...our good experience with JBoss. Now, if we have a new need and a good open source product exists to cover the need, we will use that product. Up till now we have not had a problem finding a product that meets our needs," says Lapeyre.
80,000 desktops
The next major open source migration planned at the tax agency is a migration to the open source productivity application OpenOffice.org on 80,000 desktops. It hopes to switch to OpenOffice.org running on Windows XP, "probably by the end of next year", according to Lapeyre.
This migration is expected to cut the agency's costs by €29.3m, compared with the cost of migrating from Microsoft Office 97 to Office XP. Lapeyre says that the agency has calculated that switching its 80,000 desktops to Office XP would cost around €29.5m, but switching to OpenOffice.org only €200,000. Although this cost is a one-off saving, Lapeyre points out that due to the need for regular upgrades it will effectively save this amount every five years.
Since last year, the agency has given departments the choice of using OpenOffice.org or sticking to Office 97. It now plans to mandate the use of OpenOffice.org, a migration that should be fairly straightforward as few employees use the more complex features of Microsoft Office, according to Lapeyre.
Three man-years to be free of Office
"Our use of Office is very, very basic. The majority of our employees do not really use office programs — they mainly use business applications, which are not linked to Office. The documents produced are, in majority of cases, very simple — there are no macros or anything like that," says Lapeyre.
"We have calculated that to be completely independent of Microsoft Office, would need three man-years," he adds.
The organisation has already updated some applications to generate OpenOffice.org documents rather than Office documents. This modification is "very easy", according to Lapeyre. But some applications are more tightly linked to Office and will require more work to adapt, he says.
The tax agency may also migrate to Linux desktops in the future, although this will require much more work, according to Lapeyre.
"It's difficult to switch to Linux on the desktop for the moment because we have about 30 desktop applications that have been developed in Visual Basic. It's technically possible to switch the desktops to Linux, but the VB licence doesn't allow you to run them on non-Windows systems," says Lapeyre.
"We need to get rid of all these programs and will have to redevelop everything using Web-based technologies before we can switch," he says.
Bold yet measured
Even if the tax agency does not switch to Linux in the near future, its current open source deployments and the fact it has mandated open source makes it one of the most progressive public sector users of open source in Europe.
Its adoption and attitude to open source has been bold, yet measured — initially treating open source and proprietary software as equal and then after a couple of successful large-scale deployments mandating the use of open source. Other public sector organisations that are unwilling to carry out large-scale open source deployments might do well to follow the tax agency's strategy.
Talkback
Pure economics is driving decision making but Linux technology also has much to offer!!
C'est bon!
Change in small amounts but do make sure that changes are in check with the broader (future) plan in mind would be my game plan.
That said it seems to me that the French are well ahead of the game. Add the Germans and you can see who will be passed the learning curve in the future of the EU. In other words, who will be leading the total game. At least some seem to understand the signals that matter.
I'm confused. The cost savings used by the French Minister,and Massachusetts ITD people, are not consistent with what I read on the "Get the Facts" advertisements, when talking about TCO costs.The MS articles wouldn't be telling 'porkies' would they?
I installed OpenOffice on production systems the morning I heard about the 1.0 release. I had to hunt the world over to find a server not loaded down with the demand. There were a few problems, but it worked. Today, there are still a few problems, not least of which is that OO is not ported to AMD64 and I use an AMD64 terminal server. Using a 32bit chroot is a minor problem. OO works well for us and we can generate PDFs which helps with interagency communication. Microsoft is not an innovator. Its barbaric EULA (End-User Licence Agreement), endless changes of file format, useless features, broken features, incompatibilities with previous versions, very high licence fee and the fact that they still do not do PDF two years after OO are all the reasons anyone needs to switch. Ray Ozzie had it right when he stated, "Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges, and it causes end-user and administrator frustrations.". Microsoft knows its own problems and refuses to fix them. It deserves to be abandoned.
The question to ask is why anyone should stay with Microsoft. Those who are solidly locked in made a mistake with their last acquisition. The longer the switch is delayed, the more the pain.