On 12 February 2011 19:46, alan c <aecl...@candt.waitrose.com> wrote:
> Armed with my new knowledge I am recently in touch with my Councillor to > help make them aware that there is no real reason why they need to stay with > a paid-for OS on their corporate laptop. It may take a bit more time of > course. > I think that "paid for" is irrelevant, to be honest. When I was working for Cornhill I was on what was called the e-aag (the e-application architecture group) and one of the desires of the Cornhill management was to move towards J2EE. The terms of reference were fixed, in that we had to have however many desktops with the IDE on it, so many servers with the J2EE server and so on... We evaluated several products on the market, including (I recall) BEA Weblogic, IBM Websphere, the Oracle JDeveloper suite and JBOSS, a FOSS product as most will no doubt be aware. When it actually came to costings, including support, there really wasn't ANY difference at all in the total cost of ownership. In fact, a supported JBOSS worked out to be FAR from the cheapest, as other vendors offered free support alongside the "licences". The opportunity that JBOSS did offer, of course, was that we could have an unlimited number of installations - development, test, acceptance and live servers, and clients on however many PCs we chose. But, working on the terms of reference, it wasn't always cheaper. So I think that the argument that Councils will automatically "save money" through moving to FOSS is one that doesn't always stand up to scrutiny. Ultimately we should be promoting Linux on its merits, rather than on costs. Because, as well, people do tend to think "if it's free there's something inferior about it"... and to make them change their minds we have to stop spouting this "free free free" thing. Sean
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