[balug-talk] Linux computers for the police! With Link

[Greg Herlein]

The problem is that the City (nearly any organization) is unlikely to
find the cash to do this easily.  A company that was aiming to refit
*many* City PD could probably amortize the costs across a big enough
base to be able to offer a price to the City that they can afford and
yet still make it cost-effective (read: make  money on the deal) but
for a group of Linux-folk to try this... well, making money (read:
covering costs) on it would be really hard I think.

I say all this as a dedicated Linux user and developer - and I've been
a linux gy since 1994, and I ran my own (linux-based) consulting
company here in SF for years.  Doing a City agency is simply a much
bigger deal.

Greg

On 10/9/06, Joseph Brenner <doom at kzsu.stanford.edu> wrote:
>
> Greg Herlein <gherlein at herlein.com> wrote:
>
> > Is linux better? Obviously.  Would it make fiduciary sense to change
> > the City PD to Linux?  Probably not.
>
> Most likely. But then, the actual question is whether the 95 => XP
> upgrade is cheaper than making the (superficially) bigger leap to,
> say, KDE on SUSE.
>
> My presumption would be that standing still is not an option (or not a
> good one).  Some people are presuming that they have some sort of
> custom applications running on Windows (e.g. database front end), but
> I don't think we know that (e.g., they might have ported it to a web
> front-end already).
>
> If most of what they're doing is browser/spreadsheet/word processor
> work, then the technical problems are relatively small; the main
> difficulty is then some re-training.
>
> At a guess, the re-training is the hard part, which isn't necessarily
> bad news if your firm gets the contract to do it.
>
>
>
>