I was just reading an advertisement for a product which is supposed to cut the cost of IT so that more resources can be spent productively. It contained this gem:
“According to Gartner, when looking at the total lifetime cost of building or buying a new application, on average 42% of the initial cost of the application is going to be spent, year after year, to maintain that app. Application maintenance is the real problem.
Drilling into that 42% we find that it breaks down into three major buckets. The first bucket is enhancing the application. The second bucket is maintaining the application, break-and-fix, etc. And the final bucket is all the operational costs – the people who run the help desk, delivering upgrades to operating systems and storage environments, etc. These costs are real. “
That description must be describing non-free software because the reality of using FLOSS is much different:
- The initial costs are much lower as upstream/distros have done a lot of the work of integration. A package manager (software that helps install and update all the software in the system) does much of the work and they’ve already done much of the testing.
- There is no ongoing licensing cost so most of the work remaining is creating/using content/data, productive work.
- Because open standards are followed, the cost of extending applications is less because the data can always be moved to another application.
Indeed, FLOSS solves most of the problems of IT and leaves the major part of the budget to creative/innovative work. Schools where I worked had almost zero budgets but with FLOSS a lot got done, limited mainly by imagination not effort.
I recommend using Debian GNU/Linux for the base of all IT. Debian has a huge repository and the best package manager around, APT. It is trivial to create a minimal installation of a computer or cluster and by importing a package-list one can install all the relevant software and nothing else in a few minutes. No requests for quotations, no budget-meetings, no delays. Just make it happen and try it out. You can always do it on existing hardware and move the application to some dedicated/specialized hardware later if you want. Everything is allowed by a FLOSS licence:
- You can run the software any way you want.
- You can examine it, the ultimate documentation.
- You can change it.
- You can distribute it or others can distribute it to you, modified or not.
That last feature of FLOSS software is absolutely wonderful. If you integrate a system with some application you can share it with others or have it shared with you at very low cost.
The major costs of using FLOSS are hardware and actual productive use not anything irrelevant/arbitrary. That puts more of your budget to productive use and gives you time to think. One school where I worked actually had a real IT budget for the first year of operation. Because we used FLOSS, twice as much stuff was able to be installed and the cost of operation was trivial. The school increased use of IT many times with no additional costs. Visitors from other schools were amazed because they were usually limited to one PC per classroom and one lab. We had in addition, multiple PCs per classroom, multiple servers, a gigabit/s network, ready access to printers, scanners, and cameras all for the same cost as the usual solution using non-free software. Those savings are real.
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