DK: Ministry leaves out open source savings in report on Police budget
In a report requested by the parliament on the Police budget, the Danish ministry of Finance has left out recommendations by its consultants to switch to open source, which would result in savings of a 100 million kroner (about 13 million Euro), Danish newspapers report.
The omission was found by the Danish Association for Open Source Service suppliers (OSL), which compared the report sent to parliament with the original report by McKinsey, a consultancy. They recommend switching from the proprietary office system and relational database management system to open source alternatives OpenOffice and MySQL.
According to McKinsey, the costs for switching to OpenOffice would be between 2 and 7.5 million kroner (between 270,000 and a million Euro), depending on the effort for integration and the number of office macros that need to be converted.
"This is an investments that is paid back in a few months", OSL writes in a public letter published Tuesday.
The trade group is asking the ministry why these recommendations were left out. "In Sweden and in France, the police is saving millions by switching to open source. This point, made also by McKinsey, is ignored by the ministry."
A member of the Danish parliament, Lone Dybkjær, has asked the ministry to clarify the omissions. The ministry's budget report includes the McKinsey document as an annex. However Dybkjær suspects an internal struggle at the ministry is the reason for leaving out the potential open source savings, she told Business DK, part of the Danish daily Berlingske Tidene, this Wednesday. "There is no valid explanation why we should not use open source. These are not trivial amounts."
The ministry could not immediately provide a comment. "We're looking into it", said a spokesperson.
More information:
Announcement by the Ministry of Finance (in Danish)
Statement by OSL (in Danish)
Business DK news item (in Danish)
Version 2 news item (in Danish)
Computerworld news item (in Danish)
Comon news item (in Danish)