[A2k] open source cheaper than commercial rivals?

[Michelle Childs]

http://society.guardian.co.uk/e-public/story/0,,1786068,00.html
Open source debate brought to a close - for now

Arguments over whether open source software really does save money over
commercial rivals have come to a head...

S A Mathieson
Wednesday May 31, 2006
The Guardian


Is open source software - collaboratively written and free of licence fees
- cheaper than proprietary software? A series of government-sponsored
trials has produced an official answer to this intensely debated question
and the results are interesting: open source application software used for
specific tasks such as word-processing is often fit for purpose but the
operating system Linux is often not.

Over the past year, three large local authorities have used =A31.3m from
what was the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister to try to reach
conclusions through the Open Source Academy.

In the largest trial, Bristol city council installed Sun's StarOffice on
5,500 desktops last July, and it has since been moving staff across from
Corel WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 (previously used by 60% of staff) and
Microsoft Office (40%), a process that will be completed this summer.
Staff continue to use Microsoft's proprietary Windows operating system,
and StarOffice consists of an open source core, OpenOffice, with some
extra proprietary software and services.

The verdict? StarOffice is cheaper to licence, even given the preferential
rates negotiated with both Sun and Microsoft by the Treasury's Office of
Government Commerce.

Bristol calculated a five-year total cost of ownership of =A3670,010 for
StarOffice, compared with =A31,706,684 for Microsoft Office. This was
despite budgeting half as much in implementation and support costs for
Microsoft because many users were already on its systems.

The difference may turn out to be even greater, says says IT strategy team
leader Gavin Beckett. "We discovered that things were simpler than we
thought they'd be," he says of the switch. "We always argued that a lot of
the risk was perceived risk, rather than real risk."

Deployment of StarOffice has cost =A310,000 rather than a budgeted =A387,00=
0,
as Bristol found it could re-use an existing tool. In addition, most staff
have needed 30 to 60 minutes of re-training rather than the planned
day's-worth.

"Probably 90% of the product can be used identically," says Beckett of
StarOffice 7, the version installed by Bristol, compared with Microsoft
Office 2003. He says the gap has closed further with the recently-released
StarOffice 8, to which Bristol may move, and OpenOffice 2.0, the
equivalent open source version.

In negotiations, Microsoft told Bristol that it could recover the
software's costs through the efficiency savings it would allow. But,
Beckett argues, "you can become more efficient using any IT system. We
make people more efficient every time we visit them".

Another reason for moving is Star- Office/OpenOffice's use of the Open
Document Format, which is open for use by other software: earlier this
month, the format was adopted by the International Organisation for
Standardisation (ISO).

Up to 15% of users in Bristol's affected departments will stay with
Microsoft Office, often because they need to swap files with central
government departments that use only Microsoft formats. Others use
specialist software that requires Microsoft Office, although Beckett says
some software works with StarOffice without advertising it, and other
suppliers are converting their software.

OpenForum Europe and the Institute for IT Training, two of the partners in
the Open Source Academy project, have started Certified Open, a scheme to
collect information on what operating systems and application software are
required by specialist local government software. Graham Taylor, director
of OpenForum Europe, says that buying specialist software can lead
councils to suffer "hidden lock-in".

This hit Birmingham city council's attempt to move 134 library staff to a
full set of open source software, including SuSE's Linux operating system,
OpenOffice 2.0 and web-browser Firefox. The city's library management
software, Galaxy, works only on Microsoft Windows. DS, the supplier, was
prepared to produce a Linux version, but this would have taken too long
and cost too much for the trial.

Les Timms, IT manager at the city's IT provider, Service Birmingham, says
niche suppliers understandably focus on their area of expertise rather
than on providing software for multiple operating systems. Staff have
stayed with Microsoft Windows XP, although they have moved fairly smoothly
to OpenOffice 2.0.

The city also had mixed results with public access computers: after trials
in three libraries, it is making 130 all open source, although 66 used for
education will use Windows and OpenOffice 2.0.

The trial found other problems with Linux, with public-access computers
sometimes failing to recognise diskettes and memory sticks or incorrectly
saying these were full. "There were quite a lot of problems getting it
working," says Timms, although this was achieved.

"I would caution against snap decisions saying, 'let's go fully open
source in this area'," Timms advises other local authorities. "You may not
need as many people, as the technology is very reliable, but you do need a
depth of expertise."

However, Service Birmingham has identified several staff with
previously-unknown open source skills, developed in their spare time.
"Quite unusually for a local government environment, when I talked to
people about it, lots of people wanted to join the project," says Timms.

Cheshire county council also experienced mixed results in trying to extend
the life of PCs dating from the late 1990s, by installing Linux and open
source web-browsers through which users access central computer systems.
Around a dozen staff are using the reconditioned machines - with new
keyboards and screens to disguise their vintage - with only one such
computer failing so far.

However, the council originally considered testing 400 old PCs from social
services; it eventually tested around two dozen, and successfully
converted around half of these.

One reason for the reduced numbers, says Bev Roberts, head of ICT strategy
and policy, is that many social services staff are moving to mobile
working: "The department was saying, 'we need to replace some of these old
PCs with portables or notebooks'."

In some cases, there were compatibility problems between Linux and the new
screens but, in others, the difficulties were lower-tech. "We found the
plastic was really brittle," says Roberts. "The on-off switches were
breaking, the plastic was shattering." She hopes that hardware made this
decade will be more durable, which may allow Cheshire to keep PCs in
service for longer than five years.

An opportunity to test this may arise because Cheshire, like many local
authorities, was given one-off funding to equip libraries with
public-access computers around four years ago. "They are getting old now,
and there never has been the budget put aside to replace those," says
Roberts - Birmingham's library trial may be applicable.
Detailed reports on the trials:
www.opensourceacademy.org.uk/solutions/casestudies





--
Michelle Childs -Head of European Affairs
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