“In an effort to reduce software licencing costs, Limerick City Council is fully committed to adopting open source solutions that prove to be value for money.”
via Open Source, Limerick City Council.
Amen. Doing IT right as a local government involves getting the most bang for the $ and FLOSS does that in a big way. Costs of creating, distributing and maintaining software are all minimized with FLOSS and there’s nothing that cannot be done with the FLOSS OS, GNU/Linux. When Limerick is ready to migrate its desktops, I recommend Debian GNU/Linux because of its huge repository, slick package manager and depth and breadth of application.
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M$ is very expensive to maintain, difficult to manage and security adverse.
When dealing with CIOs, they can be shown their initial CAPEX for hardware, and by utilizing Linux, one does not need to deal with all the headaches as previously mentioned.
M$ Office – Sharepoint – Exchange are all stupidly expensive and can be replaced be viable, LESS costly solutions.
Beware the M$ partners saying one NEEDS Windows to operate a business. That statement is a non-sequitur and analogous to saying you must use HP to print paper, while XEROX or any other printer does the same job equally well.