How Do I Start a University Transition To Open Source? 497
exmoron writes "I work at a small university (5,500 students) and am in a position to potentially influence future software purchasing decisions. I use a number of FOSS solutions at home (OpenOffice.org, Zotero, GIMP, VirtualBox). My university, on the other hand, is a Microsoft and proprietary software groupie (Vista boxes running MS Office 2007, Exchange email server, Endnote, Photoshop, Blackboard, etc.). I'd like to make an argument that going open source would save the university money and think through a gradual transition process to open source software (starting small, with something like replacing Endnote with Zotero, then MS Office with OpenOffice.org, and so on). Unfortunately, I can't find very good information online on site licenses for proprietary software. How much does a site-license for Endnote cost? What about a site license for MS Office for 2,000 computers? In short, what's the skinny on moving to open source? How much money could a university like mine save? Additionally, what other benefits are there to moving to open source that I could try to sell the university on? And what are the drawbacks (other than people whining about change)?"
it's called a cost analysis (Score:4, Informative)
i did one recently to justify the purchase of a new backup system. i got the purchase orders and added how much it all cost over the last 3 years for support, maintenance, offsite tape storage, etc. then compared to a new LTO-4 and estimated a few years out. put everything in a nice easy to read PPT to show how buying a new tape library will save a lot of money going forward.
Same here. get all the costs associated with whatever you run. You might need to ask your boss of finance department. estimate the costs of transition and running the new solution and compare the two.
MS licensing is a nightmare and there are a bunch of programs depending on how much users you have and which program you buy into. ask your finance people to pull copies of the purchase orders.
I work in a 95% MS shop. Reason MS rules is 90% of all MS software is stupid little scripts to make things easier. like the box to create a new user in AD. With Open Source you need to customize a lot of it and it may cost money for the consultants, extra support, etc. I help manage 30 or so SQL servers and in the last 2 years our support costs were around $1000 for a few support cases. In all cases MS released a hotfix after we opened a case. No need for custom coding.
we do have a lot of internally depeloved apps and it's like Quake point releases with them. constant updates and fixes.
Site licenses (Score:5, Informative)
It doesn't surprise me that you can't find good information about this. Even if you found valid pricing for a medium-sized business, I doubt that universities have the same pricing. Universities themselves also negotiate directly with Microsoft (at least the larger ones do), leading to differences in pricing and terms. Unis also often negotiate to obtain student pricing on products like Office. For example:
University of Wisconsin Office 2007 Enterprise [wisc.edu]: $72
University of Michigan Office 2007 Enterprise [umich.edu]: $47
The real question is, if you're "in a position to potentially influence future software purchasing decisions", how do you not have access to the current expenditures on software licensing? What you really need are current expenditures and knowledge about when the current contract expires.
Firefox (Score:4, Informative)
Getting Firefox on all university-owned machines is a great first step. Install the IETab extension on Windows machines as a transition measure for those pesky sites which work better in IE (Blackboard, for example).
Next, get OpenOffice installed in the same manner.
Then, do the con suggested in this comment [slashdot.org]. Get MS to shower you in free licenses for things just so you can see how much you'd save if things were free.
Next up is policy. Move towards a policy which favors open, published standards, not just open source. For instance, that comment says to make ODF the official format of college-student communications because it is the most accessible format (since it doesn't virtually require an expensive program to read). If any university staff so much as utters something like, "We should use whatever format we like. Students should expect to make purchases in order to advance their education," you need to combat that mentality promptly with something like, "We're in a position to lower the cost of education in both visible and transparent ways by offering better choices to our students, we need to do that."
The last step I'll talk about is to work on the professorial end. Get professors to send documentation in ODF and PDF and require submissions in those formats. Get graphics teachers to do a week or two on open source graphics tools. Get a professor to teach a class or hold lunch-time discussions on the use of TeX for research documents and proposals and such. There are very few science majors who would not benefit from instruction in TeX.
Microsoft Licensing (Score:5, Informative)
With Vista (and "above" - 2k8, win7), Microsoft changed the way they do site licensing. Instead of having one key for every computer, every client does a DNS lookup for a Key Management Software Server (KMS server), which then simply activates the client computer. It does not keep a record of how many activations you have used, only the last 50.
Likewise, you just call them up, tell them how many computers you have, and they give you a price. A few minutes and many thousands of dollars later, you have a key to plug in to KMS. Magically, every Vista+ box that you have on site is licensed and activated. This can include student computers if you wish. The activations 6 months, after which time they *must* talk to the KMS server again.
http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/resources/vol/default.mspx [microsoft.com]
Now look. I run centos/debian/openbsd/gentoo/xp/vista/server 2008. I really hate (operating system) licensing. I hate the simple concept. But KMS is really the way to go. It takes right next to no system resources. In the KMS docs, they say that most 100k+ client customers are perfectly content with 2 KMS servers (with the same key). Next to zero system load.
Second, Office.
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/suites/HA101080191033.aspx [microsoft.com]
There is also their Software Assurance program.
http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/sa/default.mspx [microsoft.com]
Software Assurance has one big downside, and one big upside. The downside is that it is a yearly fee. It is more or less a subscription. The upside is that you are entitled to free upgrades of "the product" as long as you keep paying. This means that if you purchased SA on Office 2003 a year before 2007 was released, your 2003 license can be automatically upconverted to 2007 free of charge. The same applies to... all of their products. XP --> Vista --> Win7, SQL 2000 --> 2003 --> 2008, Visual Studio, the works. It is not a required upconversion either - you choose if and when you upgrade.
As a result, buying your weight in gold worth of Software Assurance also gives you 24/7 software support. It more or less gives you everything. Tech support, upgrades, technical resources... it is essentially the equal to a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription in terms of the support you get, the products that you get, and the upgrades.
Really, your best bet to understanding MS licensing is to contact one of their reps. Gather everything that you can find before hand, and give them a call. Grill them endlessly. Ask questions, and don't let them leave until you know everything you needed.
What is the benefit of open source/free software? EVERYTHING ABOVE IS ENTIRELY IRRELEVANT.
Re:money is not the way (Score:3, Informative)
But it is not free-libre. You cannot study or modify the gmail codebase, with the exception of the web front end. Google can pull the plug at any minute, and suddenly an entire university is without email. Google could also suddenly decide (perhaps following investor pressure) that universities will no longer receive free service.
. A competent sysadmin can set up a mail server without too much effort. Unless your university is tiny and not technically oriented, I do not think asking for competent sysadmins is terribly unfair.
Re:money is not the way (Score:4, Informative)
The entire department would love to stop using Windows, but the headache of teaching the faculty how to use it would drive us insane.
That's a tradeoff. Do a cost analysis, see how much money would be saved, and how much it would cost to say, double your staff? Be practical about it, and make sure they understand that the increase in staff is absolutely necessary, that there's no way to cut tech costs without increasing staff somewhat. Even if what looked like a 90% drop in cost only turns out to be a 20% drop in cost, that's still justified.
And then once you've made the jump, after a year or two, your staff can relax out of Panic Mode and quality of service will go up. (or you can lay off a couple staff)
Re:money is not the way (Score:4, Informative)
Re:money is not the way (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Declaration of independence (Score:3, Informative)
May I suggest a quote?
"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And when you gaze for long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." - F. Nietzsche
Re:Thank samba for diversity (Score:3, Informative)
Also, remember that rdesktop is an excellent compatibility layer for those times when only Windows will do.
Replace Blackboard with Moodle (Score:3, Informative)