OPINION-- In producing a response to Josh Mehlman's recent piece regarding our Linux vs. Windows: Total Cost of Ownership Study (which showed that Linux as 34 percent less costly than Windows to run) I wanted to make a few clarifications and highlight some issues, as well as provide some context and reasoning as to why the study was undertaken.
Firstly, the company which produced the report in question is not a firm of analysts, but 'in-the-trenches' techies, who have over a decade's experience in managing and supporting both platforms. My own personal experience with Windows started with version 2.0/386, in the late 1980s, and with Linux in the early '90s.
Throughout much of this time, our customers have traditionally used Windows desktops and Unix/Linux network infrastructure. The past nine months, however, has seen a dramatic increase in the number of existing and potential new customers indicating that they are looking seriously at small or medium-scale, non-infrastructural deployments of Linux desktops and terminals. Many of these customers approached us with the question: "How much will we save if we move groups, departments or the whole company to Linux?" The study in question started as a brief report in pursuit of an answer.
Perhaps another motivator in our undertaking this research was as a response to Microsoft's claims that the cost of software licensing was a virtual non-entity in the overall calculation of IT budgetary expenditure, accounting for a mere few percent. Our experience with many clients indicated otherwise.
As a statement to establish some veracity and integrity, I can categorically state that Cybersource received no payments to research and produce this or any other report. Few supposedly 'independent' analysts can claim likewise. Reports of Microsoft's backdoor funding of research institutes which subsequently release anti-Linux reports are legion.
While it is true that we lean towards Linux/Unix and Open Source solutions, this has evolved as a preference based on our collective experiences and quality of the technology, preferences which were not infused within the report itself. As for financial incentive, our fee schedule for Windows platform support is identical to that of Linux.
Josh's opinion piece (and readers who sleight him in any way for his opinions should have more common sense and courtesy) claimed that the report was anti-Microsoft FUD, but he doesn't actually indicate fault with the numbers given nor the process by which they were arrived at.
As is outlined clearly in the report, we began with a premise of a core set of functional requirements, and set out to meet those requirements with products and technologies which were sourced from the Microsoft or from the Linux arenas: operating systems, applications suites, development tools, e-commerce systems etc. We also referenced and invoked any ancillary technologies which these systems or services required: DNS, SQL, firewall and proxy servers for instance. We then set out finding verifiable and reproducible sources for pricing or costs for each component, along with hardware, staff, consultancy, networking costs, and all the other line items we added within the study. We found substantial evidence (from the anti-virus companies) that while it is possible to produce a Linux virus, they are rare-to-nonexistent in the real world, so we therefore indicated likewise within the study.
Also, in no way did we impute that one platform was more reliable than the other, nor that one GUI was usable than the other, or that one was higher performance, as none of these attributes could be independently verified, and we would have had to resort to personal-empirical or anecdotal evidence, clearly inappropriate content-matter.
As for the issue of higher levels of retraining for the Linux option, we handled this in two ways. Firstly, Linux-trained staff were enacted to operate these systems, being efficient in their deployment and support, thus obviating any problems with pre-existing knowledge, experience or training for the systems administration. As for the desktop, where Josh claims a "time and training burden" for Linux, our own research and discussions with a number of organisations in the US, Korea, Finland etc indicates that "minimal or no retraining" of end-user staff is needed to migrate non-power-users from Windows to Linux. Specifically, discussions with the IT Manager for Mastertrade (an appliance wholesaler with 47 branches across New Zealand) indicate that for their migration of 300 workstations, no retraining was required.
On this point, I recommend that ZDNet Australia consider sponsoring an independent study into how easily a group of Windows users can perform a set number of day-to-day business tasks on a modern Linux workstation, with no training and with no help. This can be achieved by establishing a benchmark metric of tasks, such as opening documents, making changes, saving as HTML, embedding spreadsheets, saving the final document, sending it as an attachment, browsing the Web, etc. Results can then be generated to determine how much these users are able to achieve, with no re-training, and with no assistance.
Finally, the fact that corporate desktop users may be stymied from substantially tinkering with their Linux workstation, or installing non-SOE software, is a positive attribute. Linux desktops are very amenable to being locked-down very tightly, helping reduce support costs.
Josh also claims that "a company buying 250 copies would pay considerably less" due to volume discount. I disagree. Take for example the recent Victorian government licence deal, for 40,000 Victorian public servants, which deploys essentially the same software as was reported in our TCO study. We calculated a cost of around AU$2,000 per user for the Microsoft solution option.
The Victorian government deal, which one would expect (at 40,000 users) should attract the highest possible discount, worked out to cost AU$80 million, or AU$2,000 per user, and this did not include licence costs for the pricey Exchange email technology, as the Victorian government uses Lotus Notes for that task.
In all, this indicates that perhaps our cost estimation for the Microsoft option was possibly a conservative under-estimate, and the real cost for 250 users is likely to be much higher.
We shouldn't however concentrate solely on cost, as Otto Schily, Minister of the Interior of the Federal Republic of Germany, said in a statement about his country's recent policy decision to adopt Linux and Open Source.
"We raise the level of IT security by avoiding monocultures; we lower the dependency on single software vendors; and we reach costs savings in software and operation costs."
In fact, it is this final point that now needs to be expounded. If, as the study has shown, many, perhaps most, organisations can accrue substantial financial benefits through the partial or total adoption of Linux and open source software, what remains to convince government and business to move wholesale to Linux? Are existing implementors of IT within these organisations the remaining roadblock? Are they concerned about, as Australian art historian Robert Hughes famously pronounced during a corresponding period within the art world, "the shock of the new"? Would faster progress be made if the study results were presented to financial and non-IT executive company officials, in the language and format they know and understand, rather than to IT staff? Would many of the businesses worldwide presently suffering economic hardship (and shedding staff) benefit financially from such a move to Linux? I welcome your responses.
Con Zymaris (conz@cyber.com.au) is the CEO of Cybersource Pty. Ltd. a long-standing IT & Internet Professional Services company.
It does not surprise me that a number of articles trying to paint Open Source/Linux in a bad light have appeared over the last month. Remember that the deadline for signing up for Microsoft's Licnsing scheme is July 31.
Gartner tried to discredit Open Office. ZDNet tried to discredit the Cybersource study. The Alexis de Tocqueville institution (AdTI) has released a study that is full of specious arguments about the dangers of using open source. And we have John Carroll on ZDNet talking about the very (un)real limitations of Open Source.
Dr Goebbels, anyone?
Strikes me that a lot of people who profit from proprietary software are running scared. This is a method which has been tried many times in the past and has failed.
David Skoll has a scathing response to the AdTI study which tells proprietary software houses what they should do - Adapt. Or die.