[ubuntu-uk] local council

[Tony Travis]

On 13/02/11 11:51, Sean Miller wrote:
> [...]
> 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.
>[...]

Hi, Sean.

Presumably, your unlimited number of client PC's were running M$ 
Windoze, and this was not factored into your TCO...

I'm not for one moment disputing that Linux should be promoted on merit. 
However, TCO calculations can be misleading and 'supported' software, 
FLOSS or proprietary, may require the customer IT support team to have a 
lot more involvement than the management anticipate because the IT team 
know about application of the product to the specific customer's 
requirements.

In that respect, it seems more reasonable to endorse the idea of 
zero-cost software of either type and compare the level of service 
provided by different vendors: In your scenario, the "licence" fee (your 
quotes) implies, as I would expect, that licenced versions of the 
software are well supported. In fact, TCO calculations typically do not 
take into account the existing expertise of that the IT team and, in the 
case of FLOSS, that might be an important economic factor.

In my experience, managers think they can solve problems by buying a 
'solution' - hardware or software, but everyone else knows that it is 
people who solve problems and they are the most important factor.

So, what 'solution' did you opt for?

Bye,

   Tony.
-- 
Dr. A.J.Travis, University of Aberdeen, Rowett Institute of Nutrition
and Health, Greenburn Road, Bucksburn, Aberdeen AB21 9SB, Scotland, UK
tel +44(0)1224 712751, fax +44(0)1224 716687, http://www.rowett.ac.uk
mailto:a.travis at abdn.ac.uk, http://bioinformatics.rri.sari.ac.uk