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Story: Birmingham considers Linux extension
Blame public accounting procedures, not Linux
I'm getting a bit fed up with the carping about how much money has been spent on "only" 200 desktops. Yes, it is a lot but because of the way public finance and grants work, if the project had spent say £20,000, then the rest of the funds would have been clawed back.
I'd bet that this money covers the salaries for the time spent on the project of all the people who had any part in it and loads of incidentals as well. In fact probably anything that could be claimed.
If Glyn Evans had decided to implement a Linux rollout for its merits using staff whose wages were already covered, rather than because there was a pot of money attached, we could have a much truer cost figure for implementation.
Despite the stories of huge spending on implementations, Linux represents excellent value for money for probably 80% of corperate users, for some "power users" of excel, maybe the conversion is too much bother but where I work, just about every spreadsheet I see is used for tabulating information, not actually doing any calculations. Hardly difficult to switch to Open Office then.... The Accountant example given is not a representative case for not switching over.
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