 at 7:08 pm
As a regular reader of Slashdot, these types of stories are always cropping up, but it was interesting to see one at C|Net, a slightly more mainstream source. The city of Mannheim in Germany is looking to move to Open Source software for it's government IT systems.
And it's not about price!
Now I don't have the source of the interviews and I'm not sure they're like my interviews where pretty much every word I get back is what is published. I do sometimes reword a sentence to make more sense, or reorder the questions slightly, but I don't drop anything out.
However here it was interesting that they paid 1 million euros to Microsoft to migrate from Office 2000 to Office 2003. For 3500 desktops, that's about 285 euros per desktop. Don't know about you, but that's not an outrageous amount to me. It's not cheap, but it's not outrageous. So the quote in the article is that if they move to open software, like Open Office, then they never pay 1 million euros to Microsoft again.
But are they paying someone else? Are they going to hire programmers to fix software or buy a contract from some other provider at less money?
It's interesting that right after this the article goes to talk that they won't pay for Linux, but they'll be paying for 145 applications to be ported, which will be at some cost. There's no real estimate even given for what this will cost and likely it will be way beyond 1 million euros.
I do think this is more a religious change then a financial one. That $300 you pay Microsoft is really because they've done a lot of work on their product, it's integrated, and it works well. It's not perfect, but neither is anything else, and it works great. If you want to switch to someone else's software, be my guess. You're welcome to and it may be the best decision for you.
Just don't tell me I'm making the wrong decision.
Steve Jones
January 9, 2006 at 6:59 am
I think it's a matter of control, not cost.
I suspect, in part, it's because governments and others are uncomfortable with ceding their control over their data. Organizations strongly prefer multiple sourcing for many critical services and IT is as critical as it gets. Licensing terms change with the wind, MS is famous for changing formats (which has really crippled Access for any long term company wide applications), and while there is little likelihood that MS will go belly up, with many vendors bankruptcy or takeover can leave your data and systems hostage to different and perhaps unfriendly hands.
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-- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers --
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