FLOSS Works for Indians at Robert Pogson

In India, the expense of licensing non-free software sometimes exceeds the salaries of the employees…

In the article below, a lakh is 100,000 and a crore is 10 million.

A financial services company was paying 1.5 lakhs per PC for licences but an employee on average cost only 1.0 lakh. By converting to FLOSS they did not have to pay software licences.

“With the open source adoption, the company estimates cost savings of close to ` 5 crore a year. With the deployment, MMFSL has reduced connectivity, power and other recurring costs by almost 90 percent. ROI was seen within three months of implementation.”

see No more technology lock-in

Some of the conversions I have done have yielded break-even in less time than that simply because of the licensing fees. For example, the school at Easterville had a budget for the project of about $100K. By using FLOSS, I put in the basic system for much less and had plenty of money to spend on other peripherals. The break-even point was essentially on day 1. Last year I converted existing PCs by individual re-imaging, perhaps 10 minutes each. I then copied images onto new machines as they came in. So, a few hours of work was the entire cost of conversion and the savings were within the first month or so that many fewer hours spent cleaning up the mess that other OS makes. So, perhaps it took a couple of weeks to break-even.

Munich, on the other hand, budgeted somewhat more than a migration from NT to XP (thanks to a discount from Ballmer’s interrupted skiing), and reached the point of not having to pay so many licensing fees within a few years. They are probably at break-even as soon as “7″ would be installed. 80% of 15000 PCs X $100 is more than $1 million just for client licences. Add to that more for M$’s office suite and the servers and CALs and hardware and Munich is laughing at all those folks chucking stuff to run “7″.

My Mission

My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. I do not care whether my solution is the same as yours. I like to think for myself.

My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. I have been blessed by working in schools where students and school systems have benefited by good, modular software easily installed in most systems.

I have shown GNU/Linux to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers over the years and will continue in some way doing that until I die in spite of the opposition.