[Fsfe-uk] Newham: Richard Steel speaks (Techworld)

[James Heald]

Kieran McCarthy, who often writes for the Register, has serveral quotes 
from Richard Steel, the head of ICT at Newham, in this piece at Techworld:

http://www.techworld.com/news/index.cfm?fuseaction=displaynews&NewsID=916


Extract:

 “Linux is going to have increasing market share in the next few years 
but it is still immature and for us it was not an acceptable migration.” 
The audit of Newham’s systems revealed what Steel already suspected: “It 
has been a very piecemeal investment, project-based developments and not 
planned investments, so we have loads of different versions of software 
and we want to move to a position where it can be sustained, a known 
situation with a revenue commitment and regular technology refresh.”

The budget for new IT systems had come in small chunks over a long 
period of time and it was beginning to get expensive to run. Before the 
OGC came up with its pilots, Newham was already looking at open source 
as a way of reducing costs, Steel says. The pilot scheme however gave a 
valuable opportunity to stand back and review the entire infrastructure. 
“We found out we were already running 16 open source systems,” he 
explains, “but our core infrastructure was e-mail and desktops.”

If Newham decided to go completely open source, it would have to upgrade 
its existing infrastructure and that would prove too expensive. This 
point, when explained to one journalist, appeared in print as the main 
reason why Newham had decided to go with Microsoft.

“Newham Borough Council has shelved its Linux desktop trials and will 
remain with Microsoft, citing the cost of upgrading its Microsoft 
Exchange Server software as a primary cause,” read the first paragraph. 
But Steel claims his colleague was misquoted and that the reasons were 
far more complex.

“Open source was there, okay, software like OpenOffice is very similar 
but when it comes to bringing macros forward, you can’t, you have to 
redevelop it. Plus, we have lots of programs that are integrated with 
other products and with suppliers. If we change, in many cases they will 
have to change their products - that can make things very tricky.”

And there remains the classic case of “look and feel”. “People are quite 
sensitive to small changes,” says Steel, foreseeing months of phone 
calls from council workers trying to familiarise themselves with the 
basics of a new operating system. There also remain some areas that open 
source simply hasn’t provided the software for yet. When you add all 
these things together, he says, open source starts to look less 
promising. “In the past, we have done the trailblazing, now maybe it’s 
time to let someone else take the risks.”

...

“We made what we believe to be the best decision, the most pragmatic.” 
No matter which way you look at it, it is hard to disagree with that 
statement, no matter how the Linux conspiracy theorists would like to.