Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions • Hacker News Board

Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions

#81

Post by scholia » Tue, Jul 08, 2014, 4:16 PM UTC

alkonaut wrote: post #65

spodek wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 organizati…

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...

Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions

#82

Post by scholia » Tue, Jul 08, 2014, 4:30 PM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #71

alkonaut wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

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.)

Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions

#83

Post by scholia » Tue, Jul 08, 2014, 4:33 PM UTC

spodek wrote: post #63

alkonaut wrote: post #58

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 th…

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.

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

Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions

#84

Post by level » Tue, Jul 08, 2014, 4:34 PM UTC

freehunter wrote: post #67

eru wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chrome is horrible on linux, --disable-gpu --audio-buffer-size what user is going to bother with that? Really? Chrome is a first class citizen on ChromeOS, so I'd expected other linuxes to be well served, too.

My biggest gripe with Chrome on Linux is you can't change the default behavior of clicking in the address bar. In Firefox I can make it so clicking once selects everything. In Chrome, it drops a cursor and I have to click two or three times to get it to select everything. I understand some people want that behavior, but I don't. The Chrome team's response is that this is the Linux default and Chrome is a native Linux…

I'm currently running Chrome 35.0.1916.153 on Ubuntu 14.04 with XFCE and clicking once in the address bar highlights everything all. Don't know why mine is acting different than yours, maybe they changed that since you last tried it.

Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions

#85

Post by mimiflynn » Tue, Jul 08, 2014, 4:39 PM UTC

xorcist wrote: post #27

CSDude wrote: post #4

It reminds me http://xkcd.com/934/ for most simple users. What a government officer do at his/her workstation? They probably have every service through web pages, almost nobody builds native programs anymore. And for the most cases LibreOffice is not perfect, but adequate to do simple jobs. So it is very logical to use something free for these tasks, to replace Windows+Office and save money.

What a strange view of what a "government officer" does. 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 f…

In my time working for financial firms (~4 years), I can tell you that there are a lot of proprietary applications being developed with web technologies.

Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions

#86

Post by brudgers » Tue, Jul 08, 2014, 4:54 PM UTC

mkesper wrote: post #29

brudgers wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I mentioned common open source productivity software runs on Windows. That includes Gimp, Emacs etc. - not that I believe that Munich is rolling out 14000 development/graphics boxes. The comparison does not appear to be between equivalent specifications. It's assuming that Windows requires Office. That's simply false.

Don't understand your point. An office PC will need an office suite. And if you've got Microsoft in your door, guess what will it be?

Office not being available for Linux does not imply that Office is required by Windows. The difference between platforms is the availability of Office and it's cheap and easy to use something other than Office on a Windows machine, don't buy Office and install the other thing instead.

AutoCad isn't available for Linux either, but it no less sense rolling it into the price of a Windows license than Office.

Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions

#87

Post by alkonaut » Tue, Jul 08, 2014, 4:56 PM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #71

alkonaut wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

> 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.

Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions

#88

Post by brudgers » Tue, Jul 08, 2014, 5:07 PM UTC

alkonaut wrote: post #58

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 th…

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.

Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions

#89

Post by Zigurd » Tue, Jul 08, 2014, 5:09 PM UTC

alkonaut wrote: post #68

freehunter wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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-y…

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…

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.

Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions

#90

Post by worklogin » Tue, Jul 08, 2014, 5:26 PM UTC

freehunter wrote: post #67

eru wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chrome is horrible on linux, --disable-gpu --audio-buffer-size what user is going to bother with that? Really? Chrome is a first class citizen on ChromeOS, so I'd expected other linuxes to be well served, too.

My biggest gripe with Chrome on Linux is you can't change the default behavior of clicking in the address bar. In Firefox I can make it so clicking once selects everything. In Chrome, it drops a cursor and I have to click two or three times to get it to select everything. I understand some people want that behavior, but I don't. The Chrome team's response is that this is the Linux default and Chrome is a native Linux…

So then they add that to the other 10,000 config options people have requested, and now it's a bloated interface and people will lament "Why can't they keep it simple?" until they strip out all of the pet features and people get mad for them "stupifying" the interface.