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Story: Criticism mounts over Birmingham's Linux project

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Facts: Successful Pilot

Coming to what we know of the project, the implementation of the Linux pilot I believe was a success, and various members of the linux community, opensource advantage, south birmingham linux group and the open source academy were initially involved in the project.

When I have visited Birmingham Central Library, the linux machines were always in use with a waiting queue and appeared to be more available then the other machines in the library at the time.

The version of linux distribution was chosen as it had all the functionality they required as well as being available and backed by a company like Novell. At the time, 9.3 was the current and supported version and not out of date as suggested. For a big organisation it was important for official support to be available to reassure the rest of the business. According to the presentation given to SBLUG, Ubuntu was assessed and did do well in the initial trails on a equal par to Suse, but the implementation team had prior experience of SuSE and some other distros but not of Ubuntu. In addition certain required enterprise grade applications Birmingham required were only supported by their manufacturers on either SuSE or RedHat.

I believe it was the Birmingham Libraries powers that be that pulled the plug on the rollout as they didn’t feel comfortable about supporting another OS, as they thought it be a steep learning curve for library staff to support.

Cost of SuSE licence, £zero, cost of xp licence £120ish.
Cost of OpenOffice £zero, cost of officexp £150ish.
Cost of Linux AV software £not-required, cost of xp AV £20ish.

Assuming costs of support would be broadly similar once in-house open source experience was at the same level as windows, doesn’t take much comparison to see which is the better value for money.

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