On Tuesday 26. June 2007 17:42, José L. Redrejo RodrÃguez wrote: > But they have a lot of money and > people and, if some day they do it seriously, we could speak in a medium > term of about 500.000 pcs running Novell. And that amount has to be > taken into account.
In Norway they got a sales staff of 6-7 people. Its now people selling hardware with preinstalled Skolelinux, and they can match Novells effort. Novell covers rest of the industrial and public sector too, so they got a whole lot of ground to cover. The reason we got people selling Skolelinux in Norway, is because we have invested in such an approach. It's same situation in Germany where Debian is supported commercially. * City of Munich begins Linux migration: http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/6187/360 * Munich's KDE distribution LiMux has been certified to meet the international usability standard ISO 9241: http://dot.kde.org/1179818755/ I got an distinct feeling that several Spanish regional government are not interested in supporting local entrepreneurship based on inland competence. They want to buy from GNU/Linux suppliers which sells it as Microsoft sells Windows. Regional governments buy a brand and more additional consultancy effort, costing more than the competitor. German cities got an other viewpoint. This was also the advice from Ministry of Education and Research in Norway. They suggested us to make a support business. Through that schools had someone to call professionally, where voluntary support are difficult to get on daytime, and you need that to get your server up running if anythings screws up. So we made a business which selling support agreements to schools. Yes, there are some schools running SuSE Novell in Norway, but they are still few. The reason is basicly that municipality computer department want's to support Windows desktops with Linux as a choice, and Novell are paid a lot of money from Microsoft to make this believeable. So they actually pays much more for maintaining their solution, and making procurement requirement that includes complexity, and disregard public procurement regulation buying from the lowest bidder when it comes to lifetime cost. This municipalities now supporting two desktop OS-es, both SuSE Novell and Windows. That cost considerable more to buy, maintain, and maybe twice as much as a single OS install. Their architecture are still based on workstations. Then municipalities gets twice the maintenance cost compared to low-fat clients (diskless). Also the setup cost are much higher compared to Skolelinux, since SuSE don't got an preinstalled architecture for municipalities wide installations. I know of municipalities using 200 000 Euro for configuring up a Novell based server-room to serve 20 schools (just configuring the software). The installation cost was the same with Windows, they told. You can do the same with Skolelinux for 10-20% of that price. When updating, configuration has to be done again (probably cheaper, but it will cost them much more than with Skolelinux). In sale its not good to bash your competitor, but what Novell actually does in schools now is to introduce significantly higher maintenance cost compared to other GNU/Linux-solutions for schools. We know why, and in a business case, we usually know how to argue, winning on price. We also see school districts evaluating Skolelinux, and then stating that it's too difficult because the municipality ICT staff just know Windows, and have spent years to learn that (and will get hell when Windows Vista is introduced 2-3 years from now). One last thing, my impression is that schools are all in favour of 3-4 years release cycles when it comes to software updates (distro updates). Faster upgrades will be bogged down in user questions. When upgrading the ICT-staff get a whole lot of questions, and you also introduces instability where it's always something left out. Doing upgrades every 6-18 months are introducing much more maintenance cost compared with doing it with 36 months cycles. We got school districts running K12LTSP in combination with Skolelinux for a while. They ditched K12LTSP when Skolelinux 2.0 came with newer software because of stability. The fedora based K12LTSP had to be rebooted every night because of instability, memory leakages and such. Skolelinux is built on rock solid Debian. Then ICT staff just runs the servers for months. It just works they say. Open SuSE got 6 months release cycles. If you don't know how to operate a stable ICT maintenance operation, you maybe go for that. After a while you just want that the schools 15-20 servers working for months, and you don't need to restart every server every night. Interesting links: Best regards Knut Yrvin -- Community Manager / Developer Tools - Trolltech ASA cell: + 47 908 95 765, phone: +47 21 60 27 58 http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt
