[ubuntu-uk] local council

[bodsda at googlemail.com]

At the council where I work, vendor lock in is not a concern at all, quite the opposite. One of the merits is that everything is likely to integrate without an issue. Sharepoint, exchange, ms office, ms sql all work together to deliver the service. You can't just replace MS office with LibreOffice and get the same service.

I believe that the easiest solution to implement and see savings from are servers. My place for example has 5 DC's all doing 1 or 2 roles. Replacing these with Linux based DHCP and DNS servers would save over £1000 in licensing fees

The problem with trying to replace ms office is that many organisations will have a 5 year enterprise site license which they have paid for, so there is no cost to keep deploying and upgrading the office suite and therefore there is no reason to move to a free alternative.

Bodsda 
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

-----Original Message-----
From: Sarah Chard <sarah at streetentertainers.co.uk>
Sender: ubuntu-uk-bounces at lists.ubuntu.com
Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2011 12:15:39 
To: UK Ubuntu Talk<ubuntu-uk at lists.ubuntu.com>
Reply-To: ubuntu-uk at lists.ubuntu.com
Subject: Re: [ubuntu-uk] local council

On Sun, 2011-02-13 at 11:51 +0000, Sean Miller wrote:
> So I think that the argument that Councils will automatically "save
> money" through moving to FOSS is one that doesn't always stand up to
> scrutiny.
> 
> Ultimately we should be promoting Linux on its merits, rather than on
> costs.

The argument about moving to FOSS for Councils is about avoiding lock-in
and having software that can be adapted by the councils for their use
and shared with other councils because it is open source. It's the long
term value of FOSS that matters.

And yes absolutely we should promote linux and open source generally on
it's merits - that's why we launched our county HOSS awards for
organisations and individuals who have been promoting and using Open
source in Herefordshire -( and we may have a nomination from the council
itself ) - it's all about promoting Open Source as positive so that
others will be encouraged to take it seriously and realise how many
organisations/businesses/individuals actually already use it.

Sarah


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