If the 40% figure is accurate, this is a BIG win for the Linux desktop (and Canonical in particular), because the TCO (total cost of ownership) of an enterprise desktop can be as much as four to five times greater than the cost of its hardware and software licenses.[1] At most corporations, training, support, maintenance, security, and other ongoing costs together vastly exceed the cost of just hardware and software.
For example, the hardware+software-only costs of a run-of-the-mill Windows+Office enterprise desktop, for a large corporation, might be $1,200 over three years, but the TCO could easily top $4,000 or even $5,000 a year. (If these figures seem high to you, think about the cost of training thousands of individuals about as computer savvy as your Aunt Tillie, and then having to troubleshoot all their virus infections, messed up files, one-off application bugs, unrepeatable weird crashes, etc. so they can do their work every day.)
The Gendarmerie, in other words, is claiming that the switch to Ubuntu Linux on the desktop is saving them somewhere between one and two thousand dollars a year per seat. With 72,000 desktops, the aggregate savings are probably in the mid-to-high tens of millions of dollars a year.
Keep in mind that a motivation to change was the end of Windows XP so they're probably assuming the training costs for each OS (GendBuntu vs Windows Vista) would be identical. So while it is a victory for Linux, it's not a rout like these numbers might make it seem.
I interned in a french company a couple years ago, and was surprised to discover what the company's computer setup was. You had the usual windows XP, but you couldn't install anything on it: they had this system where you had to call IT, tell them what software you wanted, then they would deploy it to your computer. They would also do nightly backups of your systems, and all that jazz. Half of the time, it didn't work, so you had to call IT and they'd come troubleshoot. All in all, I have no trouble believing that factoring in the IT support behemoth and, the TCO was vastly more that $1000.
The problem with the 40% savings figure is that tablet-based operating systems cost around $1k annually. And in the long run, your windows desktop will have an OS more like a tablet than a windows 7 desktop.
It's a smart move to first introduce cross-platform applications. Then after switching to a different operating system, the users will be familiar with the applications, so "only" the desktop changes, not the whole experience. If you are used to firefox, thunderbird and libreoffice, to many users it doesn't matter much if it's windows or linux underneath.
That was exactly how I converted for my own personal use. I gradually replaced all my Windows applications with cross-platform FOSS applications and finally switched from Windows to Ubuntu.
Definitely. I'd say that improving the Libreoffice experience on Windows is probably one of the most effective things we can do at present to increase adoption of desktop Linux.
Not that they were excluded, but explicitly consider browser based applications as part of those cross-platform applications. I own a copy of MS Office, but rarely use it since Google Docs solves every problem I usually have.
That's an impressive number, all things considered.
Many people rant about Open/LibreOffice not being comparable to MS Office, and while there probably is no good replacement for Outlook in Linux (simply from an ease of use standpoint), swriter and scalc provide 99.9% of the features that most people use MS Office for.
Overall, I'm eager for the time when a major US municipality switches over to Linux desktops. It just makes sense.
The biggest problem comparing open/libreoffice is that compatibility is 99% of the focus here. Trying to implement Microsoft's horrible file-formats just sucks all the oxygen out of the room - the users obsess over compatibility (for good reasons), and that means the developers have to obsess over compatibility (also for good reasons) but this makes it really hard for LibreOffice to actually focus on real features.
Also, as an aside, my wife's learning LaTeX for some math courses... she was shocked at how well her OOO Draw files could be converted and opened up in Inkscape, which in turn played nice with LaTeX. Having good compatibility between various small applications actually was surprising to someone used to the closed-source software world.
Overall, I'm eager for the time when a major US municipality switches over to Linux desktops. It just makes sense.
The problem is, it's been making sense for a decade now, at least for the office suite. But these wins against Microsoft remain one offs.
There are many reasons for this, but IT professionals are part of the "problem." Someone with a lifetime of MSFT certifications and training can come up with a dozen reasons why open source is bad. He needs to save his livelihood.
The feature parity of libreoffice is much closer than the polish parity. There is still so much to do in terms of UI polishing in LibreOffice that I wouldn't know where to start.
This may be true, but it does raise some questions:
Did your father have to configure his access to the (probably) Samba based file shares, set up his own account on the network, map all of the printers, configure his own email client etc?
Part of a large enterprise roll-out is pre-configuration. I can't imagine the Gendarmerie IT dept. appreciating all of this extra configuration for "every single guy" with a Win 7 laptop.
I'm the mirror image of your father. I take my CentOS laptop into work where we have a Windows 7 network. I use a remote desktop session to access all the 'business applications' and I can have my own 'stuff' running behind the remote desktop window.
IT support don't want to put LibreOffice on the desktops in case it confuses users being similar but different to MS Office.
Governments should use as much open source software as possible, both because of cost reasons, but also in principle (especially now about the NSA scandals, instead of buying proprietary software from American companies).
> Governments should use as much open source software as possible, both because of cost reasons, but also in principle
IIRC the latter is a major reason why France's PM released a circular strongly recommending the increased use of OSS in administrations last year.
The first activity in that direction turns out to be almost 15 years old: back in 1999, a french senator had proposed mandating OSS use across the board[0]
This is the first public announcement (I have seen) of a large government agency using open source desktop OSs. I've seen articles about tech companies using Linux for Desktops, and other articles that mention large organizations using Linux Desktops but the couldn't specify the company specifically (dont know if it was US based or not). I have doubts about a large US non-tech organization actually using Linux for their desktops. The user training would have to momentous and cant imagine the IT support personnel/time needed to successfully implement this kind of change. To be honest I cant even imagine my company or others even switching to Open Office.
I am glad that this is working out for the French, I wonder if their are any US government agencies that would consider a switch like this.
is in French, but it claims they have saveed 500 000 euros (over one year) from this switch, and that deputies are mostly pleased with the switch. It also features testimonies from both rightwing and leftwing deputies that agree with each other!
> I have doubts about a large US non-tech organization actually using Linux for their desktops.
I could envision certain types of companies being able to do this -- those where the great majority (if not all) of the computing that an employee does is in the browser. (Call centers come to mind.)
Just out of high school, for example, I got a "data entry" job at Columbia House. Remember those "Get 12 CDs for a penny!" things that were in damn near every magazine imaginable ~15 years ago? My job consisted solely of typing into a custom (DOS-based) application whatever the customer had written on the card (e.g. their name, address, the ID numbers of the CDs they wanted to receive). That job could be done entirely on a Linux PC without issue (web-based application) although, on second thought, that job probably doesn't even exist anymore.
What I want to know is the PC that they are using. I love to use Linux on my computers but always have a hard time making sure that the hardware is completely compatible. I hope such adoptions lead to better hardware compatibility with cheaper commodity hardware. I've had a few weird experiences:
1. Previous laptop: wifi under Linux didn't connect to certain networks, wile the same machine connected to all networks under windows.
2. Current desktop: Under Linux, it will sometimes freeze with no errors reported (usually under heavy and sustained CPU and graphics usage) but nothing of the sort happens under windows.
And these issues are really hard to figure out for non systems programmers like me.
1) WiFi chipset manufacturers and the linux kernel are and have been at odds for some time. The issue is primarily that some (many?) of the chipset manufacturers that make the machinery that runs WiFi cards don't provide open source drivers for their chipsets. Some of these make proprietary kernel-compatible drivers (often inferior to their Windows offerings), and others have to make do with hackish workarounds (NDISwrapper). I'd argue this isn't a problem with Linux as much as it is the device manufacturers. I'd also argue from the end-user perspective that doesn't matter much.
2. See (1)--there is a notorious hate-hate relationship between nVidia and Linux; I'd bet that what you've experienced is related to that, although happily will admit to being wrong (if you aren't engaged in accidental selective memory--that is, remembering times Linux froze but not Windows, even though the latter surely has frozen on you before, under similar circumstances).
presumably the police are not using a GPU, which seems to be a major source of issues in our lab.
64 bit ubuntu gives me more hardware headaches than 32 bit for things like wifi. Again this is for police desktops so probably they don;t use wifi.
As someone who has worked on Open Source in France I think this is big for another reason. It might lead to a nice push of Linux in Africa (specifically through the African Union). Many of the French speaking countries look at France for "tech trends" etc.
Microsoft is following an interesting strategy in Africa. basically the MS-whatever certificates are cheap and widespread (and nonauthorized copies of Windows are tolerated) which leads to IT guys wanting Windows. I always thought that was strange and Linux should be much stronger in Africa :)
"About 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."
- Bill Gates @ 1998
Everyone who cares about control over their software should be using open-source. This is why pretty much any investment bank, hedge fund and proprietary trading firm runs Linux or BSD, uses open-source tools and rolls their own trading software...
I'd be interested to know about how much they have in the way of custom software. If they're just using Office, I agree, this should be fairly easy. The tough thing is when you have custom development that happened on Windows.
For example, the US deploys a large number of custom applications on Windows. One of the biggest is the VA's electronic medical records application, CPRS. CPRS is a massive application. Wine might do the trick, though I'm not sure how it works with AD and other Windows services the VA depends on.
Isn't pretty much everyone moving to custom web applications for internal services? I doubt that in those cases it matters much what platform you're on since it's probably running on Apache on a linux server anyway.
I've seen this model even at tiny companies, and my impression is that it is also how the big ones do it. There are limitations, but the benefits are pretty substantial.
I would not be surprised if many non-US government agencies are evaluating running their own security-oriented Linux distributions. Hopefully this will result in a critical mass of vendors and technologies for running networks that have at least some chance of keeping communications and data storage secure.
Sadly, I would also not be surprised if many governments continue to rely on US vendors for a lot of network and voice infrastructure that have already been compromised.
I've attended to a course on presenting in a French university. The professor actually recommended Comic Sans as the most suitable font. With a straight face.
It's not unusual for a nation to have multiple police forces with overlapping jurisdictions. And I don't see it as a problem in and of itself. In Ottawa, Canada, for example, because it is the national capital there are three police forces with jurisdiction within the city: the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (the federal gendarmerie force), the Ontario Provincial Police, and the Ottawa Police Service. As far as I know, and I live in Ottawa, it works out well.
But back to France. I imagine that IT costs are a small portion of the gendarmerie or police's budget. Most of it would be taken up by wages for the officers and staff and maintenance of equipment and facilities. Merging France's two police forces would do little to reduce those costs, since the combined organization would have the union of the two organizations' duties.
I find this somewhat cute. I didn't know what TCO was at first, so I had assumed from headline that France's national police was blowing FUD against open source, and this was another article about government agency malfeasance in tech.
Good to know adoption of so many GNU/Linux desktops. Though, Ubuntu is a bad choice because of the Amazon search bar spyware enabled by default which sends back search queries to Amazon. Perhaps they don't understand the underlying principles behind free software: something that gives the users complete freedom.
[+] [-] cs702|12 years ago|reply
For example, the hardware+software-only costs of a run-of-the-mill Windows+Office enterprise desktop, for a large corporation, might be $1,200 over three years, but the TCO could easily top $4,000 or even $5,000 a year. (If these figures seem high to you, think about the cost of training thousands of individuals about as computer savvy as your Aunt Tillie, and then having to troubleshoot all their virus infections, messed up files, one-off application bugs, unrepeatable weird crashes, etc. so they can do their work every day.)
The Gendarmerie, in other words, is claiming that the switch to Ubuntu Linux on the desktop is saving them somewhere between one and two thousand dollars a year per seat. With 72,000 desktops, the aggregate savings are probably in the mid-to-high tens of millions of dollars a year.
--
[1] http://www.gartner.com/id=2371417
[+] [-] nols|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abraxasz|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Spooky23|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] S4M|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] perlgeek|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RyanMcGreal|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] takluyver|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thomaslangston|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mercurial|12 years ago|reply
1: http://adullact.net/plugins/mediawiki/wiki/milimail/index.ph...
[+] [-] debacle|12 years ago|reply
Many people rant about Open/LibreOffice not being comparable to MS Office, and while there probably is no good replacement for Outlook in Linux (simply from an ease of use standpoint), swriter and scalc provide 99.9% of the features that most people use MS Office for.
Overall, I'm eager for the time when a major US municipality switches over to Linux desktops. It just makes sense.
[+] [-] Pxtl|12 years ago|reply
Also, as an aside, my wife's learning LaTeX for some math courses... she was shocked at how well her OOO Draw files could be converted and opened up in Inkscape, which in turn played nice with LaTeX. Having good compatibility between various small applications actually was surprising to someone used to the closed-source software world.
[+] [-] auctiontheory|12 years ago|reply
The problem is, it's been making sense for a decade now, at least for the office suite. But these wins against Microsoft remain one offs.
There are many reasons for this, but IT professionals are part of the "problem." Someone with a lifetime of MSFT certifications and training can come up with a dozen reasons why open source is bad. He needs to save his livelihood.
[+] [-] PeterisP|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edelans|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] officemonkey|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jlengrand|12 years ago|reply
A few years later, he still complains about it. I still haven't found any of his colleagues happy of the change.
The huge majority of those guys are not technical, and as pragmatic as the change may be; it is quite hard for the people impacted :).
In the end, every single guy I know now has bought a laptop with Win 7, brings it to work and works on it. Ubuntu is not used.
People don't want to change.
[+] [-] Intermernet|12 years ago|reply
Did your father have to configure his access to the (probably) Samba based file shares, set up his own account on the network, map all of the printers, configure his own email client etc?
Part of a large enterprise roll-out is pre-configuration. I can't imagine the Gendarmerie IT dept. appreciating all of this extra configuration for "every single guy" with a Win 7 laptop.
[+] [-] keithpeter|12 years ago|reply
IT support don't want to put LibreOffice on the desktops in case it confuses users being similar but different to MS Office.
[+] [-] seewhat|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devx|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] masklinn|12 years ago|reply
IIRC the latter is a major reason why France's PM released a circular strongly recommending the increased use of OSS in administrations last year.
The first activity in that direction turns out to be almost 15 years old: back in 1999, a french senator had proposed mandating OSS use across the board[0]
[0] http://slashdot.org/story/99/10/28/0820202/french-senator-pr...
[+] [-] wil421|12 years ago|reply
I am glad that this is working out for the French, I wonder if their are any US government agencies that would consider a switch like this.
[+] [-] seszett|12 years ago|reply
This article:
http://www.zdnet.fr/actualites/linux-a-l-assemblee-nationale...
is in French, but it claims they have saveed 500 000 euros (over one year) from this switch, and that deputies are mostly pleased with the switch. It also features testimonies from both rightwing and leftwing deputies that agree with each other!
[+] [-] perlgeek|12 years ago|reply
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux for details.
[+] [-] jlgaddis|12 years ago|reply
I could envision certain types of companies being able to do this -- those where the great majority (if not all) of the computing that an employee does is in the browser. (Call centers come to mind.)
Just out of high school, for example, I got a "data entry" job at Columbia House. Remember those "Get 12 CDs for a penny!" things that were in damn near every magazine imaginable ~15 years ago? My job consisted solely of typing into a custom (DOS-based) application whatever the customer had written on the card (e.g. their name, address, the ID numbers of the CDs they wanted to receive). That job could be done entirely on a Linux PC without issue (web-based application) although, on second thought, that job probably doesn't even exist anymore.
[+] [-] baltcode|12 years ago|reply
1. Previous laptop: wifi under Linux didn't connect to certain networks, wile the same machine connected to all networks under windows.
2. Current desktop: Under Linux, it will sometimes freeze with no errors reported (usually under heavy and sustained CPU and graphics usage) but nothing of the sort happens under windows.
And these issues are really hard to figure out for non systems programmers like me.
[+] [-] Iftheshoefits|12 years ago|reply
2. See (1)--there is a notorious hate-hate relationship between nVidia and Linux; I'd bet that what you've experienced is related to that, although happily will admit to being wrong (if you aren't engaged in accidental selective memory--that is, remembering times Linux froze but not Windows, even though the latter surely has frozen on you before, under similar circumstances).
[+] [-] jeltz|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tlarkworthy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kriro|12 years ago|reply
Microsoft is following an interesting strategy in Africa. basically the MS-whatever certificates are cheap and widespread (and nonauthorized copies of Windows are tolerated) which leads to IT guys wanting Windows. I always thought that was strange and Linux should be much stronger in Africa :)
[+] [-] SeppoErviala|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mikeb85|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trimbo|12 years ago|reply
For example, the US deploys a large number of custom applications on Windows. One of the biggest is the VA's electronic medical records application, CPRS. CPRS is a massive application. Wine might do the trick, though I'm not sure how it works with AD and other Windows services the VA depends on.
[+] [-] neltnerb|12 years ago|reply
I've seen this model even at tiny companies, and my impression is that it is also how the big ones do it. There are limitations, but the benefits are pretty substantial.
[+] [-] Zigurd|12 years ago|reply
Sadly, I would also not be surprised if many governments continue to rely on US vendors for a lot of network and voice infrastructure that have already been compromised.
[+] [-] mddw|12 years ago|reply
Nice use of Comic Sans in the presentation. Wonder if he paid the licence or used Powerpoint.
Nice post though, I did not know about GendBuntu ! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu
[+] [-] username42|12 years ago|reply
Installation is trivial (apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installer). I think it is a default package.
[+] [-] mavroprovato|12 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_fonts_for_the_Web
[+] [-] lrem|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nraynaud|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a-priori|12 years ago|reply
But back to France. I imagine that IT costs are a small portion of the gendarmerie or police's budget. Most of it would be taken up by wages for the officers and staff and maintenance of equipment and facilities. Merging France's two police forces would do little to reduce those costs, since the combined organization would have the union of the two organizations' duties.
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