The Hindu Business Line : How much does Linux save for its users?

EVERYONE knows that Linux is an inexpensive software tool. But how much do you save if you opt for it? That question has been nagging us for sometime.

While claims abound, users haven't audibly vouched for it. So Business Line sounded out industry folk and made some inferences. That provided us an answer to our question: a big company's savings - through using Linux - could run into several crores of rupees.

Mr S.V. Sriram, President and Chief Operating Officer, Accel-ICIM Systems & Services, says that Linux helps cut software purchase costs by about 90 per cent. According to him, CDs with Linux operating system and related applications typically come for a few hundred rupees.

Mr Javed Tapia, Director at the Indian arm of Red Hat Linux, a Linux distributor, says that the Linux operating system and applications, including a spreadsheet, a word processor, browser, email client and presentation software, cost Rs 1,000. He feels that a figure of 90 per cent, as discount compared to other software, is conservative.

According to Mr Tapia, "A copy of proprietary spreadsheet software alone could cost you in excess of Rs 10,000."

Proprietary software is that whose source code is not shared with users by developers. It means that any changes that users want in the software cannot be made without the consent and help of the developer. Linux is an example of open source software and its source code is available for public use.

Both Accel-ICIM and Red Hat Linux recently helped Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) move from a Unix system to Linux. LIC has 2,048 branches. With 10 PCs to a branch on average and about 2,500 servers across its locations, it has a total of about 23,000 machines. Assuming it did buy all those Linux-based software applications along with the Linux operating system, it would have spent Rs 2.3 crore, given Red Hat's cost estimate per PC. If the estimate of 90 per cent savings is accurate, LIC would have ended up spending Rs 23 crore had it chosen proprietary software.

However, a source from LIC's software development team says that the company could have spent as little as a few thousands of rupees across all branches for the operating system (OS) alone. He explains that there is no licensing system for the OS as Linux is governed by the GNU (GNU is Not Unix - a recursive acronym) licence where one corporate licence allows you to make as many copies, as long as the usage was within the system.

Also, says Mr Tapia, LIC opted for computers with no processing power (or dumb terminals) where it saw little sophisticated usage. In such instances, extra software was not needed, hence reducing costs even further.

Mr D.D. Singh, Chief-IT at LIC, declined to comment on savings it had generated by using Linux. According to him, "LIC was using Unix prior to the Linux migration. We needed to upgrade the hardware as our servers were over eight years old." Its branches were running on Unix and it continued with hardware upgrades so that it could use newer versions of Unix.

Says Mr Singh, "When it was time to re-haul the hardware, we decided to move to Linux (on the software front)." He says that the cost factor didn't influence the decision since the hardware was anyway being bought afresh. LIC's in-house IT team led the migration to Linux and completed it in three months.