On Wed, 2007-02-14 at 04:40 +0000, Ciaran O'Riordan wrote:
Brighton, UK (there was an article about this collapsing, but apparently it didn't)
Eh, I've never heard of a project in Brighton :D
The was supposed to be a roll-out in Birmingham libraries - that was the scheme that collapsed. They spent more than €130,000 more on the free software solution than a proprietary upgrade would have cost, and the report says the scheme wouldn't ever have recouped that cost:
http://www.opensourceacademy.gov.uk/solutions/casestudies/birminham-city-cou...
They were supposed to setup 1500 PCs, with a €600,000 budget (roughly), but only managed to setup 200:
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39284683,00.htm
There was a technical report available at some stage, which was hilarious (they couldn't get floppy drives to work, and ended up writing scripts to control them - users ended up complaining because the scripts were deleting all the data on the discs...).
There was a roll-out of StarOffice at Bristol, and although I've read online that it "failed" I think that was simply confusion with the disaster at Birmingham - it was a very different situation. They made big savings moving 5500 desktops to StarOffice, because they previously weren't using a standard Office suite - they had a mix.
Cheers,
Alex.