From Slashdot:
“Groklaw has up a story about an EU Commission’s recent findings on the costs savings available from using Open Source Software. From the article: ‘Costs to migrate to an open solution are relevant and an organization needs to consider an extra effort for this. However these costs are temporary and mainly are budgeted in less than one year. The major factor of cost of the new solution – even in the case that the open solution is mixed with closed software – is costs for peer or ad hoc training. These are the best example of intangible costs that often are not foreseen in a transition.'”
Interesting article, are there any actual figures for how much they will save etc? The MS argument about training costs is clutching at straws, from a training background myself I know that retards will need to be trained either way. If someone already knows how to use office then they will be able to figure out how to use open office themselves. There will always be hurdles at the beginning of a change, people are naturally resistant to change, but after it’s in and working, they get used to it. GO HARD OPEN OFFICE YEAH YEAH YEAH BOYEEE
Just reading the documents now, both the links in the post are good, I read groklaw fairly often.
From what Ive been reading the so called IT experts are saying Vista launch will boost “Linux” Desktop because as you mentioned they have to be retrained anyway and for some reason only known to transexual eskimo homo’s MS Office 07 has an entirely new interface, meanwhile its probably easier to train people to use OpenOffice and in terms of file formats ODF is the hottest public policy issue going, National Archives of Australia are smart enough to adopt it.
BTW Linux Conf 07 just started ! Its in Sydney.
Heres the main doc
*Final Report. Study on the Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU. Final Report. Nov. 20, 2006. R.A. Ghosh, UNU-MERIT, NL. et al., 287 pp. PDF file 1721 kB
It looks like an overall savings of 1.2 million euros, the report is really detailed. It goes into cost per person and cost per software application and so on.
p.s. I forgot to mention, at work here we use open office. I was surprised to see that, as they still use XP for the OS and it’s a call center enviro. Still I thought it was pretty cool.