

Dump Microsoft, Use Linux to Save Money, U.K. Officials Suggest - dotcoma
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-07-09/dump-microsoft-use-linux-to-save-money-u-k-officials-suggest.html

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motters
Dumping Microsoft would be a smart move, not only in terms of saving money on
licenses but also in order to increase the governments IT procurement options
(freedom from lock-in). Ideally to maximize return on investment any software
written using public money for public use should be open source.

In reality the government won't be able to dump old systems overnight, but
should put in place a transition plan similar to the Open Source Action Plan
proposed about a year ago. Any new software developed should preferentially
take advantage of any open source systems currently available, before
considering proprietary options.

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w1ntermute
90% of these open source initiatives are just schemes to put pressure on
Microsoft to lower licensing fees.

~~~
rbanffy
The other 90% of these initiatives, on the other hand, are genuine attempts to
reduce costs with the added benefit of breaking vendor lock-in and thus
reducing costs down the line while increasing decision autonomy.

I have no idea who suggested it, but, if I were a UK citizen, I would prefer
the money that comes from my taxes to be diverted to companies that create
more jobs in the UK than they create in Redmond, or Bangalore.

~~~
robryan
That's the issue that many countries deal with, do you purchase a sub standard
product from a local vendor to keep money in the local economy or do you go
for the most effective product anywhere.

The big problem for them will be that it's fine to give all these people
OpenOffice but they have the extra effort of also saving it into an Office
format most times they have to interact with people outside there business.
Then there could be translation problems.

~~~
rbanffy
In this specific case, it's the choice between the most effective product and
the one with biggest marketing budget.

Also, in this case, companies wishing to do business with the government
should adhere to government norms. If the government dictates OOo-compatible
file formats, then OOo-compatible it will be.

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mgkimsal
I'm not sure if this is controversial at all, or if more govts are sticking
with MS out of plain old inertia.

MS has a place. Look at the requirements, and if MS is the 'best', use them.
But... the 'best' definition needs to be clear at all levels, and understood
by everyone involved.

My argument for migrating towards more Linux/opensourceness would be one of
'keep the money local'. Especially in the early stages of a migration, there
may in fact be a short term increase in spending, to find local talent to
train and reprogram systems. After the initial transition, the need for fewer
license renewals can be substantial.

Assuming there wasn't 100% reduction in licensing costs. Let's say there was a
60% reduction in licensing costs, but in reality that became only 70% because
of increased training, customization and programming costs. You've saved 30%
but also kept more money flowing in the UK economy.

At some point, stuff need to be paid for. You can choose to hire local
consultants and companies who use MS tools, meaning you're paying for local
talent and paying license fees over to an US-based company. Or you can pay
local talent to use free technology.

Bottom line: You have to pay talent/labor, but you may have more money in the
budget to pay more local people to get more done after migrating to free
technologies.

~~~
lunchbox
I'm skeptical of "keep the money local" and "create local jobs" arguments.
They sound good, but rarely end up being good economics.

Beware: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectionism>

In my mind, the two most important things to consider are:

1) How will worker productivity be affected by the transition? Retraining and
relearning can be extremely expensive, especially for information workers who
are set in their ways. Not to mention the cost of migrating all a company's
documents, scripts, programs, assets, etc. over to the new formats.

2) How is worker productivity affected in the long run? OpenOffice is still
far behind Office in usability for the average information worker. The savings
in license costs is probably outweighed by the long-term productivity hit.

In the grand scheme of things, software is pretty cheap. Wasted man-hours are
very expensive. I haven't seen evidence that these transitions to open source
actually save money.

~~~
rbanffy
> How will worker productivity be affected by the transition?

It's easy to run a pilot and check. From previous experiences, it drops a
little in the beginning, but training smooths the transition. With increased
decision freedom due to removed vendor lock-in, governments can both choose
the best tool for a given job (even if it's incompatible with, say, MS SQL
Server) or develop the missing functionality (because they have access to
source code). And governments can cooperate over these developments across
regional or national borders. Reduced licensing cost is just the beginning.

> especially for information workers who are set in their ways

In other words, who can't learn another IDE beyond Visual Studio and other
language beyond VB. Oh! Wait! They have to learn a new Visual Studio every
couple years. And they had to learn VB.Net (or C#, or managed C++). They
already do relearn lots of stuff.

And if you have a developer who is not willing to learn, fire him.

> OpenOffice is still far behind Office in usability for the average
> information worker

Come on... How many people _within Microsoft_ really stress Words feature-set?
1%? The average "information worker" would be perfectly fine with WordStar and
Visicalc. Also, it's not like Office 2003 users weren't completely lost when
upgraded to 2007 and more so on 2010. The GDP of a decent-sized country was
lost on menu repositioning over Office's history.

> The savings in license costs is probably outweighed by the long-term
> productivity hit.

Long term productivity hit meaning these workers cannot learn new things?

~~~
lunchbox
_Oh! Wait! They have to learn a new Visual Studio every couple years. And they
had to learn VB.Net (or C#, or managed C++)._

Most information workers are not developers and have never heard of the above
technology. Keep in mind that developers are more receptive to change than
most computer workers, which is part of the reason MSFT evolves dev technology
more rapidly.

 _They already do relearn lots of stuff._

Switching to the new version of Windows/Office is not the same as switching to
Linux/OpenOffice. To keep things in perspective, the switch to the Ribbon was
the biggest change to Office in many releases. Most releases (e.g. Office
2010) require little relearning.

 _And if you have a developer who is not willing to learn, fire him._

 _Long term productivity hit meaning these workers cannot learn new things?_

It isn't black and white like that. This isn't about not being willing to
learn or not being able to learn new things. Many computer workers -- lawyers,
managers, schoolteachers, administrative assistants, my parents -- hate having
to learn new technology. They'll learn eventually, but it might be slow and
costly, and might not result in any productivity boost in the end.

 _Come on...How many people within Microsoft really stress Words feature-set?
1%? The average "information worker" would be perfectly fine with WordStar and
Visicalc._

It's not about feature set. It's about familiarity, muscle memory, ease of
use, efficiency, stability, performance, interoperability, accessibility,
backwards compatibility, ubiquity (Office is installed on most PCs),
documentation, supportability, and visual polish.

Alternate response: why are so few organizations switching to WordStar &
Visicalc?

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forkandwait
I work in an analysis shop for state government, and the minority of us who do
"sophisticated" analysis (which is really just basic numerics and trending
plus making maps), could go to a Unix/ FOSS world and increase productivity in
no time. However, it gives me the shakes thinking about trying to explain
CSV's to 100s of local jurisdictions, much less the less sophisticated 50% of
OUR office. But when I say "send me an excel spreadsheet of X, Y, Z" EVERYONE
knows what I mean; so we won't be installing Ubuntu on our desktops any time
soon, unfortunately.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>But when I say "send me an excel spreadsheet of X, Y, Z" EVERYONE knows what
I mean; so we won't be installing Ubuntu on our desktops any time soon,
unfortunately.

For real? OpenOffice.org and KOffice (that I know) both output XLS files. OOo
in fact is more compatible with more versions of MS Office than MS Office is
AFAICT.

There are some esoteric differences between OOo's spreadsheet (called
Spreadsheet) and MS Excel so you'd want to do some testing first.

There used to be StarOffice (not sure if it's still around) which was Sun's
payed for version from which OOo was extracted and also Lotus Symphony based
on OOo - both commercial offerings; like I said I'm not sure of the status of
these now.

~~~
forkandwait
OOo, umm, still sucks. I don't know about Koffice, and I really love Gnumeric.
It is more that the government is in world of not very savvy users (ahem), and
getting out of sync with one's colleagues/ customers/ etc would be a huge
productivity hit, even though personal productivity alone on projects would be
fine.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>OOo, umm, still sucks.

I'm curious. I've come across some things on more complex forms (PAYE+NI
calulators for example) that differed from the MS Excel way but not much/often
(but I don't use it much).

Can you be specific about what your colleagues are doing in MS Excel that OOo
Spreadsheet can't do or how else it sucks?

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kierank
Open Source in Government is just another political buzzphrase along with Open
Data. However, Open Data is relatively easy to do and it has various emotional
or financial attachments to some: e.g. "It's our data" or "We paid for it" and
so it won various brownie points when data was released. Open Source is a
different kettle of fish and vast swathes of Government IT are set-up around
Microsoft and other proprietary systems.

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pbhjpbhj
Given that the NHS alone has spent 400Million on an unfinished unified medical
records system (for real, 400Million GBP!) then I'd have thought having a UK
Linux OS created by the gov and used throughout all gov departments, schools,
etc. and given away free for private and business use would be a drop in the
ocean of UK gov IT spending.

Guess it's too communist looking.

~~~
rbanffy
I seriously doubt that, if the NHS system were to be developed "in the open"
with public access to daily builds and in-progress documentation, a 400M GBP
disaster would have happened.

Light is a great antiseptic.

------
hotmind
In related news, I just discovered (today in fact) a real-life Adobe
DreamWeaver alternative that DOESN'T SUCK! And for the most part, it's
completely free, unless you want the Pro version which costs a whopping $59:
<http://www.evrsoft.com>

I dunno. I feel like dancing on my dining room table with a lampshade on my
head, I'm so freakin' happy. Except I don't have a dining room table, so that
takes care of that.

P.S. I have absolutely nothing to do with Evrsoft. I only heard of them today.
The software is great, so I thought I'd pass along the good news.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>I only heard of them today. The software is great, so I thought I'd pass
along the good news.

Use it for a couple of weeks and then post us a review.

Personally (and I've developed using about 20 different apps/environments) I
feel you need to have done a whole project on it to really know if it's any
good.

Tagged for a closer look. Currently I'm using Quanta+ and am exited that a
GSoC dev has stepped in to push it into KDE4 proper (trials of Kdevelop halted
for now).

~~~
hotmind
I've used DreamWeaver exclusively for about a decade (way back when Macromedia
was the shiznit), mostly for static HTML/CSS projects. Then recently, my main
PC died, and with it my last Adobe Creative Suite 5 licence (I couldn't get
back into the drive and deactivate the licence on that computer).

That sent me on an epic voyage for a dreamweaver alternative, and I've been
disappointed by the half dozen or so open source alternatives. Yeah, I've only
kicked the tires on Evrsoft, but it seems sturdy enough for what I'll use it
for.

Let's face it, things are moving away from static HTML to online CMS platforms
like Drupal and Wordpress. I'm not crazy about forking over hundreds of
dollars for a) software that's already paid for and b) software I am needing
less and less.

~~~
hotmind
Afterthought: I've used NVU years ago when I ran RedHat, and it wasn't
terrible. Still isn't.

