Microsoft Cheaper To Use Than Open Source Software, UK CIO Says 589
colinneagle (2544914) writes "Jos Creese, CIO of the Hampshire County Council, told Britain's 'Computing' publication that part of the reason is that most staff are already familiar with Microsoft products and that Microsoft has been flexible and more helpful. 'Microsoft has been flexible and helpful in the way we apply their products to improve the operation of our frontline services, and this helps to de-risk ongoing cost,' he told the publication. 'The point is that the true cost is in the total cost of ownership and exploitation, not just the license cost.' Creese went on to say he didn't have a particular bias about open source over Microsoft, but proprietary solutions from Microsoft or any other commercial software vendor 'need to justify themselves and to work doubly hard to have flexible business models to help us further our aims.'"
Re:Translation (Score:5, Informative)
You're not negotiating for a big enough organization. All the vendors can be extremely helpful when the dollar signs in front of them are big enough.
Re:Mod parent up (Score:5, Informative)
This is why myself and Hairfeet no longer support Linux for average users.
I do admit I was more of a FreeBSD bigot but after 5 and 6 were so bad and I stayed with 4.x all the way to 4.12 I kind of gave up :-(
I do not care about RMS extreme ideology about freaking drivers. I WANT THEM TO JUST WORK. Why can't apps just work between versions like MacOSX, Solaris, FreeBSD with the compat libs, and even Windows?
I can click on a setup.exe from the XP era and unless it is a horribly written business app requiring local admin (more like win98 style written) it will run on Windows 8 no problem.
Why do ATI drivers from 2 years ago not run on Linux? ABI and API compatibilities as Linux developers feel that is evil and encourages binary blobs! Funny no other platform has this problem with them.
Socialist ideology about everyone that is closed source is harmful I know lets purposedly not include a stable ABi so things break when I do an apt-get update to force ATI and NVidia will just work. That is the ticket.
These companies are still struggling to make win 7 compatible apps and only care about the latest versions. My ATI drivers from 2011 will not work on a modern distro., Therefore I am choosing Windows and sticking to Linux for a VM. I might piss some some Slashdot moderators but I speak the truth. Why can't a stable ABI and API exist so one thing can just work? It is freaking 2014?
Re:not about cost in my oppinion (Score:5, Informative)
It says cost, but the whole of TFAs boil down to MS is big and you can't depend on small vendors just because. So, ignoring Red Hat (reason not given) and IBM (reason not given), there are no large vendors of Linux. QED(ish, sorta).
Re:Recruiting policy (Score:4, Informative)
There's thousands of people out there who will claim to have windows knowledge, and the vast majority of them don't have the first clue. So you'd end up with an extremely poorly configured network just limping along (as happens in many places)...
Theres a lot less people claiming linux/unix knowledge, but the vast majority of those who make such claims actually do have such knowledge, and experience, and in many cases its a genuine interest for them rather than a 9-5 job.
Finding competent windows engineers is generally *harder* than finding competent unix engineers simply because you have many more incompetent ones to sort through first. And generally the most competent people have experience of multiple systems anyway because one of the key differentiators is that someone highly competent will do proper research and use the best tool for the job at hand, rather than just using what they're most comfortable with or what they think is expected.
Re:Mod parent up (Score:2, Informative)
Hairyfeet just likes to spew venom and his own ignorance.
They do. Every once in a while you find something that breaks, just like on all of those other platforms.
Rather, it'll install (maybe) and run (maybe.)
Because the kernel has moved on and AMD refuses to keep pace.
That will waste their time as they try to track down a bug only to find it's in a binary module that they can't look into.
So you're taking up Hairyfeet's penchant for blatant lying?
And now it's just balls to the wall nutty rambling.
Your opinion isn't the truth, and cut out the passive agressive garbage.
Because, again, the internel kernel APIs and ABIs do not need to be stable if you push your driver upstream. If you do, they keep it up to date for you and can debug issues for you. Otherwise you're just demanding that they assume the duty of maintaining backwards compatibility so that you may reap the rewards of the work done by them without aiding them in any way.
Re:True Costs (Score:1, Informative)
I'm not sure if you're trolling or just an astroturfer, but you couldn't have chosen a more easily disproved line of bullshit.
New Office won't open Office documents from older versions. That's just a simple fact of life. Can't explain why, but I don't need to.
I have no problem with Libre Office editing old Word documents, none whatsoever. There have been a number of times that I've opened older documents in a text editor, removed all the extraneous formatting crap, and then pasted the remaining text into a new document.
Word is not as great as you explain. Also, we don't use Office products at my work - a TV station. We use Open Office.
End of story.
Re:Not really (Score:4, Informative)
Github went down? Did not notice that. I checked the status [github.com] and yes, they had a few hiccups in the last months. But in each case the issue was resolved in under an hour and in most cases it was only a minor glitch. I don't know what is less "enterprise ready" that this type of reliability.
Also in the case of git, when the central public repository is down, that does not mean you can't work. Compare that to Exchange or Team Foundation Server, the entire company grinds to a halt when these systems go down and I have seen my fair share of downtime.
Re:True Costs (Score:3, Informative)
If I can not use Libre Office or Open Office (or anything else) to edit Word-generated documents and return them without formatting disasters, I cannot use anything else than MS Office products. End of story.
You can only guarantee this with MS Office if you both have the same version of Office and you both have the same printer drivers installed, but MS marketing has been very good at convincing people to ignore this...
Re:True Costs (Score:5, Informative)
That may be your experience, but it's not something that I've seen since the times of Office XP.
I develop lots of training materials that go through people on all sides of the planet in their revision/editing process. It's not very unusual for some to have Office 2008, others 2010 and some 2012. In all cases I do not remember formatting problems to occur. And that includes different regional settings and so forth.
And I'm not even sure what you meant with the printer drivers...
Re:Lock-in? (Score:5, Informative)
Choose Format - Font Size