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German city wants freedom of Linux

SCHWAEBISCH HALL, Germany — At first glance, there’s not much cutting-edge about Schwaebisch Hall, a provincial German town of crooked medieval streets whose biggest employer is a savings bank.

By David McHugh
AP business writer Deseret News

But decidedly un-trendy Schwaebisch Hall has jumped to the front of a growing technology movement by replacing Microsoft software on all city computers with open-source applications based on the free, unproprietary Linux operating system.

It’s the first city in the world to do that, local officials claim, saying the switch will save money, improve security and break their dependence on just one supplier.

Companies such as Deutsche Telekom and 7-Eleven, along with government agencies in Germany, France, the United States and other countries, are increasingly relying on open-source software for heavy data lifting, mostly on servers that do Internet and database work.

But Schwaebisch Hall’s decision to adopt it for everything represents a breakthrough, said SuSE, Germany’s leading Linux distributor, which swung the deal to help them switch.

SuSE credits its user-friendly Linux desktop products, which make it finally palatable to the average computer user who wants only to deal with a graphical Windows-like interface.
"This is the first customer that has said, ‘This is the platform that our future is going to be taking shape with,’ " said Stefan Werden, a senior SuSE sales engineer.

Open-source software is based on the principle that anyone using it should be able to scrutinize the source code, or inner workings, to make changes and improvements — making it, at least in theory, both more transparent and more secure.
By contrast, say open-source advocates, corporations such as Microsoft keep source codes secret so they can sell software at a profit.

The open-source software can be freely copied by the more than 400 new Linux users employed by Schwaebisch Hall, which is encouraging them to copy the software on their work computers for home use.

The basic version of Linux, the most popular open-source operating system, was written in 1991 by Finnish programmer Linus Torvalds but for years saw only limited use because it was complex and incompatible with most popular consumer-oriented programs and games.

By year’s end Schwaebisch Hall, working with Nuremberg-based SuSE and IBM Germany, will have switched all 300 desktop computers and 15 servers recording tax payments, business licenses and library checkout records.
Mayor Hermann-Joseph Pelgrim says the key driver is money: "We expect to save a six-figure sum. . . . Our employees are proud to be helping with the consolidation of the city budget."

City officials say it costs $88 to equip each desktop PC with open-source software, compared to $480 for new editions of the equivalents from Microsoft, by far the dominant producer of proprietary desktop software.

That adds up to a one-time savings of $121,000, they said — a lot for a town struggling with declining tax revenue.
"There are plenty of signs right now that the open-source idea is very viable, for the pure and simple reasons people are looking for cost savings," said Charles Homs, senior researcher at Forrester analytical firm. "So it’s not so much a philosophical question of, ‘Do I support open source or don’t I?’ but ‘How can I save money?’ "

But for Matthias Setzer, head of the local Volkshochschule, or community college, which is doing much of the retraining, higher principles are in play.
"As a democratic society, we should not support monopolies," he said, adding a gentle dig: "Freedom of choice — it’s the American way, isn’t it?"

Schwaebisch Hall, in southern Germany, joins the Estremadura region in Spain, where the local government has put on an effort to convert not only government computers, but also home machines in the region of more than a million people by distributing copies of the Linux system.

Companies such as SuSE and Red Hat, based in Raleigh, N.C., bundle Linux-based programs and charge customers for the packaging and support and consulting services.

The German government made a deal in June with IBM and SuSE to outfit Interior Ministry computers with open-source software.
Microsoft Germany spokesman Thomas Baumgaertner insists open-source can get more expensive in the long run because of training costs and add-on such as administrative software for updates.

"The cost analyses are in Microsoft’s favor," he asserted.

SuSE officials wouldn’t say how much they charged Schwaebisch Hall for the deal, under which SuSE will provide technical support for five years. "As the first customer, they got a special price," was all SuSE’s Werden would say.

One hurdle for Schwaebisch Hall: Linux’s reputation as difficult to use on desktops. Pelgrim, a self-described non-techie, led the way by having his computer changed over first.

"From what I can see, Linux is something good and no big change from Windows," said librarian Elisabeth Guechida, who keeps the library’s PCs running though not a computer specialist. "There’s a mouse, a keyboard and icons. I personally find it interesting to learn new things."

http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,480031938,00.html

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Out of Shadows

Open-source software is not only becoming acceptable. It’s also becoming a big business

By WILLIAM M. BULKELEY
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Free software is going mainstream.

Open-source software, developed outside the corporate framework and available at no cost to anyone who wants to download it, has long been considered by some to be somehow untrustworthy or inadequate. But that perception is giving way to an appreciation of its improving quality and increasing versatility.

And, perhaps most important, companies have found ways to make money by providing services to open-source-software users, or by packaging this free software with products they sell. With the profit motive driving its promotion, free software is cropping up all over corporate and government computers.

Among the recent converts: Consumer-products giant Unilever PLC announced in January that it will start using Linux, the free operating-system software, on all its server computers around the world. Sun Microsystems Inc. has switched all its 30,000 workers from Microsoft Office to Sun’s version of the free Open Office product for desktop applications like word processing and spreadsheets. And semiconductor maker Texas Instruments Inc. uses the free database software MySQL to track bugs as it develops new chips.

Beyond ‘Barefoot Hippies’

To be sure, many corporate customers remain skeptical that free software is capable of running complex operations. Even vendors of open-source software concede, for instance, that proprietary database programs like those made by [ Oracle Corp. of Redwood Shores, Calif., or International Business Machines Corp. of Armonk, N.Y., have more features than their free competitors. And companies are still developing the software tools for managing free software in corporate computer rooms, while such tools are widely available for Windows and Unix products.

Still, corporate buyers say free software has gotten much better in the past year. The open-source community, which creates free software and cooperatively improves it by passing along code upgrades over the Internet, has taken big steps in making it simpler to use and getting it to work better in networks with proprietary software. That’s partly because major companies like IBM, Sun and Hewlett-Packard Co., awakened to the profit opportunities in providing hardware and services linked to free software, are paying some of their programmers to work on Linux and other open-source software. And smaller companies such as Red Hat Inc., of Durham, N.C., have formalized the distribution of Linux, making it easier for corporations to buy standard versions and get consulting help.

The fact that profitable companies are selling and servicing Linux and other open-source software reassures many chief information officers who were put off by the perception that Linux programmers were "barefoot, navel-pierced hippies," as former software entrepreneur Frank Ingari once labeled them.

Motor-home maker Winnebago Industries Inc. bought an open-source software program called Bynari to manage its e-mail, after IBM recommended the program as an alternative to Microsoft Exchange. Including the cost of IBM servers Winnebago bought to run the program, "we’re paying around $25,000, which was one-third what we would have paid" for a system based on Microsoft Exchange, says David Ennen, technical-support manager, who adds he might have decided differently if not for IBM’s backing.

IBM also encourages customers to run Linux, to boost sales of its mainframes and other servers that use the software, some of which don’t run Microsoft Corp.’s Windows. Dan Fry, director of the Linux Technology Center at IBM, says that over the past four years, "companies have gone from getting comfortable with Linux to getting aggressive in figuring out how free software can provide bottom-line dollars."

At the same time, years of success using Linux are now leading more chief information officers to investigate and adopt other free software programs. "Five years ago, you wouldn’t have had anyone but Linux," says Marten G. Mickos, president of MySQL AB, which both gives away and sells the MySQL database program. MySQL, headquartered in Uppsala, Sweden, counts major companies like Cisco Systems Inc., Yahoo Inc. and Xerox Corp. among its customers.

Indeed, even just two years ago, Linux and Apache, a software system for Web servers, were among the few free programs used in mainstream businesses. And they were used mostly for peripheral functions like file sharing and print serving, or running firewalls.

Mike Prince, chief information officer for retail chain Burlington Coat Factory Warehouse Corp., says that as recently as six months ago, Linux was too complex for people who weren’t computer programmers. But since then, he says, a new release of the free Mozilla browser and the improved Star Office program from Sun have made Linux more than adequate on the desktop. "Over the holidays, I switched from Windows [to Linux] on my home computer, and my computer-illiterate brother-in-law used it with no instructions," he says.

Finding a Place

While enthusiasm for free software is building, it still varies from industry to industry. "Some have already made the shift, others have started to dabble, and some are still asking, ‘What’s Linux?’" says Martin Fink, vice president of Hewlett-Packard, of Palo Alto, Calif., which is selling billions of dollars of computers running Linux. He says manufacturing and transportation companies have been slow to look at free software, but cash-strapped Wall Street financial firms are leading users. Many retailers use Linux as the operating system for their thousands of point-of-sale systems, avoiding licensing fees for Windows-based cash registers.

Linux is quickly becoming the dominant operating system for some new technologies. Take blade servers — powerful computers in which dozens of Intel circuit cards are racked vertically inside a container, replacing several separate servers. IBM says 70% of the blade servers it sold last year ran Linux software. And in the high-performance and supercomputing world, researchers are increasingly using grid technology, linking numerous PCs or servers in a single system, employing the Linux operating system.

Users of open-source software often say the cost advantage was what first attracted them, but ultimately they switched because they could get equal or better performance compared with more-expensive software. Calvin Pearson, director of information technology at Westone Laboratories Inc., a maker of medical devices, says he found that both MySQL’s and Oracle’s database software could handle "double or triple" the amount of customer data that SQL Server, the Microsoft product, could. But he says that the Oracle product would have cost $138,000, while his cost for MySQL was "how much time you have to spend reading the manual."

On the desktop, not many big companies have converted from Microsoft Office, but at Sun all employees now use Star Office, and "it works just fine," says Curtis Sasaki, vice president for desktop solutions. He says that "initially there were complaints," particularly from "some power users in finance who did custom macros" — small programs for handling repetitious tasks. But he says a new version of Star Office gives them the capabilities they need. Among the improvements Sun, of Palo Alto, Calif., made to the Open Office product was greater ability to create documents or presentations that could be read by Microsoft Office users, and to read documents created on Microsoft Office.

Pauley’s, a British food-distribution unit of Clayton Dubilier & Rice Inc., adopted Star Office to avoid buying hundreds of PCs. David Lane, a Pauley’s director, says he uses Sunray terminals connected to Sun servers and runs Star Office on all of them. "We’ve had absolutely no problems at all" putting 300 users on Star Office, he says. "Licensing is $35 [per user], as opposed to hundreds of dollars for Microsoft." In addition, Mr. Lane says he likes being able to copy Star Office free to employees’ computers, so they can use it when they’re at home. "They go home and do some work, so we get some benefit."

Sun Microsystems decided to back the Open Office desktop system because it hopes that customers will reduce their spending for Microsoft software and have money left over to spend on Sun’s hardware. Sun sells its version as Star Office for $25 to $75 per user, compared with $150 to $350 for high-volume corporate customers of Microsoft Office.

‘We Are Making Money’

Other companies have different strategies for making money from open-source software.

MySQL AB gives away its database software to anyone who wants to download it. Those who acquire it free must agree to document and share any improvements they make. If a company doesn’t want to share its improvements, MySQL will sell them the same software for $395 for a single copy — far less than what database rivals Oracle, Microsoft and IBM charge. Some 4,000 companies pay MySQL a license fee, compared with some four million users of the free version. The paying customers include giants like router maker Cisco, which has incorporated MySQL into five of its products for such tasks as logging traffic.

MySQL, which is closely held, declines to disclose finances, but Mr. Mickos says "we are making money on this model." MySQL got a boost last year when eWeek, a trade publication, released the results of a test that showed MySQL equaling Oracle’s new 9i database and far surpassing databases from IBM and Microsoft, of Redmond, Wash., in a speed test.

Another company trying to make money with open-source software is Boston-based Ximian Inc. Ximian gives away a program that makes desktop Linux, normally a text-based system, look something like Windows through the use of icons. It also gives away a collaboration program called Evolution for group e-mail and calendar management. For customers who want to connect Evolution to Microsoft Exchange, Ximian charges $69 for Connector software. It also sells a corporate software tool called Red Carpet for managing installations of open-source software. Then there’s Bynari Inc., a Dallas company that has combined open-source and proprietary software to create a package that is designed to replace Microsoft Exchange. "The cost is one-fifth of Exchange, around $20 per user," says Hyun Kim, Bynari’s president, who is a former IBM consultant.

Microsoft is fighting back in part by emphasizing the potential hidden costs of open-source software. Last year, it commissioned market researcher International Data Corp. to examine the total cost of ownership of open-source software. IDC concluded that for many users, free software actually costs more over five years than Windows, because of the need for expensive experts to fit it to each user’s needs. But corporate buyers say free software is getting simpler to use, reducing the need for such experts. And their growing enthusiasm for it suggests this isn’t an issue that’s going to hamper the spread of open-source software.

— Mr. Bulkeley is a staff reporter in The Wall Street Journal’s Boston bureau.

Write to William M. Bulkeley at [email protected]

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