Linux Operating Systems

[whs]

The City of Muenchen (Munic) is a good example. Their cost of changing to Linux was officially 13 millon Euros (appr. 17 million Dollar). The inofficial number is a lot higher.

Cost of change is one reason why many organizations will not change. And then they have to retrain hundreds or thousands of end users. Migration is not an easy task.

[elija]

The actual figures released by Munich show that:

Upgrading 26,000 desktop machines to Windows 7 and MS Office: €34,000,000
Upgrading 26,000 desktop machines to Windows 7 and Openoffice: €30,00,000
Upgrading 26,000 desktop machines to a full Linux solution including training: €23,000,000

Munich did this right. They had a plan for change, they got buy in* from their staff and provided training for their staff. This as you can see resulted in a saving of 11 million Euros which means it may be worth going to the beer festival this year as it should be a good one

It may be that the quoted €17,000,000 is an updated figure after deployment and that saving would be absolutely staggering.

Then consider that it is not just about cost but access to your data. Using a proprietary vendor will usually mean lock in to a proprietary format. This is a very bad situation. The solution is to use an open format such as ODF for your documents. At the risk of getting political for the moment, this will be a simpler sell to your government or indeed any organisation, than changing their software.

A combination of these reasons is why Limerick is going open although given Ireland's financial situation, I expect cost has a lot of weight. Limerick are also doing their implementation right.

Then there is Feiburg where an open source implementation apparently failed entirely. That is looking dodgier and dodgier as time goes on and more recently it seems to verging on accusations of fraud. If such is the case then a criminal investigation needs to be done and should evidence be found, over and above Internet scuttlebutt, due process followed.

* a term I hate but is depressingly descriptive