No, Microsoft, open source software really is cheaper, insists Munich
Summary: Which is cheaper - using open source or Microsoft's software? The software giant and the city of Munich have come up with very different answers.
The city of Munich has hit back at Microsoft in a row over whether the city's plan to use open-source software is cheaper than using Microsoft's products.
The city is currently migrating 13,000 computers from Windows NT 4 and Microsoft Office 97 to a custom build of Ubuntu and OpenOffice as part of its 'LiMux' project. A further 2,000 computers will stay on Windows but are being switched to OpenOffice. The move began in 2004 and will be completed in the autumn of this year.
Last year Munich released figures that it said demonstrated the project would save the authority more than €10m by sidestepping the need to license Windows 7 and newer versions of Microsoft Office, as well as associated hardware upgrades.
In total the LiMux project would cost €23m, compared to the €34m the authority estimated it would have cost to stick with Windows and MS Office.
Munich's figures were challenged in a study produced by HP for Microsoft, which claimed the LiMux project would cost €60.6m, considerably more than claimed by the authority. In comparison, the report claimed, migrating to Windows XP and Microsoft Office would have cost only €17m.
Flawed assumptions?
However the costs in the Microsoft/HP report are based on several flawed assumptions, said Stefan Hauf, head of the press office at the City of Munich.
Hauf said the HP study assumes support costs for 12,000 clients running the LiMux OS, Munich's custom build of Ubuntu, since 2003. However the number of clients running LiMux in that period has been far lower, as migration has been taking place gradually since 2004, and will only reach 13,000 this year. He added that the report also overestimated the number of IT staff working on the project by putting it at 1,000, which is the total number of IT staff working for Munich.
The cost of porting other business applications used by the authority to Linux, estimated by Microsoft to run to tens of millions of euros, is also exaggerated, said Hauf, as it fails to acknowledge the extent to which web-based apps can be used on LiMux without significant modification.
The way the study characterises the relative hardware costs of LiMux versus Windows is also inaccurate, he said. By comparing LiMux, which is based on Ubuntu 10.04, with Windows XP, the study is not comparing like with like, as its functionality is closer to Windows 7. Consequently the hardware requirements for LiMux relative to Windows 7 should be used, not LiMux versus XP, as is laid out in the study.
On the basis of the present text of the HP study Hauf said it "cannot be regarded as scientific".
A spokesman for Microsoft said: "The study is reliable from our perspective and backed by numerous sources. The City of Munich will be provided a summary of the study. Moreover, we are available to the City of Munich anytime for talks to discuss the study findings in detail."
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Talkback
No big deal
wrong, when you get out of MS juggernaut
Yes -- even if Linux/Open Source didn't save a dime
This is in many respects (explicitly articulated respects) about "open data", free public access (ie. not requiring private citizens (or corporations, for that matter) to buy proprietary software in order to access public records), and about ensuring reliable long-term access to public/government/legal (and eventually historical) documents and records.
There have also been concerns here and there about electronic accessibility regarding public/government services (eg. taxes, bidding on contracts, etc) as well.
In this sense, the cost savings are merely a nice side-benefit of migrating the information structure to open format, open standards and open source.
Why would it be a big deal either way ?
Typical U.S. attitude.
Do you have a special source
Unix was invented at AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1969
Unix was invented at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill New Jersey
AT&T spun off Unix System Laboratories in 1990
You have no idea of what you are talking about Snoops27.
Linux was written in finland
Yes and no.
"Linux" as a whole, the base system that people think of as Linux, is basically the GNU project with the Linux kernel in place of the microkernel they'd always intended to write (they'll get it perfected someday, really!) GNU was the brainchild of Richard Stallman, at MIT. Again, the project is an international one, so no need for an intercontinental peeing match.
Maybe Germany wants to run machine code which does not run as Administrator
Maybe Germany wants full control of it's machines, with no 3rd party kill-s
cost > than just upgrading OS and document applications
I have had this happened where the group is working on a proposal spanning several hundred pages and lots and lots of embedded objects. One brilliant person (apple fanatic) decided he was going to work on it on his mac at home and convert it to whatever junk he was using. He brought the edited document back and we found constant problems throughout the document with missing objects and incorrectly generated table of contents. It was a mess to sort through. Ultimately, that fanatic had to redo all of his work in Word.
Those costs are not calculated into their estimates I am sure.
MS Word vs LaTeX
Your example is flawed
Also, you may not have read the Article carefully enough. The City of Munich is currently using MS Office 97. That's at least a 13 year old version of Office. Microsoft does not keep backwards compatibility with themselves. Munich cannot have the compatibility with outside Microsoft users you tout as an advantage. Open Office, by contrast, can read and if the fonts used are on the system, print properly all but the latest version of Microsoft Office, so this one is a win for Munich.
On another point, Munich is still running NT 3 on it's systems, this indicates a very slow upgrade cycle. Some of these PCs are going to be close to 10 years old. Windows 7 is not even an option for them, unless they replace hardware on a large scale.
Linux by contrast only this year finally gave up on support for 386 hardware from 20 years ago.
As for the rest, I have worked for a municipality. Government bodies are required to keep documents for extended time periods.
Microsoft products seldom can read their own formats from 15 years ago, let alone 30 years.
Open Office, with it's publicly documented format promises to be readable in 20 to 50 years as well as it is today, no matter what happens in the market.
In my work for the municipality I live in, I had to routinely access documents up to 100 years old. Those were film copies, of course. In the latter half of the 1800's and for all of the 1900s, paper was produced using an acid process that means that over 20 years or so, the documents will brown and crack due to oxidation. It is a problem that librarians are well acquainted with. Documents from 200 years ago are frequently in better shape than documents from 30 years ago. for this reason, documents during the 1970s were microfilmed for archival purposes.
Microsoft with it's constant undocumented format changes has just shortened the time period before the document self destructs. If Munich considered that problem, then Microsoft was a nonviable candidate right out the door.
Actually found the opposite in my personal experience.
In contrast, I found that OpenOffice installed on *my* Windows XP machine had trouble converting the Office *2003* files with 100% consistency, let alone the newer file formats.
Right on...
Go opensource and rid yourself of this foolish Microsoft yoke.
Yup
Can be oversome