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Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

The costs seem to mention training and support, but not comparing productivity makes it useless. It's like arguing that you can use the Gimp rather than photoshop, which is only true until you try.

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.

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The study MicroSoft commissioned from HP put the total cost at about €60 million or between two and three times the costs Munich claims and substantially more than their estimate for using Windows.

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.

One might as well expect productivity to increase switching away from proprietary software. I would, at least.

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.

>One might as well expect productivity to increase switching away from proprietary software. I would, at least.

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.)

There is such a thing as inherent productivity in the software though. Switching from one piece of software to another has a fixed cost, but switching to software that makes you more productive will help offset that cost.

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.

> The risk in my eyes here is that OSS (desktop) software is almost invariably less productive than proprietary software for some reason.

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.

The people using the software are being paid roughly €2,500 to €5,000 a month, so obviously Munich can't afford €2.5 to €5 a month or whatever Microsoft Office would cost them....

(Average gross salary in Germany was €3,391 in 3Q2013 so the cost of employing someone would be higher than that.)

> Well while we don't need to state reasons, there is also the risk that all proprietary software is less productive for some reason.

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.

Windows as a share of Web clients is down to 60%:

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.

That just says that web browsing is now a mobile activity. I think this project is about replacing desktop and laptop computers with linux. On desktop laptop windows is still dominating and losing mostly to MacOS

Office productivity is now a Web activity, in part because that's how modern tools can be used on otherwise locked-down desktops. Whether it's desktop Linux or people bringing their own iPads to workplaces with PCs running old versions of Windows, IE, and Office, nobody sees the supposed productivity of their desktop systems as a reason not to abandon them.

Well, it could work either way I suppose, but in my experience, usability/productivity of desktop software is severely lacking in OSS software (unlike e.g server software). Perhaps due to problems attracting non-developers to work on them. Polish is expensive, but polish is productivity.

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.

I'd expect a loss of productivity from using OpenOffice that far exceeds the cost of Microsoft Office, plus ongoing losses in productivity as staff try to cope with its incompatibilities with complex Office documents that probably arrive on a daily basis.

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...

The vast majority of free/open source software is available for Windows, and that includes things as horrendously unusable as GIMP.

And then we should remember that the big cross platform ones are used by an audience 20x larger than Linux only applications, so they should be the good ones. What's a good, large/complex OSS app that beats its proprietary competitors? It sure isn't gimp or eclipse. It's Chromium! Which is backed by a megacorp. See the pattern? I have yet to see an OSS project impress me with a large/complex desktop application. I'm sceptical it will ever happen.

I've used both photoshop and gimp a lot. If I had to use gimp for my day to day photo editing software I'd be _severely_ hampered in productivity.

How many local government workers do you think spend their day using Gimp or Photoshop?

E-mail, basic document forms and internal applications are the major use-cases for that type of scenario.

The cost of win (desktop) licenses is virtually zero, and office subscriptions are also dirt cheap. That's not where you save money. It's a few dollars per month. You can motivate that cost even for someone who uses office apps casually once a week.

Sorry, but it's not like arguing you can use "Gimp rather than Photoshop" at all.

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.

I think the same argument holds for OO vs MS Office as well. They are much closer than Gimp/PS obviously, but for power users they aren't even close to interchangeable.

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%.

The LiMux wiki page mentions a timeline of how the migration happened, so it looks like their phased rollout helped them 'convert' to Linux smoothly.

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]

One thing bureaucracies are susceptible to is vendors requiring mandatory software updates on custom software. This costs much more than most people think, and with the city of City of Munich would dwarf any productivity overhead.

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.

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