City of Munich Now a Major Contributor to Open Source
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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.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@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.
Assuming you can cut down on staff by 20%, the cost of the Linux admins being 20% more makes it a wash - and I believe you've already stated that you think your savings should be a lot more than a 20% staff reduction in a large organization.
Just so we are on the same page, I am and have been agreeing with you for the last few posts.
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@Dashrender said:
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.
Actually that's not generally true. Only super high end Windows shops ever get above 30 per admin. More typically, even on Wall St. in a good shop I have seen around 35 per admin (and those admins are pushing $180K so don't start saying that the UNIX people are insanely expensive at $200K) and bad ones are around 5-10.
Same shop with 35 per Windows had 300 per UNIX. That's anecdotal, but a real world, 20% price difference in pay number shop.
In the low end shop on Wall St. it was more like 10 per Windows and 150 per UNIX.
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@Dashrender said:
Assuming you can cut down on staff by 20%, the cost of the Linux admins being 20%
Right, so the 50% savings makes it a massive win.
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And once you move to DevOps models, which nearly everyone does these days, the cost savings increases so much more as UNIX is so easier to scale up in that way that you don't even have the concept of servers per admin anymore.
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And then going to cloud, the server density concepts make UNIX even that much more beneficial.
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I saw that - I didn't think I was ignoring anything.
I don't recall the past (yeah well over a year ago) discussions saying that your staff reduction would be 50% compared to the 20% increase in individual staff added cost.
Which, you're right, is a huge win.
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@Dashrender said:
I saw that - I didn't think I was ignoring anything.
I had misread the original post you had made, it was worded oddly.
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@Dashrender said:
I don't recall the past (yeah well over a year ago) discussions saying that your staff reduction would be 50% compared to the 20% increase in individual staff added cost.
50% is kind of the assumption. I don't know of any shop first hand that was not way better than that, but assuming I'm only seeing really good UNIX shops. In the real world I tend to see closer to 80% reduction, but I don't think you will see that in shops converting from one to the other. You need to change a lot of underlying assumptions before you can hit those kinds of numbers.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
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.
Actually that's not generally true. Only super high end Windows shops ever get above 30 per admin. More typically, even on Wall St. in a good shop I have seen around 35 per admin (and those admins are pushing $180K so don't start saying that the UNIX people are insanely expensive at $200K) and bad ones are around 5-10.
Same shop with 35 per Windows had 300 per UNIX. That's anecdotal, but a real world, 20% price difference in pay number shop.
In the low end shop on Wall St. it was more like 10 per Windows and 150 per UNIX.
I gotta ask - what makes managing those Windows boxes so much more time consuming? At that pay rate, those guys are should definitely be doing things as automatedly (made up word?) as possible, using scripts, etc.
Assuming the UNIX boxes all do the same thing, sure you can stack more boxes on one person, but if they are all unique, what is the support per admin numbers look like? Closer to Windows at 35?
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UNIX also allows you to change hardware. It's not just about getting better density on the same boxes, it lets you move to different architectures (ARM, POWER, Sparc, Itanium) which let you go to faster machines, bigger hardware, mainframes, etc. which can result in even more cost savings at scale. At the very least, it offers more options.
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@Dashrender said:
Assuming the UNIX boxes all do the same thing, sure you can stack more boxes on one person, but if they are all unique, what is the support per admin numbers look like? Closer to Windows at 35?
That's why I use the term snowflake. The 50% - 80% reduction in staff is done in a snowflake environment where every box is unique. In the DevOps world, where we assume they are not unique, that's where you get the 1,000% or more reduction.
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That is bending my mind that you can get 50-80% reduction in a snowflake environment.
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@Dashrender said:
I gotta ask - what makes managing those Windows boxes so much more time consuming? At that pay rate, those guys are should definitely be doing things as automatedly (made up word?) as possible, using scripts, etc.
Automating Windows is still considered, a specialist task. At $100K you have UNIX admins who automate with nearly every key stroke. At the same price, Windows admins do so rarely. UNIX is designed top to bottom around automation and everything in the culture is based around it. Windows is making incredible strides in this area but is nowhere near there yet - more because of the culture than because of the tooling. But the tooling is very new still.
But how many Windows shops can, with zero effort, poll every server that they have, instantly, and get a report on uptime, for example? This is simply a "command" in UNIX. No planning needed, no setup, no special tools. It just works.
In Windows you have to plan to automate, in UNIX it often "just happens."
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I'd be surprised today if that particular request wasn't just a command today on Windows too ( a powershell command), but you're right it's definitely a culture thing.
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@Dashrender said:
I'd be surprised today if that particular request wasn't just a command today on Windows too ( a powershell command), but you're right it's definitely a culture thing.
It might be. But every UNIX admin, even juniors, know how to do that. In Windows, outside of Rob and Martin who teach PowerShell, find me anyone who can do it without looking it up and even then, maybe it is challenging.
