If the 40% figure is accurate, this is a BIG win for the Linux desktop (and Canonical in particular), because the TCO (total cost of ownership) of an enterprise desktop can be as much as four to five times greater than the cost of its hardware and software licenses.[1] At most corporations, training, support, maintenance, security, and other ongoing costs together vastly exceed the cost of just hardware and software.
For example, the hardware+software-only costs of a run-of-the-mill Windows+Office enterprise desktop, for a large corporation, might be $1,200 over three years, but the TCO could easily top $4,000 or even $5,000 a year. (If these figures seem high to you, think about the cost of training thousands of individuals about as computer savvy as your Aunt Tillie, and then having to troubleshoot all their virus infections, messed up files, one-off application bugs, unrepeatable weird crashes, etc. so they can do their work every day.)
The Gendarmerie, in other words, is claiming that the switch to Ubuntu Linux on the desktop is saving them somewhere between one and two thousand dollars a year per seat. With 72,000 desktops, the aggregate savings are probably in the mid-to-high tens of millions of dollars a year.
Keep in mind that a motivation to change was the end of Windows XP so they're probably assuming the training costs for each OS (GendBuntu vs Windows Vista) would be identical. So while it is a victory for Linux, it's not a rout like these numbers might make it seem.
But also keep in mind that when using FOSS software, there is no controlling entity that can forcibly end something and force exit costs[1] and the subsequent training costs for a new product on you.
AFAIK what Microsoft forcibly ended was a support agreement for the software. I don't see how this is less possible with FOSS. If your third-party support provider doesn't want to support some software anymore and nobody else you trust wants to either, this puts you right where those companies were vis a vis Windows XP.
That's not true. If you're using an open-source distro and the vendor terminates the support agreement, you still have the source, so you can pay a 3rd party to maintain the software for you (e.g. by backporting security fixes from newer releases).
You can, but it will cost you 10x more to maintain the distro than it cost the original authors, and you won't be able to share the cost with many others. Worse, the cost will only increase over time. Not as dire as a closed source abandonment, but eventually you will have to upgrade.
You don't have to "maintain the distro" per se. You just have to backport security fixes for the subset of that distro's packages that you actually use. If you have a large organization and you only use a limited subset of the software provided by the distribution, it's not inconceivable that you might have the resources to do so.
That's simply unrealistic. It's a nice theory but if you're the only people using that software, how is it going to be cost effective to take the burden of maintaining it?
Well you have the same problem if the company that supplies the proprietary software goes out of business except that you are usually just flat out screwed. Granted it's unlikely that someone like Microsoft will go out of business anytime soon (but then again I'd say it's also fairly unlikely that Ubuntu disappears anytime soon and even that would leave you with a fallback option of other, similar Linux distros).
If say Windows XP just gets phased out on you that's not exactly cause for celebration either. And of course there's also the advantage that you can at least theoretically check most of the source code of Linux which is probably somewhat relevant in a government setting (a potential NSA cooperation of Microsoft says hi)
Sure there is, it's just smaller in magnitude. When the security updates for your distro revision stop, that's the end of that revision. Then you have upgrade costs.
Ubuntu in particular are bad at keeping things the same between (LTS) revisions - so many times when you google to fix something, there's different instructions for each of the past X releases.
Ok, fair enough. But I still think that the choice of the default desktop strongly suggests what most people should use, at least with a distro like Ubuntu that is supposed to be newbie-friendly.
I interned in a french company a couple years ago, and was surprised to discover what the company's computer setup was. You had the usual windows XP, but you couldn't install anything on it: they had this system where you had to call IT, tell them what software you wanted, then they would deploy it to your computer. They would also do nightly backups of your systems, and all that jazz. Half of the time, it didn't work, so you had to call IT and they'd come troubleshoot. All in all, I have no trouble believing that factoring in the IT support behemoth and, the TCO was vastly more that $1000.
The problem with the 40% savings figure is that tablet-based operating systems cost around $1k annually. And in the long run, your windows desktop will have an OS more like a tablet than a windows 7 desktop.
It's a bit "curious" those numbers were absent, it would certainly have made things more clear (not to mention convincing).
If they're able to calculate the TCO difference, they most certainly had the numbers, right? Or perhaps the story wouldn't have been quite as compelling if they published the specific numbers they used to calculate "TCO".
Also, are we to believe that the replacement apps are fully as good as the commercial alternative? MS Excel is not superior in any way to the open source alternative? There most certainly is a cost associated with productivity, far beyond desktop maintenance costs in many cases.
> Also, are we to believe that the replacement apps are fully as good as the commercial alternative?
Considering that the police are using this software and their requirements are email and office apps then they don't need a lot of functionality. Hell you can use Google Docs and it would suffice.
>MS Excel is not superior in any way to the open source alternative?
Why would that be a requirement? Take any two things that aren't identical and each of them will be better than the other at something. You're assuming the comparison on net would favor Microsoft. For example, here's a short list of commands: grep, awk, sed, ssh, scp, rsync, wget, nc, dig, du, sort. These programs are not superior in any way to the Microsoft alternative?
Those would be superior to the alternatives on Windows undoubtedly - the questions is what % of users in a scenario are using those commands vs how many are using spreadsheets. I'd suggest there are more spreadsheet users in most organizations.
Regardless, I'm not even suggesting who necessarily wins, I am saying it is a very important consideration that should be considered if you are truly trying to calculate an accurate TCO comparison.
For example, the hardware+software-only costs of a run-of-the-mill Windows+Office enterprise desktop, for a large corporation, might be $1,200 over three years, but the TCO could easily top $4,000 or even $5,000 a year. (If these figures seem high to you, think about the cost of training thousands of individuals about as computer savvy as your Aunt Tillie, and then having to troubleshoot all their virus infections, messed up files, one-off application bugs, unrepeatable weird crashes, etc. so they can do their work every day.)
The Gendarmerie, in other words, is claiming that the switch to Ubuntu Linux on the desktop is saving them somewhere between one and two thousand dollars a year per seat. With 72,000 desktops, the aggregate savings are probably in the mid-to-high tens of millions of dollars a year.
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[1] http://www.gartner.com/id=2371417