Open Source adoption by Irish Organisations

Gandalf23

Hi All

I'm currently in the second year of my MBS (eCommerce) in UCD and my thesis is on the reasons why Irish organisations might (or might not) migrate to open source software.

I am mainly interested in migrations from MS Windows to Linux, and MS Office to Open Office / Star Office etc.

Does anyone have any opinions on this?

Does anyone know of any organisations that have made the migration (either successfully or unsuccessfully)?

Does anyone know of an organisation currently in the process of making the decision to migrate?

I am really interested in the reasons why organisations might migrate to OSS, and the processes that take place during the desision making period.



I would be really interested in hearing from anyone who has any interest in this area, or anyone with any comments to make.

Thanks

Capt'n Midnight

Have a look at microsoft licencing, when you understand it you will have part of the reason. If you don't understand the complexities of it (there are three day courses in it for people who are experianced microsoft resellers) then the arguments are based on simple costs.

Pay attention to the upgrade/downgrade rights for an org trying to keep everyone with compatible docs and the hidden costs of OEM when replacing HW. one to look at is the historical prices of Works, Excel , Office and the cost and availability of buying works and upgrading it to Office for less than the price of Excel on it's own (at various times over the last decade it's been cheaper / dearer / not allowed and allowed again)

Microsoft change thier licencing models about every three to five years which makes it very difficult to predict what licenses would be needed in 5 years time nevermind the price.

Also the Threat of moving to opensource encourages M$ to provide discounts in some cases (Thai Government paid 10% of RRP ??)

It's moving goal posts on both sides. Microsoft are changing some standards to cut off cheaper options (eg: XP home connect to a domain)

cormy

Beaumont Hospital dumped a lot of MS Office installs in favour of StarOffice - not sure of an exact number but it's in the hundreds - i.e. they kept Windows AFAIK on the desktop but installed Star Office to save on MS Office licences.

My 2 cents on why organisations decide to change is that they realise that not everybody needs all the features of Windows and/or MS Office - for example all the person on the front desk needs is web and email potentially, or whole departments may just need web/mail/word processing. Such requirements can be more than met by Linux and/or Open/StarOffice. And that's just the desktop environment. In the server room on the other hand I don't see as much activity in terms of Windows to unix migrations - unix already has a strong foothold and it's really only the non-critical applications that sit on windows systems in general. I.e. the banks/telcos/Gov't don't store customer account details/billing info/tax records etc. on windows (again I say: "in general").

Keep an eye on www.theregister.co.uk - they tend to carry a lot of stories of Windows v Unix battles for customers.


Good luck with the thesis ...

Zaltais

cormy wrote:

Beaumont Hospital dumped a lot of MS Office installs in favour of StarOffice - not sure of an exact number but it's in the hundreds - i.e. they kept Windows AFAIK on the desktop but installed Star Office to save on MS Office licences.

There's a case study on this here. (PDF document)

Hairy Homer

ComputerScope magazine does an annual survey of its readers to gauge the extent of Open Source deployment in ireland. I believe the next one is coming out this April.

It's controlled circulation so you can't buy it in shops but there should be copies in the UCD library. It should be useful for a thesis because it will have figures you can quote.

Another large Irish company that uses Open Source is Bord na Mona, which uses Linux as the OS for its Oracle infrastructure and applications.

scojones

Keep your eyes on the Linux mags you can get in Easons, they often have success stories for companies that decided to migrate their entire business from windows to linux and the reasons why. LinuxFormat, Linux User & Developer, and so on... Just have a look at the contents pages when they are released each month

Gandalf23

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

Have a look at microsoft licencing, when you understand it you will have part of the reason. If you don't understand the complexities of it (there are three day courses in it for people who are experianced microsoft resellers) then the arguments are based on simple costs.

Pay attention to the upgrade/downgrade rights for an org trying to keep everyone with compatible docs and the hidden costs of OEM when replacing HW. one to look at is the historical prices of Works, Excel , Office and the cost and availability of buying works and upgrading it to Office for less than the price of Excel on it's own (at various times over the last decade it's been cheaper / dearer / not allowed and allowed again)

Microsoft change thier licencing models about every three to five years which makes it very difficult to predict what licenses would be needed in 5 years time nevermind the price.

Also the Threat of moving to opensource encourages M$ to provide discounts in some cases (Thai Government paid 10% of RRP ??)

It's moving goal posts on both sides. Microsoft are changing some standards to cut off cheaper options (eg: XP home connect to a domain)

This is an excellent suggestion... never thought of approaching it from this angle. Do you really think licensing costs/considerations are the most important factor though?

Gandalf23

Thanks guys (and gals if there are any?)

excellent suggestions and much appreciated.

Zaltais and Cormy... I am aware of the Beaumont studies and I'm hoping to link in with them. Brian Fitzgerald has a lot of other OSS stuff going on in UL at the moment.

sjones and Hairy Homer... thanks... will do. I had not heard of "Computer Scope" mag... if its not in UCD where else could I get my hands on a copy?

Zombrex

Didn't AIB decide to migrate a lot of there Bankcentre machines from Windows/Office to Sun Java Desktop (a version of Linux/Gnome)??

Not sure if it ever went ahead or not, but it would be a pretty major migration.

Though often the reasons for companies claiming to be switching is to scare Microsoft into giving them cheap discounts on MS products.

Capt'n Midnight

Gandalf23 wrote:

This is an excellent suggestion... never thought of approaching it from this angle. Do you really think licensing costs/considerations are the most important factor though?

http://pcworld.about.com/magazine/1908p133id52503.htm

How did an upstart like PC-DOS get any traction? Price played a big part: PC-DOS cost $40, while CP/M was $450 and UCSD p-System was $550.

Nobody was prepared for the IBM PC's instant, explosive success. And that clamor was for a machine whose $1265 base model didn't include a monitor, a video card, a parallel or serial port, an operating system, or a floppy drive.

So back at the start the OS cost less than 4% of the price of the entry level system. Today you can buy a Dell for about €400, lets imagine you want to email a dB file to someone. You are on a network => XP Pro + Windows CAL , Microsoft Office Professional + SQL CAL , Exchange server (enterprise versions if you want more than 8-16GB of email storage) + exchange CAL - result Microsoft can make more money than Dell ! If there is a hardware problem, Dell will relace the hardware, if there is a software problem , google on technet ..
http://www.softwaremarketsolution.com/SMS%20Articles/doomed_pricing.htm

http://www.techcentral.ie/techcentral/corporate_it/systems_management/beaumont_upgrades_servers_to_linux.xml

The consolidation of our servers into one mainframe architecture means that we are able to manage the multiple business applications from one machine, avoiding random failure patterns that plagued us under the old infrastructure.'

For years people have had to seperate roles on windows servers in an effort to not have all functionality lost when (not if) it went belly up or needed to be rebooted for it's monthly patches

[EDIT] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/07/linux_windows_quocirca/