Indian State Saves $45 Million As Schools Switch To Open Source Software (factordaily.com) 88
From a report: The Kerala government has made a saving of Rs 300 crore ($45 million) through introduction and adoption of Free & Open Source Software (FOSS) in the school education sector, said a state government official on Sunday. IT became a compulsory subject in Kerala schools from 2003, but it was only in 2005 that FOSS was introduced in a phased manner and started to replace proprietary software. The decision made by the curriculum committee to implement it in the higher secondary sector has also been completed now. "It's not the cost saving that matters more, but the fact that the Free Software license enables not only teachers and students but also the general public an opportunity to copy, distribute and share the contents and use it as they wish," K. Anwar Sadath, executive director IT@School said.
Re:Didn't some country do this? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, they always switch back after Microsoft bribes the right people.
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Management failures are not product failures (Score:2)
This complaint "it just takes far too long and costs far too much for the city to implement software that's available as standard on the market" is something I have herd repeatedly of several different UK local government IT set ups, all of which are near-pure Microsoft. A report by a Microsoft partner highlighting that people thought that their large central IT is slow to respond and too expensive is a joke, like a bear pointing at another bear and going you s*** in the woods. The actual report given in M
Re:Didn't some country do this? (Score:5, Insightful)
- yet. That is exactly what people used to say about IBM products - up until the day in 1993, when IBM posted massive losses and had to lose something like half its workforce, if I remember correctly. If nobody has got fired for buying Microsoft, it may well be because management simply are blind to the very significant cost of keeping a Microsoft only environment in the air, especially on the server side.
In the beginning, when Linux started to be taken serious, there was a lot of nonsense being said, like 'You get what you pay for'; then more and more engineers started wailing about how much trouble Windows servers were, compared to Linux, and in the last several years, even management in many companies have moved away from automatically going for Microsoft software. As far as I can see, Microsoft products are beginning to be regarded as legacy software that you can't get rid of yet. It could be that we will see the day when people will get fired for buying Microsoft, when there clearly are much better options available.
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As far as I can see, Microsoft products are beginning to be regarded as legacy software that you can't get rid of yet.
I agree. After using Microsoft products for 30 years, we are moving away from them at home and at work. And Linux does almost everything we need. Quickbooks and AutoCAD are two things that are making it hard to make a clean break. At home, I'm running Quickbooks 2009 on an early-2000s era Windows XP computer for now - simply because to me, Intuit Quickbooks Pro for Windows is the ultimate accounting software for home/SMB. This could be run in a VM on Linux but my old PC needs a job. I am investigating
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How good, really, is Microsoft support?
When Munich talked about not supporting products alternative to available off the shelf commercial software--- I have trouble seeing the difference. Microsoft products have a big support requirement in a corporate environment, as do FOSS products. Is there much difference? It's not like you call Microsoft and they send you a fix for xxx problem. Most support is found online, and there is plenty of it, for both commercial and open source products ... with the big differ
Re: Didn't some country do this? (Score:2)
You call Microsoft and, depending on the issue, you speak to their tech support or if they can't help, you get an engineer. They run regular conferences and workshops where you can meet and ask the devs questions, they give you an account manager who can liaise with the devs should you need advice, they have shitloads of code samples and video tutorials and their primary dev framework plus loads of other parts of the software stack is on GitHub and so on and so forth. It's nowhere near perfect but the idea
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Running complex software is indeed not just a matter of googling. Decent support staff are of course needed.
The kind of Microsoft support you speak of sounds like an expensive Cadillac option. The question is, does it produce that much more than the type of support you get in on-line forums frequented by other experienced people? I don't think the answer is any sort of obvious "yes."
Re: Didn't some country do this? (Score:2)
So you think being able to speak in person to someone who works on the project is no better than asking a question on Stack Overflow? Of course it costs money. Is good OSS support free?
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If you have a level of support that allows you to speak to the developer(s) directly and get direct answers and assistance, obviously that's worth a lot. That sounds like a high tier of support at presumably a matching price ... as you might reasonably expect.
But the support fora for FOSS products very often have the developer(s) as participants. Is it just as good as a direct phone line? Of course not, and there are no guarantees (something important to some businesses). But it seems to work out pretty wel
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I wouldn't comment on the quality (or lack thereof) of open source software compared to their main commercial competitors, since I haven't enough experience of the former to make a proper judgement.
What I would say though is that just because the software is FOSS, that doesn't mean zero cost.
Sure, you don't have to buy licenses, but you still need all the infrastructure to deploy it, and especially to support it. If your users have more difficulty using the open source alternatives for whatever reason, you
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But if you have employees who have difficulty learning Foss, you can figure out who to fire in the future. If they are so slow to learn and inflexible, they WILL be a problem in the future. It's a great screening tool.
This is one of those posts that you desperately hope is a joke, but deep down you know the poster actually means it, and thinks they're being clever.
Re: Didn't some country do this? (Score:2)
You obviously learn new tech instantaneously but us mere mortals may take a week or two to get our heads round it.
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If your users have more difficulty using the open source alternatives for whatever reason, you will spend more money on staff to provide sufficient support.
True - but that comes down to investing in education, and that hurdle is a lot smaller than you might think. A lot of universities teach their students Linux, either directly or indirectly; when most of the advanced SW is available only on Linux, and the teachers all speak from a UNIX/Linux perspective, the students have to either translate everything to Windows terminology - or just pick up Linux. Inevitably there will be a large crowd in the technical jobs, who know and like Linux and are reluctant to use
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That is true enough. And even though OpenOffice and LibreOffice are more than capable of doing almost all the tasks one can ask from an office suite, there are enough differences between that and MS Office that one can get tricked up. But the reality here is that whenever you bring in new software, you have to put resources into training. With MS-Office being near-ubiquitous, organizations and firms tend to have the expectation that existing staff and new hires are just going to know at least the basics, an
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I haven't enough experience [with FOSS] to make a proper judgement.
But that didn't stop you from spewing bullshit, anyway.
I, on the other hand, deal with both on a daily basis. Closed software not only costs far more up front than Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), but it costs far more to maintain as well. While I suppose there can be closed software that is more cost effective than FOSS, I have yet to run into it during my 32 years in business.
The retraining costs to my customers are neglible, as most of the significant FOSS systems are either self-explanatory for e
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Further on retraining: when Microsoft, as they do from time to time, decides to switch to the latest hipster UI, you have significant retraining costs. Remember when the ribbon was introduced? Remember what Windows 8 was like? I don't think minor FOSS retraining is such a big thing. If you have basic computer literacy, you can go from (say) MS Office to LibreOffice without major dislocation, at least for the vast majority who don't use super-advanced features.
LibreOffice, at release 5.3, has come a long way
Re: Didn't some country do this? (Score:2)
Whereas there have been no breaking UI changes in any FOSS products ever.
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Of course there have been FOSS UI breakages, but the point is that the "no retraining" advantage of Microsoft is an illusion.
Re: Didn't some country do this? (Score:2)
It may be an illusion as you say, although there doesn't seem to have been a major problem with it, but it's not just the interface but the custom templates, the macros and the third party plugins and document generators that FOSS advocates always pretend don't exist. The cost of migrating away from them, especially if nothing suitable is already on the market, can be prohibitive. If it was as simple as you say then there would've been a stampede away from proprietary software. This simplistic "it's just a
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I'll certainly grant that you're correct in the situation where MS products have been in use for some time and workflows have been built around customizations, templates, etc., as you rightly point out. Migration could indeed be difficult and expensive, although retraining would be far from the largest part of the cost. (I'm obviously a big FOSS supporter but I won't ignore reality.)
In a case where there is a clean start, however ... or the possibility of a relatively clean start ... I think the situation w
Re: Didn't some country do this? (Score:3)
FOSS will be more than good enough. I'm not wedded to Microsoft. Even they have embraced open source so why wouldn't I? I love having the ability to dig into the tools I work with and would find it much harder if I couldn't.
What? (Score:2)
150,000 Indian Rupees are $2250 which sounds simply astonishing. I guess someone bought something which wasn't really needed, so color me unconvinced.
Besides the article gives exactly zero information about the obtained commercial software. To me everything looks a little bit too fishy.
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So? "It's not the cost saving that matters more, but the fact that the Free Software license enables not only teachers and students but also the general public an opportunity to copy, distribute and share the contents and use it as they wish,"
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It certainly doesn't "feel" right. The per capita income for Kerala is Rs100,000.
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Damnit. Slash dot ate my less than sign. That should read "Less than Rs100,000"
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Entity references are your friend. Try < next time.
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< ... < ... <
WFM. Shouldn't be affected by your choice of formatting options, either, AFAICT. Did you forget the trailing semicolon, maybe?
Countries adopting FOSS (Score:2)
And Brazil. E.g. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/bus... [bbc.co.uk]
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And Microsoft jumped in to give them free licenses (Score:1)
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Kerala is india's hotspot for open source software: https://www.cnet.com/news/indi... [cnet.com]
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Bad case of ideology (Score:2)
"It's not the cost saving that matters more, but the fact that the Free Software license enables not only teachers and students but also the general public an opportunity to copy, distribute and share the contents and use it as they wish," K. Anwar Sadath, executive director IT@School said.
Strange, because here I thought it was the quality of education that mattered more.
I suspect that the extra time spent fidgeting with FOSS to make it work will ultimately lower that quality. The only silver lining I see is the "education" of fidgeting with stuff you don't understand until it works (which is how I got started on my computer interest).
Doing their part (Score:2)
So if I get this right, India is making a huge income off of outsourcing, H1B, etc, working for American companies developing software and then having that income funneled back into their country, but they won't buy that software even at reduced educational rates? Good to see they're doing their part.
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Yes. Or we'll build a wall.
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Thank you for the fine example of something known as "false equivalence".
So if I get this right, India is making a huge income off of outsourcing, H1B, etc, working for American companies developing software and then having that income funneled back into their country,
It's not India the country or the Indian government getting rich. It's some Indian businessmen getting rich off gouging the workers they send overseas.
but they won't buy that software even at reduced educational rates? Good to see they're doing their part.
That's the government of an Indian state. Whose schools in all likelihood are not getting financed by the aforementioned businessmen.
What you're suggesting is akin to suggesting that the public schools in North Dakota naturally have more money than they know what to do with because Micro
Re: Doing their part (Score:2)
We don't pay Indians in Rupees... we pay them in dollars. They eventually HAVE to buy something that takes dollars and have it come back here... maybe just not as much in MS software.
Oh no! (Score:2)
Now where will they learn "Try turning it off and then on again"?
Cost savings bullshit from a fool... (Score:5, Informative)
The linked report says the assessment is based on Rs 150K ($2200) per machine cost for using proprietary stuff. No government in India will spend that sort of money on software licenses, forget about the spent on educational sector. This is imaginary stuff.
Here's the annual budget for the state of Kerala - https://kerala.gov.in/documents/10180/3793571/Revised%20Budget%202016-17_3 [kerala.gov.in] Go to page 4, and you can see a section for "Office Expenses" (which should include hardware, software, chairs, hammocks, water coolers, desks, fans and whatever else) for the whole state, including Department of Education - its Rs 220 CR, less than the claimed cost savings.
Its like claiming "I saved $100 million when I decided not to purchase an Airbus."
I am from Kerala. I have heard about the chappie mentioned in the report...a self aggrandizing fool.
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Way to troll. How do you even know what the "Office Expenses" in a "Budget at a glance" head contains? FYI, it is just that - "office" expenses and no, that does not include software/hardware for schools. Kerala's expenditure on education is around Rs.15,000 crore in 2016-17 - refer page 25 of the detailed financial statement straight from Finance dept. You are either a fool or far removed from India and reality if you think just Rs.220 crore includes entire Kerala's education spend. You are two magnitudes
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Kerala's expenditure on education is around Rs.15,000 crore in 2016-17 - refer page 25 of the detailed financial statement straight from Finance dept.
Yes, and what does that entail? Salary to teachers/staff.
The 150k value per machine includes not just Office software but FOSS replacements for other highly valuable ones like Matlab, Animation software, Molecular modelling, Interactive geometric sketching etc.
What silly nonsense! Add software costs which NASA uses to send rockets out of solar system and you will get a $5000 per machine figure. Then the cost savings will be even higher. And the idiots behind the PR release may get free PAZHAM PORI from the morons running the scheme.
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The PR guys wanted to show their boss in good light. But when making such claims please make sure its somewhat reasonable.
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Still valid, they may not have that amount of money to waste on licenses, but they would have used the software anyway (illegaly). The cost, when caught, could have been even higher than what is mentioned here. Going FOSS, this will not be an issue, ever, even after audits.
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For some weird definition of good.
If you were discussing switching away from Apple, I'd at least seriously consider your point. Lots of people seem to like Apple. With MS the most you can say is it's what they're used to...but many actively hate it.
Looking forward to.. (Score:1)
The Last Sentence (Score:2)
The most important thing about open source is you're free from all the BS in a proprietary license. You don't have to worry about swapping software or how you use it and all the other crazy BS that MS limits you with. Want to use it in a VM? No one cares! I migrated a friend to Linux after he upgraded his Windows box with a new hard drive and video card and it started bitching about verification. He called up MS and they gave him some crap and he got a little angry. I installed Ubuntu (this was before