City of Munich Now a Major Contributor to Open Source
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After making the move to open source systems, the City of Munich is not just embracing open source but now giving back in a very real way. It is very important for large open source customers like German governments to be involved in this way not only because it improves the software for everyone but it helps to demonstrate to those that wonder who is auditing and checking code to see major players investing in the code itself to make sure that it is being checked, updated and fixed.
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That is very awesome.
It's really great to hear that they've been able to migrate away from Windows, to a Linux derivative. And they get to boast above saving over $16 Million U.S.
Can't argue with that.
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We've talked about that savings before though - is it real? Are they really not paying as much or more for the developers creating their software as they were for packaged software?
How about on the support side? Did payroll go up when they had to hire Linux admins, etc?
This is great news for Linux though!
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I think the savings could only easily be calculated at the cost of "I purchased X computers, at X price, and saved X dollars on said computers because they didn't come with an operating system cost $199.99"
Flat cost savings.
You'd also force your current IT team to learn Linux, or leave, and bring someone else in. The cost to hire a Windows Admin vs Linux Admin is comparable.
Open source development means, everything is being done for "free" by someone(s) somewhere. They aren't purchasing any software.
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Going by the article:
Munich is using the fifth version of Limux, which is based on Kubuntu, and comes with web browser Firefox, email client Thunderbird and Libreoffice version 4.1. Also available on all workstations is Wollmux, the city’s document template and form management solution.
So although they are funnelling funds into Wollmux and some external development, by and large they are using what is out there.
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@Dashrender said:
We've talked about that savings before though - is it real? Are they really not paying as much or more for the developers creating their software as they were for packaged software?
Any development that they are paying for is above and beyond what closed source CAN deliver. So there is no way to compare. You are looking for problems where there are none.
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@Dashrender said:
How about on the support side? Did payroll go up when they had to hire Linux admins, etc?
Should go way, way down. Why would you assume that cost would go up? Windows people always raise these fears of Linux, but where do they come from? Since every large business runs primarily on Linux and they do so because of demonstrated value, why would you assume this would be any different? You are raising questions that raise fears but they are sticking with Linux because they've seen value there. And it isn't about Linux, it's about open source to them, top to bottom.
You need to work in a Linux shop a see the staggering cost savings compared to closed source shops. And none of the real savings comes from the cost of software, all the real savings comes from getting way more work out of the same number of people, getting more from your hardware, etc. The software cost savings is purely a bonus.
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@DustinB3403 said:
You'd also force your current IT team to learn Linux, or leave, and bring someone else in. The cost to hire a Windows Admin vs Linux Admin is comparable.
No, you just hire good people. One of the benefits of high end IT is that they normally cost a fraction of low end IT. In the SMB Windows world people get used to the idea that you need a system admin for everyone one to ten servers. In the enterprise world Windows admins typically can handle thirty or more per person (remember in the enterprise they likely need shifts and round the clock support) while on the UNIX side you figure a few hundred to a few thousand servers, typically, per admin. The ability to support at scale is just so different.
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@DustinB3403 said:
I think the savings could only easily be calculated at the cost of "I purchased X computers, at X price, and saved X dollars on said computers because they didn't come with an operating system cost $199.99"
Way higher than that. Not only do they not pay for a desktop OS license, they don't pay for other software too. The anti-virus cost is big. The Office price is huge. Think of all of the software that you often pay for on a typical desktop. So the savings per desktop is likely more like $800 - $1,000.
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@scottalanmiller Even if they don't pay for antivirus(I don't care what OS you are running) you need something that at least periodically scans your system for nasties.
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And that's before we start talking about licensing management. In the closed source world the management of licensing is a massive expensive - educating staff about them, time spent learning and researching (@DustinB3403 and I spent a lot of time yesterday on one minute point of MS licensing just for deployment practices!!!), the cost of tracking and reporting, convincing management to keep licensing correct, being audited and any fines that might be paid. Go all open source and all of that just goes away. One of the largest, most difficult and riskiest parts of IT (and one that has zero value and IT people are bad at and hate) is instantly eliminated letting IT people be technical instead of licensing accountants and lawyers. Things like audits go away because if you don't own closed source software, the audit companies have no legal right to request an audit even!
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
We've talked about that savings before though - is it real? Are they really not paying as much or more for the developers creating their software as they were for packaged software?
Any development that they are paying for is above and beyond what closed source CAN deliver. So there is no way to compare. You are looking for problems where there are none.
I'm not looking for a problem, I'm looking for a fair price comparison -
We've talked about this before. Sure you don't have the cost of the Windows licenses, and might not even have the costs of the DB license, but the cost of administration is noticeably higher that Windows admins would be.
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@Dashrender said:
We've talked about this before. Sure you don't have the cost of the Windows licenses, and might not even have the costs of the DB license, but the cost of administration is noticeably higher that Windows admins would be.
Yes, we've talked about this before and how everything gets cheaper, not just the licensing. You keep repeating that the cost of administration is higher, where have you seen this? I've done UNIX for over twenty years and a key benefit is how massively cheaper it is to administer. What data do you have that the cost goes up?
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@Dashrender said:
but the cost of administration is noticeably higher that Windows admins would be.
I think you are missing how many fewer staff you need. You keep stating that the cost is higher and then that Linux staff cost more than Windows. Yes, but if you had Windows staff of the same cost you'd find that the cost of managing Windows typically decreases too, just not nearly as much as UNIX.
Remember that while you pay a 20% premium to get skilled UNIX staff, you get a 100% or higher admin density jump on snowflake management and a 10,000% or more jump in the DevOps world. So the cost of admins being SO much lower in the UNIX space is one of the big drivers as to why UNIX is so much cheaper to run.
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Find me any Windows shop running 10,000 servers with a single person. Yet in the UNIX world, this is still rare, but something we've been doing for a long time.
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The cost savings in open source comes from nearly everywhere. The only aspects of open source, generally speaking in the current market, where there is room to argue that closed source is more valuable is:
- Users already know closed source software and it takes time to train them. This is valuable but assumes you have idiots as employees, learning the open source software is hard or even needs to be done and that turnover is high so that training is common. None of these are necessarily true, but certainly could be. Unlikely for the Bavarian government, though.
- That the closed source software is much more effective and efficient for end users. This is far more likely to be true. This is much more of a case by case basis and only applies to desktop software which is mostly limited to office products and LibreOffice, which Munich uses, is very good and does not have significant drop in productivity and could even improve it.
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Also remember that as a government Munich has other, legal concerns like forcing citizens to use closed course, vendor selected software. They felt that this was not right and a key benefit that they are getting is that the government files and software used with the citizens that do not work in government is all free and open. Everyone with a computer has free access to LibreOffice and the OpenDocument formats. They felt that it was a moral obligation of the government to do that component of it and it results in benefits for the citizens as absolutely everyone, not just those people running Windows and MS Office tools are able to interact with the documents.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
We've talked about this before. Sure you don't have the cost of the Windows licenses, and might not even have the costs of the DB license, but the cost of administration is noticeably higher that Windows admins would be.
Yes, we've talked about this before and how everything gets cheaper, not just the licensing. You keep repeating that the cost of administration is higher, where have you seen this? I've done UNIX for over twenty years and a key benefit is how massively cheaper it is to administer. What data do you have that the cost goes up?
the fact that you cost 10x the normal cost of a Windows admin.
Now that said, perhaps they can fire 9 other Windows admins because they don't need them. But even big Windows shops don't have one admin for every 10 Windows machines, it's probably closer to 50 or 100, or more. But you're right in that you can have many many times that number of servers per admin for Linux.
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@Dashrender said:
the fact that you cost 10x the normal cost of a Windows admin.
And that has what to do with it? This is completely misleading. Apples to apples, UNIX people cost about 20% more than Windows people.
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@Dashrender said:
Now that said, perhaps they can fire 9 other Windows admins because they don't need them.
You are just making up numbers for effect. Real world, you need roughly half the UNIX admins and they cost about 20% more. So if you needed ten Windows admins, you need five UNIX at the pay rate of six of what you had before.
In snowflake shops, where UNIX has the least value, the common number is that you pay only 60% what you did in Windows administration.
