[Klug-general] answer to my FOI request from Kent County Coucil

[Jonathan Kaye]

Dan Attwood wrote on 14/10/14 08:43:
> >Agreed. But they talk about a "strategic commitment" to Microsoft. Do
> >you know what a "strategic commitment" is? Do council members have stock
> >options in Microsoft? Seriously though, why on earth would anyone have a
> >"strategic commitment" to a corporation?
>
> They mean their 5 and 10 years plans. ie.
> We currently have Windows on all our machines and it works and we
> happy with the associated costs, current staff training etc.
> We expect, and MS have told us ,that they will release new versions of
> all their products and  we will have a clear supported upgrade path to
> those products
> Within that we have a estimated life span and refresh rate of hardware
> etc.
>
> If they switched to OSS they would still need a "strategic
> commitment" to that as an organisation
>
Thanks for the explanation Dan. I've written to some Dutch reporters who
covered the Munich switch to Free software. I sent them the FOI
response. Here's an extract from the Munich article:

/As of November last year, //the city saved more than £8.9 million
<http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/open-source/3413037/linux-migration-has-already-saved-munich-89-million/>//because
of the switch. More recent figures were not immediately available, but
cost savings were not the only goal of the operation. It was also done
to be less dependent on manufacturers, product cycles and proprietary
OSes, the council said Thursday./

//

/"All project objectives were achieved and in some cases even exceeded,"
the council said. One of the goals was to migrate 12,000 desktops to
LiMux, but in the end, the city managed to create over 14,800 LiMux
workspaces for its approximately 15,500 desktops./

source:
http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/public-sector/3493623/munich-declares-switch-open-source-successfully-completed/
I've asked them to comment on the FOI response I received. We'll see
what they have to say.

It seems the UK government is also moving in this direction but I guess
it's all too much for our Kent County councillors.
Jonathan
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/kent/attachments/20141014/9f692929/attachment-0001.html>