Is open source software - collaboratively written and free of licence fees - cheaper than proprietary software? A series of government-sponsored trials has produced an official answer to this intensely debated question and the results are interesting: open source application software used for specific tasks such as word-processing is often fit for purpose but the operating system Linux is often not.
Over the past year, three large local authorities have used £1.3m from what was the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister to try to reach conclusions through the Open Source Academy.
In the largest trial, Bristol city council installed Sun's StarOffice on 5,500 desktops last July, and it has since been moving staff across from Corel WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 (previously used by 60% of staff) and Microsoft Office (40%), a process that will be completed this summer. Staff continue to use Microsoft's proprietary Windows operating system, and StarOffice consists of an open source core, OpenOffice, with some extra proprietary software and services.
The verdict? StarOffice is cheaper to licence, even given the preferential rates negotiated with both Sun and Microsoft by the Treasury's Office of Government Commerce.
Bristol calculated a five-year total cost of ownership of £670,010 for StarOffice, compared with £1,706,684 for Microsoft Office. This was despite budgeting half as much in implementation and support costs for Microsoft because many users were already on its systems.
The difference may turn out to be even greater, says IT strategy team leader Gavin Beckett. "We discovered that things were simpler than we thought they'd be," he says of the switch. "We always argued that a lot of the risk was perceived risk, rather than real risk."
Deployment of StarOffice has cost £10,000 rather than a budgeted £87,000, as Bristol found it could re-use an existing tool. In addition, most staff have needed 30 to 60 minutes of re-training rather than the planned day's-worth.
"Probably 90% of the product can be used identically," says Beckett of StarOffice 7, the version installed by Bristol, compared with Microsoft Office 2003. He says the gap has closed further with the recently-released StarOffice 8, to which Bristol may move, and OpenOffice 2.0, the equivalent open source version.
In negotiations, Microsoft told Bristol that it could recover the software's costs through the efficiency savings it would allow. But, Beckett argues, "you can become more efficient using any IT system. We make people more efficient every time we visit them".
Another reason for moving is Star- Office/OpenOffice's use of the Open Document Format, which is open for use by other software: earlier this month, the format was adopted by the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO).
Up to 15% of users in Bristol's affected departments will stay with Microsoft Office, often because they need to swap files with central government departments that use only Microsoft formats. Others use specialist software that requires Microsoft Office, although Beckett says some software works with StarOffice without advertising it, and other suppliers are converting their software.
OpenForum Europe and the Institute for IT Training, two of the partners in the Open Source Academy project, have started Certified Open, a scheme to collect information on what operating systems and application software are required by specialist local government software. Graham Taylor, director of OpenForum Europe, says that buying specialist software can lead councils to suffer "hidden lock-in".
This hit Birmingham city council's attempt to move 134 library staff to a full set of open source software, including SuSE's Linux operating system, OpenOffice 2.0 and web-browser Firefox. The city's library management software, Galaxy, works only on Microsoft Windows. DS, the supplier, was prepared to produce a Linux version, but this would have taken too long and cost too much for the trial.
Les Timms, IT manager at the city's IT provider, Service Birmingham, says niche suppliers understandably focus on their area of expertise rather than on providing software for multiple operating systems. Staff have stayed with Microsoft Windows XP, although they have moved fairly smoothly to OpenOffice 2.0.
The city also had mixed results with public access computers: after trials in three libraries, it is making 130 all open source, although 66 used for education will use Windows and OpenOffice 2.0.
The trial found other problems with Linux, with public-access computers sometimes failing to recognise diskettes and memory sticks or incorrectly saying these were full. "There were quite a lot of problems getting it working," says Timms, although this was achieved.
"I would caution against snap decisions saying, 'let's go fully open source in this area'," Timms advises other local authorities. "You may not need as many people, as the technology is very reliable, but you do need a depth of expertise."
However, Service Birmingham has identified several staff with previously-unknown open source skills, developed in their spare time. "Quite unusually for a local government environment, when I talked to people about it, lots of people wanted to join the project," says Timms.
Cheshire county council also experienced mixed results in trying to extend the life of PCs dating from the late 1990s, by installing Linux and open source web-browsers through which users access central computer systems. Around a dozen staff are using the reconditioned machines - with new keyboards and screens to disguise their vintage - with only one such computer failing so far.
However, the council originally considered testing 400 old PCs from social services; it eventually tested around two dozen, and successfully converted around half of these.
One reason for the reduced numbers, says Bev Roberts, head of ICT strategy and policy, is that many social services staff are moving to mobile working: "The department was saying, 'we need to replace some of these old PCs with portables or notebooks'."
In some cases, there were compatibility problems between Linux and the new screens but, in others, the difficulties were lower-tech. "We found the plastic was really brittle," says Roberts. "The on-off switches were breaking, the plastic was shattering." She hopes that hardware made this decade will be more durable, which may allow Cheshire to keep PCs in service for longer than five years.
An opportunity to test this may arise because Cheshire, like many local authorities, was given one-off funding to equip libraries with public-access computers around four years ago. "They are getting old now, and there never has been the budget put aside to replace those," says Roberts - Birmingham's library trial may be applicable. Weblink
Detailed reports on the trials: www.opensourceacademy.org.uk/solutions/casestudies