Advocates of free and open source software in Helsinki are pressing the city's IT department to make public the cost calculations they used to argue that a switch to a vendor-independent office suite is too expensive. A member of the city council is considering a demand that the IT department divulges the details.
"I am disappointed on this decision by the IT department to keep the cost details under wraps", comments Green League city council member Johanna Sumuvuori. The council member has been advocating the use of open source by the city administration since October 2010. Following her council resolution the city started a ten-month pilot with using Open Office in February 2011.
Upon conclusion of the pilot program, the IT department last December argued that the switch from a proprietary office suite to a vendor-independent office suite would increase costs by 74 percent. The IT department however did not publish how it got to this number. The head of the city's IT department in April told Joinup that it made little sense for the city "to replace the proprietary office suite by another product. The details are difficult to communicate and understand, and they are only valid for Helsinki."
The Finnish chapter of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) in April used the Freedom of Information act to request that the calculations be made public. Last week, the city denied the request, saying that the calculations are part of the trade secrets from Gartner, an IT consultancy.
"Even if one were to accept that business secrets should be more important than the interests of Helsinki's citizens, the city could and should still release the numbers that it put into the formula. This could be such information as the estimated cost per seat, or estimated annual costs for support", the FSFE said in a press release yesterday. The release quotes Otto Kekäläinen, the organisation's Finland coordinator: "If Helsinki won't explain how they came by their figures, how can anyone take those numbers seriously?"
More information:
IT Viikko news item (in Finnish)
FSFE press release
Reply from the Helsinki city council (pdf, in Finnish)
Comments
Given Gartner's record of prognostication failures, Mr Kekäläinen is entirely correct to question the conclusions the company draws with regard to the costs of moving to an open-source office suite, in the absence of any figures. Nor is it surprising to see the resistance to the migration to open source offered by the municipal IT department, which no doubt enjoys a cozy relationship with a (certain) proprietary provider. I hope the Greens and the local chapter of FSFE will keep pressing on this point !...
Henri