Re: [Fsfe-uk] Article for LinuxFormat

[ian]

On Fri, 2003-05-30 at 09:59, PFJ wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> > > Does anyone have any links to articles (or the such) for schools and the
> > > cost of the tie in?
> > 
> > I have most of that information as we sell both M$ and free systems in
> > schools (obviously trying to get more over to free but it can be a bit
> > counter-productive with some) If you let me know what you want I can
> > send it.
> 
> Startup, maintainance and support costs. The machines don't really
> matter in the comparisons (except for the (approx) 80 quid for the OEM
> licence folks are unaware of).

This is from the OO.o presentation - I'll E-mail it as an attachment to
you as it has other bits that might be useful.

Prices might vary a bit due to competition between retailers and the
fact that some big companies like Dell probably get bulk discounts on
their OEM licenses but these are pretty typical.

Typical 1000 pupil school with 200 PCs. 
Mix of machines P1 100MHz to P4, 2 Ghz. Mostly on Windows 95/8, 32 and
64 meg of RAM. 

Software costs already incurred
Windows OEM academic - £65 per machine 
Office education - £80 per machine
Anti-virus - £5 per year per machine
Ranger or similar management software - £18 per machine
Client access licenses - £5 per machine
Ghost or similar - £9 per machine etc
£182 ----> £36,000 ---> 3,000 secondary schools = £108m

This could be an under-estimate in some ways as it doesn't take into
account server licences though these are very cheap to schools < £100
for Win2000 server and other apps like FrontPage or Photoshop that
schools might buy separately. For schools on Microsoft Schools Agreement
its more complicated because they pay the OEM licences but then pay per
eligible machine eg any P1 hardware up. (Currently under investigation
by the OFT) If they have a lot of P400s down its unlikely they can make
use of the upgrades without upgrading their hardware. Things like P100s
are not practically upgradeable but could be used as thin client under
terminal services. £40 per machine per year is the typical cost of MSSA
but that comes down to £35 for big sites with 4/500 machines. Its
probably most cost-effective for sites with large numbers of new
machines but there is a big risk of tie in and of course you still have
to pay for things like anti-virus, network management, security and
other non-M$ software. I think £25m a year is probably a reasonable
estimate for software licensing costs in the secondary sector each year.

If you now take primary schools - more of them but smaller units
therefore diseconomy of scale roughly the same number of pupils and
teachers, again a ball park figure for both is £50m. Then we have LEAs,
DfES, FE and HE. The cost of software licensing to education must be of
the order of £100m per year. Now the gov has set a target for 1:5 pupil
computer ratio but at work most people use a computer just about
whenever they need to write anything so why not a 1:1 ratio? Answer its
unaffordable. On software alone it puts cost up to about £500m per year.


Of course software also dictates hardware costs at least to an extent.
Our Linux installations use several servers with standard low cost
components such as IDE hard drives and single processors. The "all
singing and dancing server" is at least in part due to the fact that
multiple servers put licensing costs up so make the server a premium
specialist product and pay disproportionately for small gains in
performance. Several servers with load balancing are more robust and
give better performance at lower cost *if* you don't have to pay
software licensing. Thin client is encouraged and supported by
GNU/Linux, its little used in the Windows world in schools and Citrix
licences cost between £80 and £130 a seat depending on numbers. Again
there are potential gains with free software extending the life of
hardware and reducing indirect costs such as equipment disposal.

What about management costs? Varies a lot. Typically a secondary school
will pay 20k per year for technician support but some have 4 techs and
others will have less than one or one on a lot less money. If we said
20k per school for 3000, its £60m per year possibly a bit more so
technical support costs are something like 2.5 times the cost of
licensing. In some cases schools have expensive managed service
contracts with the LEA and local companies but managed services in
general has been a flop due to the cost. Its arguable that management
costs are greater with either system - my belief is Linux is potentially
less expensive because everything is easily obtainable with minimum
bureaucracy but the counter is that the existing knowledge base for
Windows is wider spread.Ok let's take hardware and support costs out as
equal for both systems and concentrate on the one area where there is a
clear difference. Software licensing. There really is no argument here
and its clearly very significant amounts of tax payers money - maybe as
much as billion a year across the whole public sector as more and more
computers come into use.  

The short term view that there are too few Linux techs, or there are
applications missing require a long term response. Ok, we can't
immediately swap everything over, but what is the national strategy to
achieve this. Clearly putting a few million into development of key
applications, insisting that where ever possible government funded
projects are web based and standards compliant and providing incentives
for schools to recycle older PCs as free software thin clients would be
a start. Also provide incentives to FE and HE to train technical support
in GNU/Linux as well as windows to redress the distortion in the market.
You don't have to be a economist to see why such a strategy would be
good for the UK economy. In the long run we would be diverting software
licensing funding into better support and local industry.

> Oh, and any other costs would be useful ;-)

I got a school to put out a tender based on outcome rather than specific
products (Isn't this what tenders should do anyway ;-) ) Something along
the lines of a 15 station network for web browsing, WP,SS,Presentations,
Drawing, Manipulation and editing bitmaps, E-mail. needed software
management and hardware replacement for a year should anything break.
The least expensive Windows/MS Office solution was £20k. We could do
this using brand new kit and thin clients with free software for less
than 10k and using recycled base units for the clients around half that.
So anyone who tells you that for this type of installation TCO with
Windows is lower is simply full of the proverbial.

> 
> Paul
> 
> P.S. Ian, did you get my email earlier this morning?

Yep, reply by private E-mail.

-- 
ian <address@hidden>