Open Source/Free Software in Maricopa Government

[Eric Lee Green]

On Tuesday 17 December 2002 02:51 pm, Michael Havens wrote:
> On Monday 09 December 2002 12:34 pm, Gary Nichols wrote:
> > Sorry to seem sarcastic, but I get irate knowing that they are wasting my
> > tax dollars on stuff that could be done SOOO much cheaper.
>
> Someone who knows alot about this (not me) should write a letter to the
> editor about how much money the government is wasting on Computer
> applications when there is such a viable option!

But then Maricopa County would have to hire competent IT people at market 
rates, instead of incompetent hacks at 2/3rds of market rate! 

Like Microsoft is fond of saying, TCO is more than just the up-front software 
costs. For Maricopa County to switch over would require that a) they find 
some pretense to fire the incompetent hacks who currently run their IT 
department, b) pay lots of money to settle the inevitable "wrongful 
dismissal" charges out of court, c) do a search for a competent IT director 
(and who is going to do this search? Who at Maricopa County has the knowledge 
to tell a competent IT director from a hack?), d) pay this guy market rates, 
e) have him hire competent IT staff at market rates. In other words, we're 
talking considerable expense to do the changeover, plus a higher recurring 
cost because of the need to pay competent IT staff at market rates. If the 
difference in licensing costs is $50,000 per year, but the difference in 
staffing costs to get competent IT people is $100,000 per year, you can see 
how it wouldn't be worth it to change over to Open Source -- even if we're 
not counting the wrongful dismissal settlements as part of the difference in 
staffing costs. 

Microsoft software is like crack cocaine -- once they get you addicted, 
breaking the addiction is hard to do :-(. 

Btw, the personnel costs are not insigificant. When I was doing school 
consulting, I was regularly asked "What server platform should we use?". My 
inevitable response was "Use whatever your staff is most familiar with and 
whatever has the most local talent that knows it" -- whether that was Novell, 
Microsoft, or (unlikely in that era) Linux. Our own servers (that we 
installed at these school districts) were Linux, but that's because we were 
being paid to maintain them and we were Unix database geeks. These 
mostly-rural school districts couldn't afford to hire people at market rate 
and pay them to move to BumFuck Mississippi... they had to stick with the 
local talent, which was (alas) mostly Microsoft-centric (with some Novell 
guys out there). When I was asked by these school districts, "should we use 
Linux?", my response was inevitably "ask your local computer experts", 
because if the local computer experts didn't know Linux, they hadn't a hope 
in hell of making a Linux installation work right. Given how (in)competent 
these "local experts" were with Microsoft software, I didn't see a hope in 
hell of them ever learning Linux... but what the hey, maybe the horse learns 
to speak, right? And in fact one or two districts DID dabble in Linux, mostly 
for mail servers (much cheaper than Exchange Server).  

But the deal is, I recognized that I, as an outsider merely passing through, 
was not in the best position to say whether Linux could successfully be 
deployed there. And you, as an outsider, are in no position to say whether 
Linux could successfully be deployed by Maricopa County. Given the general 
incompetence and ineptitude of how these "local experts" are handling their 
Microsoft install, the thought of them trying to do Linux is rather... 
terrifying. 

-- 
Eric Lee Green         http://badtux.org/home/eric/resume.html