“Microsoft has lost a head-to-head competition with OpenDocument Format supporting software, with the decision of the Bristol, England City Council to convert its 5500 desktops from Office to Sun’s ODF compliant StarOffice office suite. The City, after extensive study, concluded that it would save 60% of total costs of ownership over a five year period by making the switch. And, as an assist to cities, it has made the documentation of its analysis and other materials available at the Open Source Academy Website in the UK.”
Good to see something from the UK. Our politics are pretty naff, but thankfully there hasn’t been such extreme opposition and cajoling from Microsoft just over a damn file format.
For all the managers out there that doubt that open sourcing (or freeing) your software will ever pay off, this should be a nice example.
I’d guess that the availability of OpenOffice.org was what lead them to concider a change in the first place and the usual “we want someone to pick up the phone” is what made them go for StarOffice.
I’d guess that the availability of OpenOffice.org was what lead them to concider a change in the first place and the usual “we want someone to pick up the phone” is what made them go for StarOffice.
Not just the ‘pick up phone’ factor but the ‘I’ve come across a bug, fix it’ and SUN fixes it and provides a patch rather than having to wait for it to be corrected, out of the goodness of some programmers heart.
What it didn’t go into is whether they’re going to change operating systems as well – personally, that would have been a bigger win if they went the full monty.
One step at a time…
Yeah, I know, but it would be nice if Government around and moved off Windows to Linux or some other UNIX; as a tax payer, I would be more than happy to see $50-$150million spent kitting out the nation with *NIX based computers in government departments and schools; along with the re-writing of VB applications to Java or Mono/GTK#.
If the government moves over, then the private sector has to move over to it as well, thus forcing software companies to provide software for non-Windows operating systems; and hence, competition based on merit would be restored.
Your proposed move to ODF from MS by the UK Government would NEVER NEVER Happen.
The reason is that our esteemed leader (aka The Right Honorable Mr Tony Blair, Prime Minister) is far to pally with Sir (Honorary) William Gates.
I expect that there will be moves against Bristol. This government wants to control everything that anyone does in this country. For a Council the size of Bristol to get away with breaking away from MS is very off message(and that is bad) and will probably be snubbed out very soon. After all, the new financial year for Bristol starts this week!
For a Council the size of Bristol to get away with breaking away from MS is very off message(and that is bad) and will probably be snubbed out very soon. After all, the new financial year for Bristol starts this week!
Meh, do what they do in New Zealand is ‘lets pass more stuff onto the local city councils’ – central government get a nice balanced budget, and your council rates go up.
In the case of Bristol, a new proposal will get passed, and any savings they did make will get gobbled up by providing these new services plus more money will be needed.
You could easily get alway with a Linux/ODF drive in New Zealand simply because of this – the largest IT company in New Zealand is IBM, and what would IBM love to do with Microsoft? push Microsoft completely out of the New Zealand market and grab that $100million which Microsoft makes each year. Same situation could occur in Australia as well.
Believe me, Microsoft doesn’t exactly have too many friends down under.
The latest version of Star Office…is it built off of the latest OpenOffice 2.0 code?
Yeap, StarOffice 8 is built off 2.0 code – well, a fork of it anyway.
When you run OpenOffice.org you have only one choice, wait till a bug is fixed, and if you want that bug fix immediately, you’ll have to download the source, apply the patch, compile the package then deploy it.
Getting support through SUN avoids that; you ring up, lodge a bug, and depending upon your level of support, you’ll find that the bug is fixed, and a convienent package is made available via the sunsolve website.
Well if OSS is paying of tells the future. In Munich they had and still have many problems with there step to Linux. And overall, as someone mentioned before, one should not forget the teaching-costs, there ARE people for whom using Word is hard and who fear everything new.
Personally I do hope that many other City Councils will step on the ODF-train. Without the state and its organisations OSS will never get a breakthrough. The next step for OSS should be Evolution and many other programs on Windows, to make it easier for consumers to use Linux (why should I buy Viesta if everything I need works on Linux).
The problem with alot of city councils is this; they operate by themselves. If they want to move, they should form a coalition, and all work together to migrate together, thus spreading the costs over all the participating players rather than each working by themselves.
With that as well, custom written applications can be standardised; the same application used in each local city council, and again, the cost would be spread over a number of players rather than just each operating independently of each other.
custom written applications can be standardised; the same application used in each local city council, and again, the cost would be spread over a number of players rather than just each operating independently of each other.
So true – I guess one of the main problems is that coordination is hard.
A step in the right direction is that government bodies are starting to require their custom-written software to be released as open-source, which encourages reuse by other government bodies.
The Dutch government even started a sourceforge.net-like site for this (https://www.uitwisselplatform.nl). Now there are some practical issues of course, but this clearly shows some good intentions imho.
It makes sense from all perspectives. I hope this will grow.
Sounds like a great plan, and due to the nature of the internet, why not make it a global setup where by all councils can share their custom written software?
Pretty much, where ever you go in the world, city councils all roughly provide the same sorts of services irrespective or whether they’re located – it would be a co-operative which would run on the basis of generating enough cash to keep things moving along, but not to the point that its making a massive profit.
This is how I’d like decisions to be made. No surrender to lock-in or pressure, no bias or zealotry towards either side, just analysis and conclusion. It’s a bit annoying though that accessibility was ignored.
Even if ODF loses at other places in an objective analysis, it’s still a double victory for it: First, ODF was considered a serious competitor to other formats. Second, where it does win, it’s a sustainabable victory since it’s based on solid ground.
they simply did not respond to our key point – that each MS Office licence was 12 times more expensive than the equivalent StarOffice licence for the public sector. Says it all.
I hope that as part of their savings they are contributing some of it back to the development team. Really, what would be a pittance for them (say 1% of their MS Office costs) would make a _HUGE_ difference for the OOO team. Over a few switches that would really add up and enable a few full-time coders to be added.
From what I understand OOO really needs some refactoring and that would really be helping everyone in the long run. Is OOO even 64-bit clean?
If you read that article you should notice they are swtiching to StarOffice.
That is a very valid point. Much of the price for StarOffice does go to supporting further development of OpenOffice.org since it is the core of StarOffice.
On the other hand, encouraging development of OOo through donations of money (that it could be argued was saved partly because OOo exists) will also lead to faster development of new features such as accessibility. It is possible to donate money with the stipulation that it be used for a particular purpose. This isn’t that much different from the very common practice of hiring programmers to develop software to fill a need that a company has.
In essence such donations could be seen as investing for the [near] future.
Golly gee, they must not be reading getthefacts.com!
What are the overhead costs associated with start-times for StarOffice/OpenOffice? Has anyone done a study?
🙂
What a pleasent surprise. I live and work in Bristol (Actually, I live in South Glos., so I only sort of live in Bristol) and had no idea StarOffice/ODF was even being considered. I guess there really is intelligent life lurking in the Council House on College Green, as much as the idea surprises me.
ODF? Gert lush!
I looked at a case for a small, fairly poor, charity. They have simple office type needs, nothing very demanding.
We bought one decent barebones base unit and put one of the big distros on it. Got a Sempron 64, 1G memory, decent disk, for under 300 sterling. Now, we can take the old donated machines that were running W9x, have them log on over the internal network from a minimal distribution install, sort of thin clients if you like, and also run an internal web server, and for our 300 we have what would have cost us thousands any other way.
You can use that money you saved for charitable purposes. Its a no brainer. To get the same results using MS, you’d have to buy new hardware, then new OS one for each machine, then new licenses for Office, one for each machine….
Yes, give something back. But this is the obvious solution.
1. This was not a switch from MS Office to StarOffice, it was essentially a technology standardisation/consolidation project. Given the situation outlined for the council, the move to one single suite was the beneficial act, not the suite chosen. A straight swap may work out much cheaper to implement.
2. The document on spreadsheet compatability is fuzzy, and does not present a chosen outcome, merly uncosted possibilities. It does not identify that any of the these gov returns were SUBMITTED AND ACCEPTED from Star/OpenOffice which is the only test worth a damn. It also fails to take into consideration future revisions in these sheets that are centrally produced using MS Excel that may break things even more in the future.
3. 15% of users will retain MS Office for compatability reasons. 100% of MS Access users retain use for compatability (but quodos for trying to push databases onto the “right” technology)
4. They have recieved substainal finanical and operational assistance from the OSA – not something that is open to most private enterprises and thus distorts the analysis costs.
5. Training. I didn’t spot anything mentioned about the need to train incoming staff who are used to the MS world.
6. A sort of collary to the above, staff retention may go up as they aquire technical skills that are not yet generally applicable outside Bristol council – Public sector lock-in.
6. Approx 40% of your council tax goes to meeting the extragavent (nowadays) pension commitments of the council. Saving £900k on licensing over 5 years really is pissing in the ocean when it comes to using your money wisely. What I’d really like to see is the benefits management and realisation plan with actuals tracked against it over the next few years. Freedom of Information Act?
1) Although cost was ‘promoted’ as a key plank of their argument, I am sure there were other arguments bought forward but rather than trying to explain to Joe Council Rates payer the technical aspects of it, it was easier to put ‘its cheaper’ on the front of the decision.
2) If you have had people who have used Office for years, then you’ll find that StarOffice/OO.o and retraining would be non-existant – having seen ‘Joe and Jane Average’ in action, running StarOffice/OO.o, the worse case scenario will be the need to have atleast one StarOffice/OO.o guru to answer any questions and possibly give each employee a hand out that covers FAQ in regards to feature to feature transition.
They had no previous organizational commitment to any particular software suite. So when they realized that converting/reformatting documents was a PITA they wanted to standardize. StarOffice was by far cheaper (due to special public sector pricing) and did the functions they needed (which honestly doesn’t sound like they had really high requirements given the use of different/older versions of software previously) so they went with StarOffice. To top it off, they posted their rationale in order to cover their ass.
Yippie. About the only story is StarOffice/OpenOffice.org is suitable for a lot of productivity suite tasks. But should that surprise anyone? Hundreds of thousands of desktops have been migrated over to OpenOffice.org already — why is these 5,500 desktops a story? Wake me up when people choose OOo/SO when it truly is the only choice for them (open standards requirement, cross platform requirement, etc) and the choice is not due to cost.
//Wake me up when people choose OOo/SO when it truly is the only choice for them (open standards requirement, cross platform requirement, etc) and the choice is not due to cost.//
Here you go then. Wakey wakey!
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php?id=954149621&eid=-6787
Now *that* is a good story. They understand the importance of an open format. That is a much better story. Thanks for sharing.
Its nice to see them switch especially since ODF will fit their needs better than other documenting software or “just because”.
How are they going to convert those wordperfect and lotus files to ODF?
Does ODF have text formatting? By this I mean does it do bold, italics, underlines, colors and the such?
What is Sun’s plan for upgrades of Star Office? Are the licences cheaper or the same or is there any fee/license for an upgrade?
Does ODF have text formatting? By this I mean does it do bold, italics, underlines, colors and the such?
Surely you jest…?
Ummmm, they are switching to the ODF format, not ascii text.
If you need to embed an external odf spreadsheet into your wordprocessing document… ODF will do it.
If you need to write in Japanese, it will do that, too.
If you prefer Zapf Chancery to Times New Roman, you’re in luck.
And it’s all done in a way that is friendly to a wide range of productivity products, with their own internal representations of documents. It was designed that way from the ground up with participation from many makers of software in that market. (Except MS, who more or less refused to participate, though they did show up at a couple of meetings, I hear.)
I’m pretty sure that bold and italics are in there somewhere.
Last I looked, Star Office was something like $69 US, though I imagine Bristol is getting their own pricing.
But they could also go with OpenOffice.org, which is essentially the same thing, for $0 US.
Was your post serious, btw? I figured it was probably best to go ahead and answer the questions, but…
Very serious, thats why I put ignorant in the title of my post. I’m very ODF ignorant. I thought ODF was a document format like MS Word. Type up your document, save it as an ODF file then anyone anywhere could open it. I’m starting to get the feeling this is not what it is.
Very serious, thats why I put ignorant in the title of my post. I’m very ODF ignorant. I thought ODF was a document format like MS Word. Type up your document, save it as an ODF file then anyone anywhere could open it. I’m starting to get the feeling this is not what it is.
Actualy, it is exactly like that. Difference here is that anyone who wants to open it has to install ODF compatible software, which is available freely or commercialy to anyone. And since SPEC is open and free (not just royalty free like MSXML Office format), every piece of software can implement it and use it without any worry that vendor will change his mind about free.
One problem with MSOffice formats is that not everyone can open them (not even one 3rd party software opens them perfectly). while here OO.o is free, StarOffice is commercial… and they run on all platforms, not Windows only.
Thank you. That should bring me up to speed about ODF. I guess what I needed was someone to explain it to me in layman’s terms. Not sure why I got modded down for asking, but thanks to all who gave an answer.
ODF is a rich document format, just like Microsoft Word. That’s why it can do all the “embedding spreadsheet” stuff that MS Word docs can do as well. Under the hood, its an XML-based format, though, so its still human-readable.
//I thought ODF was a document format like MS Word. Type up your document, save it as an ODF file then anyone anywhere could open it. I’m starting to get the feeling this is not what it is.//
You are not as ignorant as you think … that is indeed what ODF is.
I guess what put people off when you asked this question “Does ODF have text formatting? By this I mean does it do bold, italics, underlines, colors and the such?” was how you apparently know enough about the net to post on OSNews, but apparently don’t know enough to be able to type “ODF” in a wikipedia search …
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=ODF&fulltext=ful…
which leads you to …
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument
which in turn leads you to …
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument_technical_specifications
which in turn says:
//Content
OpenDocument’s text content format supports both typical and advanced capabilities. Headings of various levels, lists of various kinds (numbered and not), numbered paragraphs, and change tracking are all supported. Page sequences and section attributes can be used to control how the text is displayed. Hyperlinks, ruby text (which provides annotations and is especially critical for some languages), bookmarks, and references are supported as well. Text fields (for autogenerated content), and mechanisms for automatically generating tables such as tables of contents, indexes, and bibliographies, are included as well.
In the OpenDocument format, spreadsheets are an example of a set of tables. Thus, there are extensive capabilities for formatting the display of tables and spreadsheets. Database ranges, filters, and data pilots (known to Excel users as “pivot tables”) are also supported. Change tracking is available for spreadsheets as well.
The graphics format supports a vector graphic representation, in which a set of layers and the contents[1] of each layer is defined. Available drawing shapes include Rectangle, Line, Polyline, Polygon, Regular Polygon, Path, Circle, Ellipse, and Connector. 3D Shapes are also available; the format includes information about the Scene, Light, Cube, Sphere, Extrude, and Rotate (it is intended for use as for office data exchange, however, and not sufficient to represent movies or other extensive 3D scenes). Custom shapes can also be defined.
Presentations are supported. Animations can be included in presentations, with control over the Sound, showing a shape or text, hiding a shape or text, or dimming something, and these can be grouped. In OpenDocument, much of the format capabilities are reused from the text format, simplifying implementations.
Charts define how to create graphical displays from numerical data. They support titles, subtitles, a footer, and a legend to explain the chart. The format defines the series of data that is to be used for the graphical display, and a number of different kinds of graphical displays (such as line charts, pie charts, and so on).
Forms are specially supported, building on the existing XForms standard.
Formatting
The style and formatting controls are numerous, providing a number of controls over how information is displayed.
Page layout is controlled by a variety of attributes. These include page size, number format, paper tray, print orientation, margins, border (and its line width), padding, shadow, background, columns, print page order, first page number, scale, table centering, maximum footnote height and separator, and many layout grid properties.
Headers and footer can have defined fixed and minimum heights, margins, border border line width, padding, background, shadow, and dynamic spacing.
There are many attributes for specific text, paragraphs, ruby text, sections, tables, columns, lists, and fills. Specific characters can have their fonts, sizes, and other properties set. Paragraphs can have their vertical space controlled through attributes on keep together, widow, and orphan, and have other attributes such as “drop caps” to provide special formatting. The list is extremely extensive; see the references (in particular the actual standard) for details.//
You could have answered your own question by typing “ODF” and got to the answer in three mouse clicks, which is a heck of a lot easier to do than posting on OSNews.
Edited 2006-04-01 13:51
//Type up your document, save it as an ODF file then anyone anywhere could –>OPEN<– it. //
(Rant warning)
What’s wrong with PDF ? Have you all been hypnotized by MS?
Why do you want to OPEN a document in a Text Editor if you want to just READ it?
If you produced a book, would you send it out as a editable format like .doc [and the like] so anybody could change it??
You don’t need an Text Editor to read a file. Don’t expect MS to tell you this.
Why not render a document as a Postscript or Pdf? There are free .pdf programs, one is included in OpenOffice.
http://www.pdf995.com/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/ <– GPL, and works great too.
..plus many other commercial packages..
Postscript:
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/doc/GPL/
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/doc/AFPL/
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/doc/cvs/Ps2pdf.htm <– postscript to pdf converter
Acrobat Di$tiller is also available for corporations/people with money to burn.
Edited 2006-04-01 16:01
PDF is good for publishing documents, yes. However, for collaboration on a document, dynamic documents (ie spreadsheets where people can type in their own values), etc.. PDF is not suitable. Though honestly, while PDF is good for a read-only version of a document, the capability of download an ODF doc so I can annotate it, update it, etc might be helpful. There have been quite a few times when I only have a PDF available and would like to append additional information — while most PDF readers will allow me to select and paste text, reconstructing the PDF as an ODF is a pain (though perhaps eveutally PDF impot might be an option?)
//Its nice to see them switch especially since ODF will fit their needs better than other documenting software or “just because”. //
http://www.openoffice.org/product/index.html
//How are they going to convert those wordperfect and lotus files to ODF? //
OpenOffice and StarOffice imports nearly every format known to man. It does a pretty good job too.
//Does ODF have text formatting? By this I mean does it do bold, italics, underlines, colors and the such?//
You have GOT to be kidding, right?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org
http://www.openoffice.org/product/writer.html
http://www.openoffice.org/product/pix/writer-big.png
http://www.openoffice.org/product/calc.html
http://www.openoffice.org/product/pix/calc-big.png
//What is Sun’s plan for upgrades of Star Office? Are the licences cheaper or the same or is there any fee/license for an upgrade?//
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarOffice
Sun’s StarOffice is the commercial version of the GPL application OpenOffice.org. StarOffice is essentially OpenOffice.org with a few extra bells and whistles, plus support from Sun.
http://www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/index.jsp
http://www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/features.jsp
http://www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/enterprise_tools.jsp
http://www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/support.jsp
Edited 2006-04-01 13:27
http://news.com.com/2008-1082_3-5065859.html
Ernie Ball, maker of fine guitars and basses, got nailed on licenses, and went totally open source.
A smaller example of sticking it to MS, showing them they don’t always provide the best value.
Type up your document, save it as an ODF file then anyone anywhere could open it. I’m starting to get the feeling this is not what it is.
In theory, anywhere but on Microsoft products, since MS doesn’t want to let go of its file format monopoly. If MS loses the file formats, it is an important breach in their armor. It’s the giant’s Achilles’ heel. If the world was to use an open file format, MS would lose money/market share on Office, and therefore lose money/market share on the OS.
It’s okay if MS loses money. That’s the free market at work. The money MS won’t make will continue to flow in the economy…
Thats cool. I don’t want to see Microsoft completely disappear as the need for competition is always there. But I can see how ODF would benefit people across platforms. If you and the others are saying a document can be created on one application and OS then can be opened on another application and OS, I definitely see the benefit in it. It was my lack of understanding of exactly what the ODF was which was holding me back.
I modded you back up. That was a good ? and to all a good anwser. He ask a ? because he didn’t know, not to flame or troll.
From the article: “The City of Bristol, as it happens, is a member of the Open Source Academy (OSA), created by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister’s (ODPM) e-Innovations programme in order to encourage local authorities to use open source software.”
Ergo, their choice was preordained.
here in rdj, there is 1 wal-mart and 1 sam’s club, and the brasilians ignore it like the plague. it’s kind of cool to see other countries not be intimidated by the all-powerful american monopolies.
“From the article: “The City of Bristol, as it happens, is a member of the Open Source Academy (OSA), created by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister’s (ODPM) e-Innovations programme in order to encourage local authorities to use open source software.”
Ergo, their choice was preordained.”
Microsoft is a member of OASIS, yes ?
So should one assume they will choose to drop MSXML, and start using the OASIS document format?
Looks like their choice is preordained. :^)