Hi Paolo!
On 9/19/06, Paolo Alexis Falcone <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Tue, 2006-09-19 at 16:03 +0800, Dean Michael Berris wrote:
>
> If the point was to save money, then let's require government to not
> use electricity anymore, and stick with gas powered lanterns, pencils
> and paper. ;-)
That's even more expensive a solution :-)
Unless you recycle the paper, or really skimp on writing stuff down... :-D
> But seriously, if using FOSS was just about saving money, then I
> believe Government is being misled to think that FOSS is Free *and*
> cheap.
The software is FREE as in free speech - government can take the FOSS
code and adapt it to the needs of other government branches if it so
desires.
Agreed.
This saves from the effort of buying the same stuff all over
again for X government agency - instead this can be used to pay
programmers to reuse the code and tailor it to X government agency.
Hmmm... And you think it's cheaper to pay programmers to reuse the
code instead of buy the licenses?
Contrast this to the proprietary solution, wherein if you're X
government agency - you buy software license for some stuff that Y
government agency may be using, then hire programmers to customize said
software. If that isn't saving money...
How much will it cost government to hire a horde of (no intent to
degrade any people) VB programmers compared to lots of
PERL/Python/C/C++/PHP/Java/Ruby/<insert favorite programming language
here> programmers to just customize the FOSS that they will be using?
But then these are just the details, we don't want to look at that...
After all, everybody else but me wants to get the bill passed as law.
> >
> > > what government needs is just Free as in Free Beer software, and not
> > > Free as in Freedom.
> >
> > But why not get both when both are available already?
> >
> > FOSS saves money NOW.
>
> This depends really. You'll be paying third party VAS providers to
> install the new FOSS on the old systems -- spend money on training the
> people, support and maintenance, all that jazz. If you think
> Government will put an IT department on every agency and expect it to
> hire hordes of System Administrators, technicians, and whatnot, then
> tell me again how that will make government save money NOW.
>
Even with proprietary software you'd still spend money on training
people, doing support and maintenance, and all that jazz.
True, to some extent... Unless you consider that the schools the
people go to already teach the non-FOSS technologies that government
is currently using: and that government doesn't really allot too much
money on training people on how to use Word or Excel, because they
most often than not already know how to use that.
But then of course, everybody else wants to think that learning OO.o
is easy and that it's enough to replace MS Office 2003.
What you save
though is the monetary cost of licenses, which imho, doesn't exist in
FOSS solutions. That saves money NOW. In the long run, you even save
more money by doing away with the cost of licenses.
Look at RedHat which sells the support licenses for RHEL at the same
price as the Windows licenses. The same goes for Novell/SuSE. I'm not
sure about Mandriva.
Of course if you actually expect government to rely on
CentOS/Debian/Gentoo/<insert non-commercial Linux distro's here> then
go ahead. Then they have to worry about hiring people that actually
know how to administer this. Can you say "not enough people" again?
> > It also is generally better except in certain
> > fields where proprietary software has a lead (a lead which can soon
> > disappear). That's doesn't justify making excuses not to use FOSS now
> > where it can be.
> >
>
> I think we're looking at different aspects of FOSS here if you think
> FOSS is generally better than proprietary software. FOSS just has a
> different license -- and the license doesn't make the piece of
> software "magical" or "waaaay better" than other solutions.
It may not be "waaay better" for "some" corporations, but think of it on
the side of government: you get FOSS software, you could tailor it to
infinitity without procuring X more licenses. This is absent from
proprietary software. That is the "magic" there.
We keep forgetting that government isn't a software company. Majority
of the people in government are actually "rank and file" and you can't
expect _them_ to write patches to the FOSS. And even if you look at
the NCC even ASTI, you don't have _enough_ resources to maintain the
FOSS solutions that you _would want to tailor_ for the government's
needs. Then acquiring these resources or even dealing with third party
VAS providers will cost if not the same amount of money you were
trying to save then more!
> > The statuis quo which you effectively promote is a leeching government
> > coffers. It has to be addresses now, not later. Making excuses not to do
> > so is needless.
> >
>
> Remove the Pork Barrel. That should save the government money.
This is irrelevant to the FOSS bill.
I agree. But if the assertion was that the FOSS bill was out to save
money, then I think it's being made to look like the solution to the
money problem. I think my above proposition is the solution to the
money problem.
--
Dean Michael C. Berris
C++ Software Architect
Orange and Bronze Software Labs, Ltd. Co.
web: http://software.orangeandbronze.com/
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
mobile: +63 928 7291459
phone: +63 2 8943415
other: +1 408 4049532
blogs: http://mikhailberis.blogspot.com http://3w-agility.blogspot.com
http://cplusplus-soup.blogspot.com
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