Reply in-line :-
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 17:54, Rony gnulinuxist@gmail.com wrote:
vinay sreenivasa wrote:
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However, while we do not stress on the cost angle, we cannot ignore it either. For eg.when governments can use Open Office and save lakhs of rupees on license fee for MS office, they should be going for Open Office and should not spend p ublic money on proprietary software.
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Even if Open Office or other FOSS packages are free as in beer, please take into account the cost of installation, training and annual support for thousands of PCs in located diverse areas.
Hi all, I support Rony's views. There are few challenges for a good implementation specifically with the scale that Vinay you are looking at.
Any implementation is bound to have X.org, Openoffice.org, GNOME at the very basic level (apart from one or few educational softwares)
Alongwith the above also have to make a choice of distribution to help maintain.
apart from system-admin issues of working with diverse range of hardware and networking infrastructure you would also have to have developers and techies report, patch and help maintain some packages at least at the distribution level.
While some of it could be outsourced, but some resources would need to be in-house.
One of the other issues which I see outright is documentation. Unlike other software development ideologies which give a change once 4-5 years the changes are fast and furious,
Examples galore from the shift to pulseaudio http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulseaudio to something simplest such as the change to the recent change of gnome-volume-control or gnome-media. http://live.gnome.org/media-applet
The change may be for the better to worse but knowing, understanding and communicating to your users would also be interesting.
It is all fascinating and interesting but yes, one would have to invest in these kind of resources.
-- Regards,
Rony.
GNU/Linux ! No Viruses No Spyware Only Freedom.