In A Tighter Economy, Why Not Open Source In All Government Offices?
- 3
- Add a Comment
One of the contributors on ZDNet is a teacher, and was asking the question (rhetorically) why schools can’t use things like GoogleDocs, instead of the Microsoft Office applications.
I immediately put forth the notion that GoogleDocs, though probably fine for many home users, would be questionable with the bandwidth limitations that might occur, especially if the school in question was a Comcast customer (they count every byte it seems). I suggested, instead, that the school should have a robust localized file server, for the collaboration he stated that was necessary, and use one of the open source packages that are available. There is Open Office, Oxygen Office Professional ( a beefed up Open Office, although not updated as frequently, it is possible to get much of the differentials, and add to OO), and the IBM-branded Symphony.
Until recently, it was possible to get Sun Office from Google, as part of the GooglePack, but no more – that is a mistake – both by Sun and Google.
Later, after my response online, I was thinking that with the economy being what it is, and Microsoft product warranties being what they are, all governmental agencies should be using open source software. Now, I’ll stop short of advocating a change to Linux, that would be too drastic, as the public has not had enough exposure to that operating system. But applications? Oh yes, enthusiastically yes!
With the latest revision of Open Office, there is no need for 99.2% of the public to have more utility. The only jobs I can think of that require more are writers, composing books, and legal secretaries, needing pleading papers. The software has gotten that good!
Those who object to this cost savings, on grounds other than utility, use the support provided as the reason to use Microsoft products. To those, I think it must be pointed out that Microsoft only provides 90 days of support without a support contract, and that the cost of the support is so horrendously overpriced that it would allow a small support staff to be used, still including savings overall. Others state that there is a time component involved. I have been involved with Microsoft support and found their timeliness to be less a factor than one might think. Again, that small support staff could be looking for a solution on the internet for quite a while before the Microsoft support would come back with answers.
I think this is such a good idea that I’ll be writing my Congressional representatives after I finish here. The number of dollars saved over time can certainly be put to use to help save water, conserve energy, and all the other things we are asked to do these days.
-
 |
I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn’t learn something from him.Galileo Galilei |
3 Comments
Bryan Price
November 23rd, 2008
at 8:08pm
I take it that you have never worked in a government office.
My old work is having problems finding Cobol programmers. The old supervisor left, er, retired and they hired a non-Cobol programmer to be the supervisor than try to promote from within. She’s capable, but she is years younger than her staff.
My old supervisor, a Cobol system programmer has retired.
The head of Finance was still running Lotus 123 (OS/2 native or a cobbled together Windows 3.x (DOS??) version, I can’t remember, it had been discontinued for some time, and yes, he was running OS/2 Warp…)
The firewall used to be an IBM A/IX until one of the token ring cards blew out, no longer supported by anybody for a maintenance contract, and the cost, IF it could be found would have been $5k. It got replaced with a modern PC running Windows. Even with the Windows tax for a great deal less than $5k.
Then there’s the matter of training. Unless it looks and acts just like Office (Lotus Notes and Symphony actually in our office), it will be years before you can get everybody trained and up to speed on it.
And then there was our proprietary LITS (OCR system to handle all the documents) that was most severely grafted into OS/2 Server (A DB server that also was the app server, and then there were the two servers with the only duty of managing the optical disk jukebox that they sat on) and Lotus Notes. When I left, they were moving everybody off OS/2 and onto Windows, the LITS project being the last people to be moved to Windows.
A small support staff is going to be used no matter what. The question is, can you easily find the support staff for the alternative to Windows? And can you pay them what you pay your Windows support? I think you’ll find that both of those answers are no. And as far as actually needing to contact Microsoft for support problems, I know of one time in 10.5 years in that job that I probably needed to talk to Microsoft. Had I managed to talk to them, I’m sure I would have been told that it was a hardware issue. And it turned out it was. After finally figuring out that the memory was bad (the memory tester I had worked in DOS mode which never found a problem, not protected mode, which when I finally got my hands on and tried it found the problem) which then finally brought up the problem that the hard drive was also failing (backups were no good, because the backups, even going back almost a year, had bad data backed up).
And then there is making sure that document exchange can happen, public to office and office to public. MS document formats may not be ideal, but they work. My boss’s boss kept trying to make sure we only dealt with ASCII files for the public, but that house of cards finally collapsed when people were complaining that the formatting wasn’t coming out right (they had no idea what font they were looking at for starters).
So, software cost compared to the hardware dollars that were being spent and the support dollars being spent and the training dollars that would have to be spent? It comes out to quite a smaller percentage than you can imagine.
Boycott Novell » Links 25/11/2008: More Mobile Devices Running GNU/Linux
November 25th, 2008
at 4:22am
[...] In A Tighter Economy, Why Not Open Source In All Government Offices? [...]
the oracle
November 26th, 2008
at 7:17am
Bryan, you are addressing very limited needs of very few. Every government worker is not a COBOL programmer, many are simply trying to write, maintain, and exchange simple text documents, with some graphics and a few bar graphs or pie charts. It is that wide margin I speak of.
As for OS/2, if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it! OS/2 rocks, and IBM should have never discontinued it. They have spent millions on dinosaurs, just to keep a certain architecture going. All OS/2 needed was the advent of cheap, high quality memory. OS/2 was a product before its time, now it has been surpassed, but if IBM had not sold it, and instead released it to the public domain, Microsoft would be hurting worse from it, than anything extant from any of the *nix camps.