I work in a Council for a London borough. It is a large organisation, with several thousand staff, many of whom are deployed off campus, or engage in remote access working. Like many such organisations, the Council's software architecture is Microsoft based, and I recently proposed to the Chief Executive that we consider switching to open source as well as to thin client networking. This was a little impertinent of me, as I have no connection to the ICT department. Anyway, my argument was that this would boost our efficiencies in terms of TCO (mostly being able to resign from the habitual hardware upgrade cycles, and let go of exorbitant licensing fees) as well as would yield better productivity without having to put up with the frequent MS Word crashes, Explorer hangs and Outlook Exchange server disconnections (the Council is using NT4.0).
Not surprisingly, the ICT department want to cover their arse, so I have received an email from the "infrastructure manager" informing me that he will send me the strategy documents outlining why open source would
not work for this Council, and also the decisions relating to their promotion of the thin client approach, using Citrix.
I firmly believe that GNU/Linux - either by itself, or in conjunction with FreeBSD and OpenBSD (the latter especially for the servers and security features) - is capable of doing the job. It would need to be able to provide reliable desktop and office suite application environments for several thousand people (approx. 4,000), both on-site as well as Councillors who want remote access to email and office applications, and off-campus departments scattered around the borough. It would also require the ability to be applied to a thin client architecture in the near future. I was thinking that either Suse or Fedora professional (really for the support factors and for all the eye candy and integrated applications), but I am sure that Slackware or even Debian would be well suited for the job.
My questions refer then to:
(1) Can GNU/Linux scale to the extent required, and which distro is most suited for this task?
(2) What are the likely pitfalls to be encountered?
(3) What is the
definitive conclusion on these TCO debates and MS-generated FUD reports?
(4) What alternatives to Citrix are there in open source land?
(5) What would be persuasive arguments to make bearing in mind that these ICT folk want to cover their arses and have expertise and experience with MS but not with open source, and hence may be rather nervous about possible loss of status and the learning curve?
(6) Are there solid open source case histories and best practice examples that could be drawn on for examples as successful alternatives to MS?
(7) The software and architecture would have to be able to work with PDAs and public-access kiosks (such as in street-based information booths and public libraries) as well as some school systems, and with these additional considerations in mind, is open source still feasible?
There will probably be more questions in the weeks and months to come as the conversations with the ICT department folk continue. Given their reluctance to make the switch (especially as they would have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo), I am unlikely to be able to convince them, but I would like to make their resistance that much harder and even more absurd to defend and maintain, if possible
Cheers
