Re: [Fsfe-uk] BECTA discriminate against FLOSS?

[Simon Waters]

ian wrote:
> 
> TCO studies are not rational

Like most statistical measures you can take an objective approach, or
you can set out to justify your own prejudices.

Like polling and questions, it is easy to find the assumptions that make
one product cheaper than another, or get the outcome you want.

Tory poll
"Do you want lower taxes?"
Labour poll
"Do you want more nurses?"
Rational
"Do you want lower taxes if it means fewer nurses?"

In free software it is inevitable that the earlier projects will be
relatively more expensive than later projects, as there will be more
gaps in your areas of interest that need filling, where as the cost of
projects with proprietary software may be expected to remain more
constant between projects (or increase if the supplier is able to
exploit a monopoly position).

Now if we always take the short term view of what is cheapest for this
project, RMS would never have started writing his own set of tools, it
wasn't the cheap or easy short term option, but the flexible one with
long term payoffs.

The one that is paying off currently is Open Office. I'm meeting
non-technical, non-University people, who just use it because it is
free, and does the job as well, or better. Once people are weened off
Office one of the big MS lockin's is dead. Where people want a quick
cheap pay-off on desktops with free software just switch them away from
MS Office.

Despite having run Desktop Linux and Unix boxes for years it has never
been the cheapest option. It may have been the best value, as we were
using a lot of them for scientific, and development work, as well as
desktop work. Recent developments in Linux may make it the cheapest
option, but I'd still sell on stability and security, unless I was doing
a big desktop roll out where the licence costs saved allowed a lot of
customisation and new development work.

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