An entirely unbiased report from OpenForum Europe, written by
- Shaik Maha (“Dr Shaikh is a coauthor of Adopting Open Source Software: A Practical Guide”) and
- Tony Cornford (“He has published work on open source software processes and business models”)
I wouldn’t knock this evidence of expertise, except that it doesn’t seem to extend to having worked with Microsoft or Oracle or indeed Hewlett Packard or IBM (which may or may not be reliant on open source software).
Well, yes, I would. These morons are a disgrace to academia. I don’t normally pick up on spelling mistakes, either, but if you’re going to publish a paper on Open Source vs Voldemort, I think you could at least use the spell-checker so that “proprietary” does not become “propriatory.”
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As an exercise for the reader, I invite you to guess the size of the dataset on which this study is based. However cynical you might be, I’m prepared to bet that you’ll be surprised. And no fair jumping ahead to “Methodology” or “Validating the TCO model.”
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After a whole bunch of throat-clearing (don’t forget the soft benefits, it’s not just the free license, etc etc), we come down to this on page 13:
Factors of influence for open source software adoption
(1) Reducing Vendor Lock-In
(2) Ability to Experiment or Innovate
(3) Value for Money
(4) Access to Knowledge and Skills
(5) Building Business Agility
(6) Support for Incremental Development of Solutions
(7) Ability to build and work with a peer community to re-use and share code
(8) Ability to work with Local/SME Service Providers
(9) Access to a wider choice of Support Service Providers
(10) Ability to work with Sector Peers on Common Areas of Interest
(11) Better adoption of Open Standards
(12) Access to Code (e.g. for worst case)
(13) Ability to Modify Code (e.g. for customization and solving critical defects)
(14) Ability to change Support Service Providers
Or, as I would put it:
(1) Swapping Microsoft for Red Hat or IBM. Actually, this is the UK Government, so you’re probably going through Deloitte (a contributor to the “paper”) in any case.
(2) Giving the Public Sector an even better chance to fanny around and mess things up for no good reason.
(3) Did we mention the free licensing?
(4) Not just any knowledge and skills, though. Just the knowledge and skills that we’re going to force down your throat.
(5) Management bullshit. How the fuck do you “build” agility in any case?
(6) Ability to claim that success is JustAroundTheCorner™
(7) A lemming-like desire to build a monolithic framework from incompatible parts, just so that you can blame the next Department over when it all goes tits up
(8) This is a really important buzz-word for UK politicians. SME, kids, SME! Keep repeating it, and never ever add the letter G at the end!
(9) Apparently there’s a tragic short-fall in service providers for proprietary (sic, very much sic) software. Well, we’re sort of guessing on that one.
(10) More management bullshit.
(11) Better than what? More open than what? Which standards? And don’t you be going waving ODF in my face on this one.
(12) Because there’s nothing quite like watching a bureaucrat trying to work out why the WiFi driver in Ubuntu has mysteriously stopped working.
(13) Because there’s nothing quite like watching a bureaucrat taking a working version of a WiFi driver in Ubuntu (I am assured there is such a thing) and trashing it.
(14) Because we already mentioned this under (9), but the clue-bat is not strong in this one.
I’m going to keep reading, but I am not hopeful that the actual stated problem (TCO) will be in any way addressed by the rest of this meretricious, dunderheaded, excuse for thinking.
Comments
I always love when they say switch to open-source to prevent vendor lock-in.
Is there truly a way to eliminate vendor lock in at all? If you use OpenOffice, then you are locked into using OpenOffice, because it has its own format, and there is the possibility that other office suites that claim to support ODF may not implement it as well as OpenOffice (or others).
What is wrong with Office? Especially Office 2010 (and 2007), they both have built-in support for ODF anyways, and they fully support the time tested DOC and DOCX (I guess this one may not be as time tested, but its pretty much just an XML version of DOC). Then if you want you can convert DOCX to ODF, which OpenOffice can’t do.
Yay for neutering the office! (both the people and the software)
Experimentation? What are they, scientists? They don’t need to experiment, and if I understand what this research is targeted (government use of foss, right?), they don’t need to experiment or innovate. What are you going to innovate, the tax code? Oh right, they can’t do that without asking.
Value for money… Oh yeah, need we refer to the YouTube video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzdykNa2IBU), and this: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/businessproductivity/en-us/Why-Microsoft/Pages/openoffice.aspx
Whether or not it is a Microsoft website/research, they certainly didn’t make up these people they refer to in the video, the website, etc.
Also funny how the document is in a PDF. What, no ODF? Not good enough for ya?
To spoil the surprised, the sample size is: 32 survey respondents— 7 by mail, 25 by SurveyMonkey(!). You know it’s a professional effort from professionals when they use SurveyMonkey!
Also they interviewed 20 people in 14 different organizations.
I may be over-skimming, but it looks like their “methodology” is to pull a list of “types of cost” out of their ass, then explaining why each item on that list is cheaper using Open Source… there’s no actual numbers!
(Well, ok, some London Oyster Card guy told them they got an 80% savings, but… over what?)
The thing is I don’t even necessarily disagree with their premise— we’re talking about GOVERNMENT offices here. If you switch from OracleApps to open source, yeah, you’ll probably see savings. If you switch from Lotus Notes to open source, yeah, you’ll probably see savings—
But the reason isn’t that SendMail or Thunderbird is JUST THAT GOOD, the reason is that you’re using the worst-of-the-worst “enterprisey” software in the first place. There’s no way that switching from Microsoft or Apple tools (or possibly even Adobe) would save you TCO.
@Ian:
How dare you! PDF is an “open format,” it says here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format.
It’s been around since 1993, for goodness’ sake. And Adobe came out with it out of the goodness of their FOSSy little hearts (unlike Flash, which was an aberration, obviously).
It’s pure coincidence that there still is no FOSS reader for PDF that actually gets the damn thing right.
... I think the funniest part of the document is the horrendous tool they use for graphs. It clearly isn’t Excel. It probably isn’t even gnuplot, which, whatever its weaknesses, is actually quite sophisticated.
I’m guessing OpenOffice Draw.
@Blakeyrat:
Ah, yes, but you’re being unfair and trying to impose a context on this miserable excuse for measurement, aren’t you?
“TCO” necessarily exists in a vacuum. The authors even make this assertion on, I think, about page six, although not in those words.
Or, in my words, the vacuum “between the researcher’s ears.”
“Evidence and opinion would seem to concur that desktops are perhaps the riskiest open source projects with the most stakeholders to consider.
“Selection in this domain is to be approached with care. At the least such a migration needs planning that moves servers and other applications over first and actual desktops last, and that in a very gradual manner with sympathetic training for the users, incentives and senior manager support.”
Shame that almost every trumpeted FOSS success in local government is based solidly around desktop migration (where the biggest savings can putatively be made), isn’t it?
But never mind. There’s always incentives and senior management support.
And sympathy. And cups of tea. And nice choccy biscuits.
“Then if you want you can convert DOCX to ODF, which OpenOffice can’t do.”
Reminds me, a friend of mine recently had a presentation (pptx) which looked bricked in LibreOffice Impress. Converting using Office 2010 to odp resulted in a working alternative.
Now if ODF had supported standardized formula language earlier ( what monkeys release a document standard for spreadsheets without a formula language ), Office 2010 would also be able to read/write formulas in ODF files.
Why is this in the “Lessons for the Public Sector” section?
“Some core themes are apparent across the cases we explored. First and perhaps most importantly, each and every interviewee repeated to us that pragmatism needs to guide open source adoption and not ideology. This is perhaps surprising given the 'ideological’ dimension to much debate within open source communities, but users in business or in the public sector want for the most part to look beyond this.”
Shouldn’t that be a lesson for the foss community itself and not the people who are going to use the software?
“Organisations need to be clear on how 'benefit realization’ will occur and how it will be monitored – will all parties realize (work for, appreciate and understand) the benefits and when should they be expected? These questions need a clear and honest answer so as not to nurture false hopes and unrealistic expectations.”
What? The expectations should be that it “just works,” and you shouldn’t have to really think too much about it. Sure, it won’t be a walk in the park, but if you are going to start using OpenOffice or LibreOffice, why should you have to open all the documents in their MS Office counterpart and save it as ODF to work properly? You should just be able to install the supposedly “better” software and open the MS Office (or whatever you may be coming from) documents without much frustration.
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