[Linux-aus] New Federal Govt's Education/PC plans

[Paul Coldrey]

> Think of the time and cost involved in purely the retraining of
> thousands of "Users" in Open Source Software.... Then there is the 
> millions of documents and files that would need to be converted to Open
> formats. They still use Lotus Suite for a large number of the files...
> Sigh, Open Office wont even open these documents. The Cost of just
> migrating the data would be enormous. And this is when you consider you
> are not paying for software licences. Man power Costs alone would be
> prohibitive. And this is just One Department.
>   
Isn't this exactly the argument FOR open software standards,.... yes 
your world is shit at the moment and it will continue to be so forever 
if the status quo is maintained. But if you your data were in open 
formats then it would be accessible forever. Plus, one day some of your 
proprietary tools will fade into obscurity and the cost of recovering 
all that data will rise exponentially. The problem doesn't get any 
smaller or cheaper with time. It's a bit like doing crappy patches to 
code that needs to be refactored completely. Sooner or later you will 
end up re-writing the code it's just a question of how much money you 
waste in the meantime. Perhaps this analogy can be stretched a little 
further:  if you do re-write the code, do it right the next time,..... 
there's no point re-writing XP to get Vista, just as there is no point 
changing from Lotus proprietary formarts to M$ proprietary formats

Cheers,

    Paul