http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/tech/A6AB17B34B1BA81ECC2573160079BFBC

This is an abstract from the above article from ComputerWorld magazine in New Zealand. There seems to be some misconceptions portrayed here and I would like to address them.

<extract>
“[But] there are issues which come with some open-source products,” says the AA’s CIO, Doug Wilson.

“The first, with Open Office, is compatibility — sharing information with Microsoft products, both within the organisation and with external parties. A dual world is complicated and, whether people like it or not, Microsoft is a standard.

“Second, you have no idea where open-source products are going, whereas vendors like Microsoft provide a roadmap for the future.

“It’s about futures, planning and integration.”

Wilson says Microsoft Office is not any cheaper, but that it was almost impossible to work out what open-source was actually costing because of issues such as incompatibility and training.

The AA’s agreement with Microsoft, for around 500 seats, includes home-usage rights, so staff can use the software at home. “That’s important,” says Wilson. The AA has 1,000 staff.

Microsoft Office will be rolled out over the next few months.
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Let me address each of the so-called issues in order:

1. The issue of compatibility is raised and the responsibility is put on OpenOffice.org to be compatible with MS Office. There is always going to be some compatibility issues when trying to implement closed, proprietary formats. Is this problem because of OpenOffice.org and the ODF format - no, it is because Microsoft keeps their proprietary formats secret so guesses have to be made.

Nobody addresses the issue as 'why does MS Office have compatibility issues - it can't render ODF properly?'. People need to realise that all applications tend to have their own formats unless using an agreed standard, which is now ODF. As more applications implement the ODF standard, the compatibility issues become a non-issue. The only problem remains with closed formats such as Microsoft binary formats and the semi-open OOXML format.

2. The second issue raised was that of roadmaps and direction for the future being lacking in open source, and OpenOffice.org in particular. I am not sure why they had trouble finding the OpenOffice.org roadmap as it is on the public website at:

http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Features

http://development.openoffice.org/releases/

The question should be more the accuracy of roadmaps as we have seen in the past with Microsoft display features or products to come out at a certain point, but almost always going beyond those guidelines.

The reasoning for roadmaps was for future planning, but they forget to consider the major future concerns such as vendor lock-in, format accessibility, and data retention. Microsoft Office is already dropping builtin support for their older formats, so how long before they drop support for "modern" formats in use today?

3. Costing was another point that was raised, but it was not because MS Office was cheaper. The reasoning was that open source software was not able to give costings for compatibility issues or for training requirements.

The first part of this logic that is interesting is that they refer to Microsoft Office (application) when they say it is NOT cheaper, but they refer to open source software (general category) when they refer to problems with compatibility and costing problems. Why don't they refer to each application at the same level when doing the comparisons to stop inferring points on all open source software?

Secondly, what is the problem with working out training costs for any software application? You source a training company/person and then calculate staff numbers and resources required and start assigning dollar values to each variable until you formulate the total training costs? Whether you are using MS Office or OpenOffice.org does not change this process, just who you approach to do the training. Before anybody suggests that there is no training (or support) for OpenOffice.org, there are lists of many businesses on the OpenOffice.org website who offer services for this open source application.

So what is this all about? It seems that the AANZ was doing a bit of negotiation with Microsoft for licensing. One of the selling points was getting their staff free use of MS Office at home. It is interesting to note that the CIO referred to in the article used to work for Microsoft, but more interesting is the fact that many companies are looking at these examples of licensing negotiation and taking the wrong approach to future-proofing their software. They see all the fear, uncertainty and doubt(FUD) that the article portrayed and instead of questioning the industry and what is available, they do the same licensing negotiation to get cheaper software applications. How easily they forget that cheaper does not always mean better.