Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions
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insights.ubuntu.com
The whole point of software is that it increases productivity (word processor rather than typewriter). While it may be the case that Linux and open source alternatives saves a bunch on licenses, I don't buy the argument that it is an amount "saved" until thurough research is made in the productivity of the users.
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Microsoft-partly-rele...
That said and even if it's fabricated from whole cloth, the numbers are all chump change in the budget for a city with 1.4 million inhabitants, particularly when the spending is spread over more than a decade. Ten million euros in savings is less than a Euro per inhabitant per year since the project kicked off in 2002. Using Munich's numbers, they could do the entire project every year with a head tax of €25 per year.
€10 million is a lot of money if it's yours. At the scale of a city it's repaving a few streets.
Taking your example of Gimp, I expect institutional adoption of free software would result in some people having it who didn't have Photoshop at all before. They can now become more productive and take less of other people's time.
The potential upside like you mention would be more licenses at lower cost. Whether that was a bottleneck depends on the organization in question. Either way I don't think it's possible to make any conclusions without research.
However, staff productivity is not generally a major concern in local government offices, as far as I can tell. Maybe Munich is different, but I doubt it...
That doesn't make any sense. What is inherent about closed-source that makes it hard to use and what is inherent about open-source that makes it easy to use?
I think the important phrase here is switching away. That implies there's been a change, which brings increased training (either formal or learn-as-you-go) to learn the new system. If they need Word for their job and now they have OpenOffice, that's not a productivity gain, that's a loss at least until they get up and running (and then it's an ongoing loss every time they need to convert a docx with custom formatting that OpenOffice doesn't understand.)
I agree on OO. The risk in my eyes here is that OSS (desktop) software is almost invariably less productive than proprietary software for some reason. Switching that way can make sense if you save a lot on licenses, administration etc., but if you have to pay once for a switch AND then pay continuously by using less productive software you are taking a much higher risk. It may give a warm fluffy feeling to be using open standards, but the problem is that the only standard that exists is a de-facto proprietary standard set by Microsoft. It may be noble to try to change that, but I certainly wouldn't want to spend tax money being the first major city to do so.
Well while we don't need to state reasons, there is also the risk that all proprietary software is less productive for some reason.
How do both of them weight?
The one thing that is certain is that administrative costs of prorpietary software do reduce the softwre availability, as spodek said.
Only from simple empirical studies of a few software packages (OO vs MS Office, Gimp vs PS, Eclipse vs IDEA, Blender vs. many) I think it's fairly obvious that the "normal" open source model doesn't match the megacorp development model for complex desktop software. My best guess at the reason is that 1) Ivory Tower is better than committee design for user interfaces 2) you need a LOT of expensive non dev resources such as designers and focus groups which just don't seem to materialize for the open source projects like they do when Adobe or Microsoft waves a pay check.
I think there may be lots to save in administration, servers etc when moving to Linux, but 2014 isn't the year of desktop Linux, far from it. You really can't motivate not buying office for a few bucks per month and expect to save money.
You CAN probably save a ton by ditching exchange/SQL server and so on, where there are plenty of good alternatives. But Ubuntu/OpenOffice instead of Win/Office? I doubt it, given reasonably low volume license costs.
(Average gross salary in Germany was €3,391 in 3Q2013 so the cost of employing someone would be higher than that.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system...
Nobody cites Windows or Office as an impediment to growth. It is very unlikely that the Windows Web client share decline has ever hit a "productivity" speed bump.
Another way to look at it is that mobility turned out to be much more highly valued than Office or Windows compatibility.
E-mail, basic document forms and internal applications are the major use-cases for that type of scenario.
You just identified a specialist application that's used in a specific use-case by a limited user-base who fully use the capabilities of the software. When a designer uses those tools their productivity is significantly increased or limited by the software. The focus of the role is using the computer as a tool, so if it performs poorly so do they.
Most 'general office' users, and certainly many administrators don't fully use the capabilities of the software they have because it's not the focus of their jobs. The software isn't the limiting factor in them doing the job. Take the example of someone working in job centre or similar, they'll likely use a Word processor for providing letters, e-mail for external/internal interaction and some custom internal applications (e.g. the jobs database). There are all well within the capabilities of Open Source software.
Framing it that way would certainly be an argument against replacing Photoshop for Gimp; but it doesn't tell you anything useful about replacing general Windows/MS Office with Linux and Open Source.
A good middle ground would be migrating the 95 or 99% who are "casual" users to open source, but you'd then have a heterogeneous system, which isn't ideal. VM's could be used to have all-Linux desktops and still provide users of win-only software with what they need.
My point is: the big savings are in the 95% but the big cost is for migrating the last 5%.
Quoting from the wiki.. September 6, 2005 - It is decided that the project needs an additional one year pilot test, and migration slips one year.[19]
September 22, 2006 - The "soft" migration begins, one year behind original schedule.[20]
November 2008: 1200 out of 14,000 have migrated to the LiMux environment (9%; March 2008: 1000=7%), in addition 12000 workstations use OpenOffice.org 2 installed on Windows (March 2008: 6000) and more 100% use Mozilla Firefox 1.5 and Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5 (March 2008: 90%). 18000 of 21000 macros, templates and forms are changed into Linux-enabled[21]
Sure it's the case with Photoshop as it's an off the shelf piece product, but it won't be with CustomVendorDirectXAccounting v13.5. I doubt City of Munich has teams of people running photoshop, and any designers likely have suite of macs anyway.
I'd wager the cost savings of switching to OpenSource likely won't come from initial costs. It will come from forcing custom software vendors to distribute software that inherently requires less ongoing costs.
I mostly use Windows 7 and OS X, but I have worked with Debian/Ubuntu as a casual user. Linux was much easier to work with than Windows 8.1, but 90% of the population doesn't know that. Most people would be as happy, or happier with Linux if there was just one big advertising campaign.
I can't help but feel that part of Android and Chromebook's success is in part due to the users not understanding/having-to-know they're running Linux. Android and Chromebook don't even mention Linux anywhere, and users are content. I think regular Joe's have a stigma about Linux, and just abstracting that aspect away has helped adoption.
Chromebook/ChromeOS is much more capable now than it used to be, with multi-tasking and multiple "apps" can be on-screen at the same time.
Within an organization you could agree to use some open format (regardless of word processor), and you could archive in some long term format. But you can't change the fact that incoming documents will be in the format that Microsofts latest word processor spits out, and you never want to have that nagging feeling that your word processor may have misread it ever so slightly.
Outside of the HN echo chamber there are thousands of companies building native applications, which are used by millions of organisations around the world. Not everything is delivered via the web.
If you include all civil servants (which the definition listed by wikipedia does) you will find police officers, national economists, sociologists, intelligence officers, surgeons, traders and many many more professionals there.
All the specialists will of course require domain specific software. In anything involving economics or statistics you will probably find SAS or R, someone tasked with planning mobile spectrum would have GIS applications etc.
For instance, even most police officers in the area where I live don't need special software. Some do, but most use a few web apps and java apps to do their paper work.
It's like a non-tech mid-sized business, really. All the management and many of the employees don't need anything more than word processing. And then there are people in technical roles whose needs are served on an individual basis (or, in good environments, their manager is handed a budget and told "have you people get what they need")
I know that it has its problems if you want to use it with Word generated documents, and it obviously has problems with add-ons developed for Word.
But I could really think that it works quite nice, if all your documents are generated for LibreOffice.
I am using Open / LibreOffice since nearly 10 years exclusively at home and I don't have any problems using it - but my needs are VERY modest. Basically I am using it as an WYSIWYG typewriter.
Most of the problems come from, I think, unnecessary features. For example a footer for the author's name on each page.
I found that move to decentralization and the availability of compilers and tools and dev. environments and easy ways to get admin privileges, well I credit that with my learning how to code/admin/... and to my succes later in life. These computers, I've heard from a friend, are LOCKED down. As in, try to compile anything against a GUI library is a complete non-starter. Compiling anything under linux without root is almost impossible.
Add to that that even the development environments that do exist on linux are ... well sorry to say but let's be honest here ... far inferior for learning to code and to writing simple games than the ones available on windows.
Nobody's going to learn how to use computers, how to program and how to improve their situation on these linux machines. And that sucks.
But hey, easier on the admins !
(not that it's anywhere near as bad as SAAS though)
This is bizarre, and very much not true. If you have a C compiler and sufficient disk space you can build whatever you want in your home directory. It might take a while, but most things that use autoconf will accept `--prefix=/home/user/stuff/` and target that location.
Not having a C compiler is rare as it tends to be deep in the requirements chain of other packages. For other languages, I believe Python is mandatory on Redhat and Perl on Debian, if you don't mind old versions.
nano awesomewebglgame.htmlThe technical lead of the LiMux project told a story once about a German federal agency that required documents to be submitted in a very specific, unusual font that basically everybody had to buy first.
Joke aside, it makes me happy to see the transition from Microsoft to Linux has been a success. I remember reading the news headline when they first announced it. I wonder how many of the 22,000 government officers that use Ubuntu at work are now also using Ubuntu at home?
The display drivers needs a lot of work (intel seems solid). Also, desktop itself needs to be super stable.
Also, the software (from companies) is treated like a second-class citizen. Chrome is horrible on linux, --disable-gpu --audio-buffer-size what user is going to bother with that?
I have to do all these tweaks and workarounds to get things to work. Regular users will not have the patience do this.
The year of LOD will only happen when everything is stable and works. Imagine if CentOS, Debian, or Ubuntu on a server were this flaky? Would you use it? This is why people jump ship to Mac.
I have found the exact opposite experience.
I only mentioned Mac because many HN users cite their experience on linux as not being a good one.
Really? Chrome is a first class citizen on ChromeOS, so I'd expected other linuxes to be well served, too.
By the way, I don't think ChromeOS is a good example. Can you use Firefox on ChromeOS? I consider ChromeOS like purpose-specific, dedicated hardware (like a router). It is a start though. By the way, Chromebooks use intel gpus - they are pretty solid.
LOD has to be better than alternatives by a significant margin in order to attract users.
No thanks.
Sorry, I'll end my rant now.
[1] https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=26140#c1...
On the other hand, System76 computers are not available in Germany. Best bet is probably is Sputnik from Dell, although their Ubuntu configuration is not that good.
4th Generation Intel® Core™ i5-4210U processor (3M Cache, up to 2.7 GHz)
UBUNTU Linux 12.04 LTS (64-bit)
13.3 inch LED Backlit Touch Display with Truelife and FHD resolution (1920 x 1080)
8GB1 DDR3L at 1600MHz
128GB Solid State Drive
Intel® HD Graphics 4400
3.02 lbs
Dell Price $1199.99
Not giving Microsoft money means you are not funding the exact reason why Linux on the desktop is obscure in the first place.
If MS did not have such comprehensive control of the consumer computer space, they would not have pervasive "deals" with every vendor to lock them in to shipping Windows across the board. Because if you, as a hardware manufacturer, install Ubuntu and make sure all the drivers work, out of the box it is no more buggy than Windows is at this point - probably less, and much more usable than Windows 8 for the average joe.
But Microsoft has a firm grasp across the entire industry on all the vendors, and their ubiquity for 20 years has given them mindshare you cannot easily unravel. And giving them more money is not helping that.
Sometimes you can also find occasionally a laptop in a store with FreeDOS, but I've never seen one being sold with Ubuntu.
If you think about it, Android's problems with open source allowing manufacturers to have their own flavours of Android, is one of the reasons why the average user might think TouchWiz (or other skins) is Android and that's why it sucks.
Note that this is just _one_ reason I believe LOD won't be a thing, there surely are more.
One is not really dependent on the other. You could use open source and not allow modifications or you could use closed source software and allow endless customization.
I also don't consider it an "android problem" that manufacturers do this. Most of the good stuff ends up in standard android after a while, which wouldn't have happened if no one was allowed to make the changes in the first place.
Good point.
> Most of the good stuff ends up in standard android after a while, which wouldn't have happened if no one was allowed to make the changes in the first place.
This was mainly due to Google pushing more stuff through Play Services. It would be nice if there was some more control/constraints on Linux flavours.
I'll add that a better comparison might be to the cost of Windows machines running open source productivity software since the comparison is closer in terms of specification.
Meanwhile, using Gimp / Krita / LibreOffice / kdev etc and, at the scale of a city like Munich, just having a dev team to fix the localized problems the city has in the software, or having a fund to bounty bugs and features the city wants, would be cheaper in the long run, and leave the city in control of its own software infrastructure.
As a first approximation: a Wiki.
Tools such as Atlassian's Trac and Jira (not themselves open sourced) offer a fair bit of the equivalent features.
For setting up Internet portals, a CMS such as Drupal or Wordpress could fit the bill.
One of the features of Sharepoint sites that I've seen is that they're used effectively to "hang" MS Office documents off of them -- as Office docs. This grates strongly with my preference for either HTML or PDF formats for documents, plus some markup style. I'm growing increasingly strongly partial to using either Markdown (for simple documents/pages) or LaTeX (for more complex ones) for document preparation. Yes, there's a touch of up-front training involved, but once you've crossed that bridge, the world opens up, and the basics can be gotten in an hour or so.
The document management pieces are actually something I'd like a solution for more generally, and it's a space that's hugely frustrating. There's zotero, a desktop application, there's git, there are a number of other tools, each of which effectively only address part of the larger picture.
There are a number of free document management tools, but I'm not in a position to recommend any: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=web+based+document+management
Best thing to do is to make a functional list of what it is you're using Sharepoint for, and to find equivalent replacements for those features.
You can write down the list of sharepoint features you need, and then find individual OSS projects that fill the gap. It's not a one-stop thing, but it doesn't have to be a deal breaker either.
SP is a mesh up of several software suits slowly coming to getter, it is getting better every release. SP could also be the right choice depending in your needs. Mainly work group portals but those tend to fail (as in not being used) since most of the time there is no proper business case nor business processes in place to support the grand idea
1. Http://alfresco.com
If you're not using Office or other Windows-only productivity software, why pay the Windows licensing fee?
Why do you think Windows 8 has seen such enterprise backlash?
AutoCad isn't available for Linux either, but it no less sense rolling it into the price of a Windows license than Office.
I'm a bit curious to know what the shelf life on the OS choice is and how well it works. I believe redhat ran into this issue and adopted the "extended support" versions in order to address the concerns (the linux space tends to move _very_ quickly in directions and you can definitely be left out in the cold if you don't stay relatively current).
All in all I doubt it's worse than the microsoft "you need to upgrade _now_" philosphy and the lack of "we don't break compatability" that used to be enjoyed in the heyday of the "Full M$ Stack".
An emphasis has been made by Microsoft on maintaining software backwards compatibility. To achieve this, when developing a new version of Windows, Microsoft sometimes had to implement workarounds to allow compatibility with third-party software that used the previous version's API in an undocumented or even (programmatically) illegal way. Raymond Chen, a Microsoft developer who works on the Windows API, has said: "I could probably write for months solely about bad things apps do and what we had to do to get them to work again (often in spite of themselves). Which is why I get particularly furious when people accuse Microsoft of maliciously breaking applications during OS upgrades. If any application failed to run on Windows 95, I took it as a personal failure."[19]