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Henry Bremridge wrote:
> I am intending to write a letter to our elected representatives pointing out the
> cost of MS and the alternatives available;
...
> These were all collected from various news reports. If anyone has publically
> disclosable facts or suggestions for improving the argument, could they please
> send them? eg I do not know what commercial support for Open Source Desktops is
> available in the SW.
I'd suggest that examples of places which have made the decision,
preferably with researched named people to contact about it are good.
I would not suggest that a big bang approach be advised.
A Brazilian ( Midgley) 06/05/2008, 22:32
http://fringethoughts.wordpress.com/2008/04/26/foss-in-brazil-an-important-shift/
PostPath: exchange for Exchange ( Midgley) 03/06/2008, 20:10
http://www.demo.com/watchlisten/videolibrary.html?bcpid=1127798146&bclid=1184497748&bctid=1196213651
see next item
Hospital ditches Exchange for Linux-based clone ( Midgley) 03/06/2008,
20:12
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/052808-microsoft-exchange-linux-clone.html
Moses Taylor Hospital, Scranton, Pa
Requires no changes on the (Windows) desktop.
90 things the same in OpenOffice and MSOffice ( mIdgley) 09/06/2008, 19:09
http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2008/06/90-things-that-are-the-same-in-microsoft-office-and-openofficeorg.html
Munich update: proceeding well ( midgley) 11/06/2008, 11:41
http://www.computerworlduk.com/toolbox/open-source/blogs/index.cfm?entryid=866&blogid=14
The city of Munich is dumping Microsoft, in general moving to open
source in public administration.
This is a good idea, which you should urge upon your own municipality.
Vienna meanwhile has trouble with lock in by Microsoft, devilish clever
marketing they do.
British schools: BECTA etc ( midgley) 17/06/2008, 0:33
http://www.itpro.co.uk/603639/becta-open-source-and-education-too-little-too-late
BECTA report: FLOSS in schools ( midgley) 17/06/2008, 0:42
http://publications.becta.org.uk/display.cfm?resID=25907&page=1835
French parliament settled, report half million Euro saving in first
year ( midgley) 15/07/2008, 1:04
http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/7712
1145 PCs.
Multiply by the number of PCs in the NHS.
I think 1145 might be the number in a DGH?
Or in primary care in Exeter.
entire state of pahang (Malaysia) ( midgley) 18/08/2008, 21:18
http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2008/08/the-entire-stat.html
Interesting country, I was out there last year.
http://www.pahang.gov.my/
" ... official that the State of Pahang is migrating all its
productivity suites to OpenOffice.org. This succint memo from the State
Secretary of Pahang entitled "Perlaksanaan Penggunaan Perisian
OpenOffice.Org Di Semua Agensi dan Pentadbiran Negeri" (translated:
"Implementing the use of OpenOffice.org suite in all State Agencies and
Administrative centres") outlines the reasons for migrating, the
benefits and how to proceed."
Sensible.
MS office price tends to marginal cost ( midgley) 25/09/2008, 22:36
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2008/09/24/microsoft_office_2007_prices_cut_china/
The problem with the MS model of production and distribution is that
their costs of preventing distribution increase the marginal cost, thus
as economic factors bring the price of software toward cost, their price
must lag behind.
They have enough capital to loss-lead in order to suppress competition
(theoretically always, and in practice at least almost always against
everyone else's interests - I mean yours and mine) and to pay eventual
large fines for doing so, but their main marketing strategies are
saturation and the network effect, and the attempt to preserve the idea
that a brand indicates quality.
Brazil using ODF (open document format, good with Open Office.org) (
Midgley) 05/10/2008, 12:15
http://news.northxsouth.com/2008/09/28/brazil-begins-using-the-open-document-format/
UK Schools meeting (Nov 27th) ( Midgley) 30/10/2008, 23:45
http://www.opensourceinschools.org.uk/index.php/agenda.html
Open Source in Schools 2008/09
London Nov 27th 2008
Free and Open Source Software in schools has gained momentum and has
become an integral part of many schools’ ICT strategy
11 000 German foreign ministry desktops. FLOSS cheaper (
Midgley) 30/10/2008, 23:47
http://www.metamorphosis.org.mk/content/view/1279/4/lang,en/
"Germany: 'Cost of Open Source desktop maintenance is by far the lowest'
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28.10.2008.
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Open Source desktops are far cheaper to maintain than proprietary
desktop configurations, says Rolf Schuster, a diplomat at the German
Embassy in Madrid and the former head of IT at the Foreign Ministry.
Schuster was one of the participants in a discussion on Open Standards
and interoperability that took place last week Tuesday during the Open
Source World conference in the city of Malaga, Spain.
The Foreign Ministry is migrating all of its 11.000 desktops to
GNU/Linux and other Open source applications. According to Schuster,
this has drastically reduced maintenance costs in comparison with other
ministries. "The Foreign Ministry is running desktops in many far away
and some very difficult locations. Yet we spend only one thousand euro
per desktop per year. That is far lower than other ministries, that on
average spend more than 3000 euro per desktop per year."
The ministry has so far migrated almost four thousand of its desktops to
GNU/Linux and expects to complete the move by the summer of 2009,
Schuster said. About half of all the 230 embassies and consulates have
now been switched over. "It is not without problems. It took a while to
find a developer in Japan to help us with some font issues we had in
Open Office."
"The embassies in Japan and Korea have completely switched over, the
embassy in Madrid has been exclusively using GNU/Linux since October
last year", Schuster added, calling the migration a success.
Hurdle
The Foreign Ministry in 2001 began migrating its back-end IT systems to
Open Source in order to provide all embassies and consulates with
Internet access and email. "Our strategy was to use as far as possible
Open Standards and Open Source. Reduction of costs was the main reason
for this decision." Upon completion of this project, the ministry
decided in 2004 to also migrate the desktops.
The biggest hurdle proved to be to convince the two hundred IT workers a
the ministry. "Their issues were not technical. They just did not know
anything about Linux and Open Source and we had to change their views.
We took all of them on a crash course of using Linux servers and
configuring Apache. There they discovered that it works." "
http://www.osor.eu/news/de-foreign-ministry-cost-of-open-source-desktop-maintenance-is-by-far-the-lowest
Indiana schools ( midgley) 25/11/2008, 20:56
http://techlearning.com/story/showArticle.php?articleID=196604800
on cost, rather than philosophy.
Although I do recall a story of Microsoft bouncing a state education
authority at their busy time, with a demand for a licencing deal, or
demonstration of licences for every application on every machine,
immediately. That might lead to a desire to deal differently.
0 colleagues voted this a quality posting.
Indiana schools ( midgley) 25/11/2008, 20:56
http://techlearning.com/story/showArticle.php?articleID=196604800
on cost, rather than philosophy.
Although I do recall a story of Microsoft bouncing a state education
authority at their busy time, with a demand for a licencing deal, or
demonstration of licences for every application on every machine,
immediately. That might lead to a desire to deal differently.
large companies, eg Motorola ( midgley) 25/11/2008, 20:57
"Meanwhile, high-profile U.S. companies have raised the status of Linux
by basing their entire operations on open source technology with amazing
success. These include Amazon (which hosts more than 42 terabytes of
data), eBay, and Motorola. Google, for one, has found Linux to be so
successful (using open source, the search engine company processes 91
million searches a day and is the fourth-largest database in the world) ..."
Catalonia integrates for small-medium businesses ( Midgley) 26/11/2008,
6:40
http://www.computerworlduk.com/community/blogs/index.cfm?entryid=1555&blogid=14
This is an account of integration of the usual FLOSS staples - OOo,
Thunderbird and so on, with an enterprise resource planning package,
driven by the regional government and available to businesses the size
of general practices. In due course, available to anyone of course, but
the target is as described.
There are actually a lot of accounting solutions, from the very top
level such as SAP down to the personal/smal business such as
http://www.gnucash.org/ which run on Linux and many more on Unix, with
support from multinational companies or small IT companies.
the US-Venezuelan infowar ( midgley) 26/11/2008, 8:33
"Venezuela’s decision to move to free software happened after a disaster
scenario like this actually took place. In 2002, the traditional, social
elite-backed administrators of PDVSA (Venezuela’s state-owned oil
company) decided that they didn’t agree with President Chávez’s policy
decisions, which included re-directing profits from the oil company
elites into social programs (including literacy and medical programs).
These administrators were so adamant about their position, they
illegally shut down the oil company, locked out the workers, and took
control over the software that ran the corporation. Conveniently, that
software had been contracted to a US company called SAIC, which has
well-known relationships with the US Department of Defense and CIA. In
response to the illegal lock-out and sabotage of oil production in
Venezuela, federal authorities were sent to PDVSA’s headquarters to
reclaim the facility.
The SAIC workers realized that they had committed an enormous crime and
fled the country — after they had changed all the passwords that ran
PDVSA’s computer systems and set themselves up with remote control of
these systems. Since the software was proprietary, no one except the
SAIC workers knew how the software worked internally and the oil
facilities were literally held hostage by criminals who were now seeking
refuge in the United States. Why US authorities did not take action and
apprehend these criminals is up for the reader’s interpretation. If the
SAIC workers had used their remote access to destroy the data, they
would have effectively sabotaged oil production in Venezuela for months,
if not years.
The Venezuelan government recruited some computer security experts who
were able to reverse engineer SAIC’s software, cut off their remote
control of the computer systems and return access to the legal
administrators of PDVSA. After this startling information warfare
scenario had played out in real life, threatening the entire economy of
a sovereign state by a multinational software firm with strong ties to a
foreign defense and intelligence agency, President Chávez fully embraced
open source, free software and mandated that all government systems be
migrated to this more secure solution."
http://www.computerworlduk.com/community/blogs/index.cfm?entryid=915
http://news.northxsouth.com/2008/11/18/protecting-sovereignty-with-free-software-is-a-good-idea-and-the-duty-of-governments-says-stallman/
How are British refineries etc controlled?
(How are British health data facilities controlled is another
interesting topic).
Boblingen (near Stuttgart) moves departments to FLOSS ( midgley)
02/12/2008, 23:02
http://www.osor.eu/news/de-boblingen-considering-migration-to-open-source-desktop
The administration is looking at a move off WIndows, and meanwhile is
moving several of its departments from MS Office to OpenOffice.
If you've not looked at OOo version 3, I suggest you do it is quite neat.
Vietnam goes FLOSS ( midgley) 09/01/2009, 19:54
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/293/1050293/vietnamese-government-mandates-open-source
"THE VIETNAM Ministry of Information and Communications has ordered all
governmental bodies to migrate to using 100 per cent Open Source
software products."
(Don't mention the war?)
2 colleagues voted this a quality posting.
Munich: progress 2008 ( midgley) 10/01/2009, 12:02
http://www.floschi.info/
As I remarked previously Munich is moving its administration from
Windows to Linux, using Wollmux, a distribution configured and selected
for its set of purposes. Which is of course available to all of us.
"...
Two departments finished their migration to our LiMux Basisclient and to
OpenOffice.org, some more started the process with small units.
...
The members of our new elected City Council got notebooks running with
the LiMux Basisclient, so they act as cutting-edge users for mobile
working, eg for our upcoming teleworkers.
..."
Steady, organised, efficient. German.
Cooperative.
I've been posting to a thread in a particular forum for a couple of
years things such as these.
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