English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

I started to research how beneficial open source solutions would be for a school. I was aimed at looking at some figures. What I discovered was spidertoos.com. Here this website for Linux training experts has an article about the cost savings. With the current economical times and the want to reduce costs this could be a key focus in our white paper as to why to switch to open source. One of the focuses of the article is to use Open Office instead of Microsoft Office. This article talks about the cost of purchasing 185 licenses for Microsoft Office as compared to the $0 cost of purchasing 185 licenses of Open Office. The article also mentions using free antivirus instead of an expensive subscription base antivirus. The solution they mention is the open source CalmAV. Once again this creates a large savings because it is free. This alone could result in a savings of over $4,000 a year. This article talks about using open source servers too. There once again are huge savings. The fact that many of these UNIX or Linux operating systems running on the server require less system resources means less expensive equipment must be purchased. When all of this is combined, number wise open source is much less expensive than the Microsoft Solutions.