Today’s Guardian has an update on the migration of Bristol City Council to Open Source applications. In summary, the move to 5500 copies of StarOffice (the Sun-supported version of OpenOffice) had a Total Cost of Ownership over the next 5 years of 670,010 UKP instead of 1,706,684 UKP for Microsoft Office. This despite the fact that most of the platforms are Microsoft and the MS had offered substantial discounts. So let’s just rub that in: StarOffice was less than 40% of the TCO of MS Office, saving over a million pounds. Furthermore, the deployment had 87,000 UKP budgeted for retraining, but they found that most staff could be retrained in anout 30 minutes, at a total cost of only 10,000 UKP. That’s a saving of over 88%.
Archive for May, 2006
Bristol says “Thanks a million!”
Wednesday, May 31st, 2006I do believe you have it surrounded, Mr. Garibaldi
Tuesday, May 16th, 2006Silicon.com has an interesting report not so much on what impact Linux is having on Microsoft’s market, but which parts of the market are being affected. Traditionally, about 2/3 of all webservers are Open Source; M$ has always been behind in that field. Despite hype to the contrary (and a few big wins here and there), Big Bill has a big lead on the desktop. Linux, being so adaptable, is making headway in the embedded market (PDAs, mobile phones, …); and the balance seems to be that overall, Linux is gaining ground.
Hurrah!
To PC or not to PC
Sunday, May 14th, 2006Let’s just be very clear here: I’m not a slave merchant. Being white, modately well off, and living in Bristol doesn’t make me one anymore than having blond hair and living in Oslo would make me a (Viking) rapist and pillager. Further more, as I look out of my window, there are no tall-masted ships unloading their cargoes of fetid and abused black Africans onto the waterfront. In fact, there are no slaves in Bristol and there are no slavers in Bristol. Why then should my adopted city feel obliged to ‘apologise’ for the past actions of people who chose to ply their terrible trade here? Nothing will change that. The past will still be there. It’s like demanding the whole population of Eire apologise for the actions of the few madmen in the (ex-)IRA, or that the French, en masse, apologise for the Norman invasion. It helps no-one in any meaningful way, because apologies for the 18th-century slave trade by people who are not slavers to people who are not slaves cannot possibly have the meaning and import a proper apology should have.
You know Spring is here when…
Tuesday, May 2nd, 2006Fresh British strawberries appear in the shops. Over the Bank Holiday I found some in Marks & Spencers at £3 for 2 punnets, and they are delicious! The whole Winter has been spent trying to avoid the carbon miles on food and eating as much as we could that is local and in season. We’ve done very well as the U.K. is well served with Winter vegetables, but Summer fruits are what I’ve missed the most (despite topping up my supply with frozen Herefordshire rasberries – probably not very carbon-low). So I’m really pleased that the fruits are here, and I’ll be freezing some of my own for next Winter (once I’ve worked out how carbon unfriendly it is or isn’t).