Birmingham City Council claims open-source success


Birmingham City Council has defended its year-long trial of desktop Linux, claiming it to be a success, despite an independent report showing it would have been cheaper to install Windows XP.
In an exclusive interview with Techworld, head of IT for the council, Glyn Evans, argued that the higher cost resulted from the council having to experiment with the new technology and build up a depth of technical understanding, as well as fit it with the complex system already in place.
The £105,000 saving that the report says would have resulted from going with Windows XP has also come under question as it was calculated using the special discounted licence rate that Microsoft offers councils - something critics argue is a calculated effort to prevent public bodies from building up technical knowledge of open source offerings.
With Birmingham's trial period over and with lessons learnt and understanding gained, the Council now expects to make cost savings over time, and contrary to press reports which claimed Birmingham had scrapped the Linux initiative, it will in fact "significantly increase" its use of open-source software, Evans said.
-
- Login or register to post comments
Printer-friendly version
- 1968 reads
PDF version
More in Tux Machines
- Highlights
- Front Page
- Latest Headlines
- Archive
- Recent comments
- All-Time Popular Stories
- Hot Topics
- New Members
today's howtos
| Android Leftovers |
University students create award-winning open source projects
In my short time working for Clarkson University, I've realized what a huge impact this small university is making on the open source world. Our 4,300 student-strong science and technology-focused institution, located just south of the Canadian border in Potsdam, New York, hosts the Clarkson Open Source Institute (COSI), dedicated to promoting open source software and providing equipment and support for student projects.
While many universities offer opportunities for students to get involved in open source projects, it's rare to have an entire institute dedicated to promoting open source development. COSI is part of Clarkson's Applied Computer Science Labs within the computer science department. It, along with the Internet Teaching Lab and the Virtual Reality Lab, is run by students (supported by faculty advisers), allowing them to gain experience in managing both facilities and projects while still undergraduates.
| Linux 4.17-rc2
So rc2 is out, and things look fairly normal.
The diff looks a bit unusual, with the tools subdirectory dominating,
with 30%+ of the whole diff. Mostly perf and test scripts.
But if you ignore that, the rest looks fairly usual. Arch updates
(s390 and x86 dominate) and drivers (networking, gpu, HID, mmc, misc)
are the bulk of it, with misc other changes all over (filesystems,
core kernel, networking, docs).
We've still got some known fallout from the merge window, but it
shouldn't affect most normal configurations, so go out and test.
Linus
|
Recent comments
22 hours 32 min ago
23 hours 43 min ago
1 day 5 hours ago
2 days 6 hours ago
3 days 11 hours ago
3 days 11 hours ago
3 days 23 hours ago
4 days 52 min ago
4 days 19 hours ago
4 days 20 hours ago