Los Angeles to Consider Open Source Software

lientz writes "According to an article at FederalComputerWeek, the city of Los Angeles is considering using Open Source software as a cost cutting measure. From the article: "...city officials could save $5.2 million by switching to OpenOffice... rather than purchasing a Microsoft Office product at $200 per license for 26,000 desktops. The savings would go to a special fund to hire more employees for the police department, a major focus for city officials right now, he added.""

The money is going to fund police?

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

- The government is the one that allows the existance of propietary software, and the first to damage Free Software (For example, with software patents).
- The government profits from Free Software
- Instead of giving part of that profit to HELP FREE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT, it's given to other government-dependant institutions.

No intention to flame, but, how is this a good thing?

ALMAFUERTE

Macros

[tyleroar]

Gordon Haff, a senior analyst and IT adviser at Illuminata, said business value should be the main concern in transitioning to an open-source environment. "The decision-making for the state or local or federal government could be essentially the same as for a corporation," Haff said. "Does it save money when all the costs [are] taken into account? And that includes conversion costs, retraining costs, perhaps costs of getting and writing or converting software that doesn't run on an open-source platform."

That's a very good point. OpenOffice is great and all, but what if they have lots of macros written for the Office suite? Once OpenOffice has implemented compatibility with macros, there will be no reason to not switch. The other thing that occurred to me, is why do they feel like they have to upgrade? Why can't they stick with the version they have?

Smaller communities would benefit most from OSS

[TykeClone]

I'm on the city council of a (very) small town, and because of that I'm on a mailing list for an Iowa municipal issues magaizine. This month they had an article in it about reducing Microsoft licensing costs - by using the state purchasing power. No mention of Open Office or any other competitors.

In Iowa, there are a few population centers, a few "larger towns", and many towns with low enough populations that they can run the entire municipal government with two or three employees. These are the kinds of places that don't have the built-in MS infrastructure and could migrate to OpenOffice fairly easily. Larger communities may have the infrastructure in place the makes it more difficult to migrate away from Microsoft.

Seeing headlines that LA is thinking about going open source is interesting, but there might be thousands of other communities in the country that could see a proportionally greater benefit from that software than LA would - but they'd never make the news.

Pilot Program

[nurb432]

Lets hope this spreads among other states too.

We are tax payers, everyone write a NICE letter to their local representatives..

Forget the simple "replace Microsoft.. they suck" angle, this sort of move saves money..

Re:You get what you pay for

[EEBaum]

I gotta agree with you. This is why I eventually let my linux partition deteriorate and die. For a while it was fun, but I found myself falling behind on the maintenance. With all the other stuff I have going on, I simply don't have the time or effort to significantly investigate the workings of the OS, not to mention make it work like I want it to.

I've opted to have one less thing to talk about with great knowledge in computer circles, and I haven't really minded.

The problem, I think, is that open source software wants to have its cake and eat it too. It often goes for raw functionality without usability, with the mentality of "if I can figure it out, so can you!" This is fine, if you want "open-source-types" to use your software, but you really can't complain if Joe User doesn't want to do a significant amount of research before setting up a computer.

It's like modernist composers who write art music very inaccessible to the average listener... sure, it may be an absolutely magnificent piece of music, and I'm not saying you shouldn't write it, and I'm not saying whether it's better or worse than something more common-listener-friendly. However, if you complain that nobody wants to listen to it, you have only yourself to blame.

Re:Typical tactic

[bkzitalsux]

This story ws covered on NPR last week (at least in the LA area). The reporter explained to the clueless what OSS was and the benefit of putting more cops on the street with the money saved. She then moved on talk about the "TCO" of going OSS, as if the status quo had none. Evidently coached (or brainwashed or funded) by MS or the reseller for the city.

I'd be amazed if LA were to switch. Pleased, but amazed.

$200 dollars

[manuelpl]

Im not a Microsoft apologist , but the figures are wrong , at my district , right next door to LAUSD we pay $47 for Microsoft Office. This is FUD , there is no way they pay $200 , thats just wrong. Volume licensing is under $50.

Re:OpenOffice Access

[ptlis]

Er... Open Office Base perhaps? Included in the OO.o 2 preview releases it seems to be an Access-like front-end for a real RDMS, none of the built-in access bullshit which dies if there are greater than 5 concurrent connections to it.

Re:And a fine tactic it is.

[behindspace]

I agree, OO.o was the best thing I ever migrated to. Everyong I know was acting like "you can't do that, you'll come crawling back to M$FT" I switched about 8 months ago, and have since converted my office, my friend who runs a computer shop (he now fully endorses OSS, and OO.o, Firefox, and Thunderbird come with all of his new computers, unless a customer wants to have M$Orafice and pay the $200+). The town of North Hampton NH is looking into the migration as well, same with the town of Methuen MA. sure, both these cities combined aren't even the size of a city block in LA, but still, it begins to prove the point that F/OSS does prove to be a powerful competitor to M$...

Free software not really free

[charles28c]

Let's be clear, free software is not really free. I worked for a company that jumped heavily into a linux-based product and we soon found bugs in all kinds of underlying linux infrastructure... Sure it's open source, but realistically no small company that is cutting cost to deploy open-source in the first place will have the resources to go in and hack code to fix bugs. We ended up spending a small fortune in consultant costs to hire outside programmers to fix small bugs thoughout several linux subsystems... and the kicker was we were theoretically expected to release those fixes back into the open-source community. Needless to say, our executives said "screw it, let everyone else figure it out for themselves". Yes, you can cut costs with open source, but god help you if you need to fix something because you won't have the expertise to do it anymore that you'd have the expertise to recompile MS Office. This isn't a rant against open source (I use several open source packages myself), but it isn't a panacea and you still need to allocate funds for things like developing your own bug fixes. Nothing is truly free.

Re:Police is good

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. LA is seriously understaffed for a city of its size. That's one of the reasons for the attitude that some LAPD officers have that they need to hit first and hit harder to make up for the lack of numbers.

I would like to see more spent on better training, which might actually do something to fix some of the problems the LAPD has.

Re:Negotiating Ploy?

[killjoe]

That's so cool. The idea that open source software will hurt the profitability of Microsofts monopoly products is the beauty of market forces at work.

Unfortunately for MS this relentless downward pressure on their profitibility is not going to end and indeed will increase with time.

Their stock price is already pretty much stagnant so I see no good reason for anybody to invest in MS stock if they are interested in growth.

All around bad news for MS which means good news for everybody else.

Re:Negotiating Ploy?

[Jondor]

Don't know about the rest of the world, but around here (the Netherlands) office was installed for free on every new computer. Well, we didn't hear about that one before uh? Of course the fact that WP's windows version sucked big time didn't help either. Especially since windows, yes you guessed it, was free with every new pc..;-)

Re:Solution:

[zapadoo]

Training is a big issue; but not the ONLY issue by far.

In a recent former life I built document and workflow management solutions - integrated with "office" applications, as well as with line of business applications (permits, licensing, parks n rec, planning, GIS, etc) - for large municipal governments.

Training was always the second largest cost impact after licensing itself.

Chances are LA uses some form of document mangagement solution (Hummingbird, Open Text, or others) and perhaps even more than one.

Strangely there are no "open source" DMS applications really ready to cut a large scale "desktop" (as opposed to "webtop") deployment, although it frankly would not be that difficult an endeavor to design and write one in this day and age. Quite a lot of the work was all the furtzing about with Microsoft as their products would tend to break integration ever so slightly with every new release.

There is more to it than just putting files under management; larger organizations also have records management rules which need to be followed, the DMS needs to manage these as well, and there are zero, as far as I am aware, open source records classification and retention application with document management capabilities suitable for a large deployment.

Again the metadata management is not terribly complex, but to date its been a rather arcane, boring, business and government-centric requirement that the open source community has not responded to.

I'd love to see an open source solution come out of such a big migration but there may be a chicken/egg scenario with the lack of a DMS / Records Management solution preventing them from moving.

Saving licensing costs on a DM/RM system could pay for an open source solution to be developed. Typical costs for a 1000 seat implementation (software only) tend to run around 200 - 500K depending on options.

And no, Microsoft does not have a Records Management solution and their DM piece is sorely lacking, so they don't have a compelling edge there themselves.

I'd be interested, and am even somewhat qualified, to work on such a project.