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Story: Large public-sector Linux project flops

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Libraries not actually a failure

Having watched this rather ill-informed debate for a week or two, I feel I must add my thoughts.
I was at a presentation given to SouthBirmingham Linux Users Group at the inception of the project. At this event the team presented their state of the project and reasons for selecting the distributions for server and client use.
Despite comments to the contrary, Suse 9.3 was the current, supported release at that time. Suse 10 only became supported part way through the project and imho, would not off a sigificant improvement to justify swapping to as part of a pilot. For a production rollout, yes, pilot, no.
Ubuntu was not chosen as the desktop for a number of reasons, all of which were justified by facts, many of the people who have criticised the chouce of SuSE over Ubuntu clearly either support Ubuntu commercially or are involved in some other way, so I suspect these comments represent sour grapes and as such should be disregarded.
The team certainly did not give the impression of wanting to exclude the Linux community, in fact quite the opposite. The intention to set up a website to track the progress was proposed subject to management approval. It's non appearance is probably down to being too "unofficial" for a local authority.

Apart from the ridiculous 1500 desktops quote "plucked from the air", 200 desktops out of 400 is probably not far off the mark, my maths are as follows:-
41 district libraries and 1 central library.
40 public access computers in the central library (10 each on 4 floors) and average of 4 in each district makes 161+40 = 201.
Assuming more or less the same for staff gives a total of 400 ish. So deploying 200 for public access is not far off what I would expect, so the "with just 200 Linux PCs being deployed" quote in the ZDnet article smacks of the "not enough research school of journalism".

As for the cost, anyone who has worked on any local government project will know that if £x is allocated to a project, £x will be spent if the project runs to budget, it may however overspend in which case it could be called a waste of money. Also every minute of time will be recorded on a timesheet to claim the funds. Given that the staff were employed by BCC (from the presentation), had the grant not been forthcoming and the staff done this as part of their daily work, the cost excluding hardware would have been close to £zero (I think the cost of the new hardware was included in the project).
The disgrace lies with the way public funding is allocated, not how much is spent.

As for the "range of problems" mentioned, on the ocasions I visited the Central Library, all the computers were in use and a booking system was in use to reserve time. Unsurprisingly the number of Linux computers not working the the Windows ones not working was rather low. So I am not sure what the problems were but I did not find any. Internet access was fine, usb devices worked fine and there was a good range of software available.
Just as important on a public access machine, the user settings were cleared between sessions, so saved work / internet links from previous users were erased in the interests of privacy. I could only find one place in the filesystem which had not been locked down and that wasn't obvious.

In conclusion, Dogstar really needs to get his facts in order, point two is totally wrong, I have spoken with several members of the team at different times about the best way to do something, just because dogstar wasn't asked doesn't mean no one else was. Point 3 is again wrong, Suse was current during the development process, and from what I heard at the presentation, the initial trial was looking at the desktop not the distribution (ie. Gnome vs KDE). As it happens, I heard that the split was about equal between those favouring Gnome over KDE.

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