Software licensing costs and unilateral licensing terms have pushed many companies to seek new solutions for obtaining software for day to day business. Large organizations are either researching or already moving to Free software both in Finland and abroad. Some of the biggest countries of the world are running projects for wider adoption of Linux. The Chinese government is funding a Chinese Linux distribution, and many believe that the unified platform for Chinese e-government will be based on Linux (Shen 2005). Many government organizations have adopted Linux, such as the German national Railway Deutsche Bahn (Heise 2005), In Finland, many universities such as Helsinki University and Helsinki University of Technology have rolled out Linux on significant part of workstations to replace Microsoft Windows.

On the server side, Free software has had a strong position for a decade. For example, the Free Apache web server has been the most popular web server since 1996, currently being more popular than all competing web servers together (Netcraft 2005). Linux is the most popular Internet server in Europe (Zoebelein 1999). Other very successful Free Internet servers include BIND, the most popular domain name server and Majordomo, the most popular mailing list system (Castellucio 2000).

Desktop workstations are currently the field of most interesting competition between proprietary and Free software. Microsoft Windows clearly dominates the desktops of both homes and companies, claiming to have over 95% market share of desktop operating systems (OS). Because there is no requirement to pay anyone or register anywhere when running Free OS:es, they cannot be counted. However, practical experience shows that Microsoft is leading the desktop market and has at least nearly as high market share as estimated. Historically, Microsoft has been able to use and abuse its dominating position on desktop operating systems to put down competition using “embrace and extend” tactics. As software licenses can easily form half of the price of a workstation, Free software could result in considerable savings.

Free licensing is more than just the technicalities of coding. A growing number of researchers see that the Free licensing model and its way of collaboration across organizational borders could extend to production of other information products (Benkler 2002. Cole & Lee 2003). Feasibility of Free licensing outside software has also been practically proved, as Free licensing has been used in texts outside software documentation. Wikipedia is the worlds largest Free encyclopedia. Having currently more than a million articles, it is also the largest encyclopedia ever. Project Gutenberg is a huge collection of classical literature with expired copyrights. Smaller projects have experimented with Free licensing in original photography (openphoto.net 2005) and music.

Traditionally, IT-projects have been run manager led, top down and with strict timetables. Brooks (1995) laid out the principles of running a traditional software project in the Mythical Man-Month. The first edition was published in 1975, when software development was a rare skill. Brooks’ ideas are still vivid, having achieved a status of a proverb among IT-professionals, such as “adding programmers to late project makes it later”. Software projects fail because of the tar pit effect, the sum of many simple problems (3-9) and these problems cannot be tackled simply by adding man power (16-17) because of added requirements on communication (babel tower, p 73-83). Even though there is no one single method to solve all these problems, the main forces keeping the project together are main architects conceptual integrity and separating designing from implementation (255 – 257).

The basic theory of how a Free software project works was put on paper by Raymond in 1997 in the first version of the Cathedral and the Bazaar. He noticed that many Free software projects contradicted the traditional wisdom of Brooks’ cathedral, but were still very successful. Raymond’s (2000) rhetorics of calling a traditional hierarchical, proprietary software project a cathedral and a Free software a bazaar have been very popular ever since. Cathedral and the Bazaar is cited on many texts on Free software (for example, its quoted on Shen 2005, Cole & Lee 2004, Zittrain 2004, Bretthauer 2002). Raymond wrote a Free email downloading program fetchmail. He took ideas and concepts from Linux kernel development, and generalized them into rules for running successful free software projects.

According to Raymond (2000), a Free software project should start by quickly creating a practical solution to a problem its programmer is facing. This solution should be published very soon, even unfinished, in order to get feedback from other users too (Raymond 2000a). This was contradictory to Brooks (1995: 116) view that pilots or beta versions should not be given to customers. After being seen by “many eyeballs”, bugs and problems vanish more easily (Raymond 2000b). Short development cycles, redesigning and rewriting when necessary create simple and elegant programming solutions (Raymond 2000a).

Linus Torvalds, the lead developer of Linux kernel, is one of the best known persons in Free software scene. Despite affecting Free software development model so much, he has not written any longer guides on how Free software should be developed. His messages on kernel-devel mailing list and newsgroups are often quoted, and sometimes he gives press interviews, but these mostly comment on some single issue related to Free software.

Weill and Broadbent (1998) describe a framework for managing information technology portfolio by classifying IT investments into four categories. Infrastructure makes IT investments in other areas work quicker and cheaper, transactional creates instant savings, informational improves quality and strategic creates competitive advantage. They provide detailed instruction on each category and analyze the risks and possible benefits of different kinds of investments. (Weill & Broadbent 1998) The choice of Free vs proprietary software and between operating systems could fit into their infrastructure category. Choice of operating system affects a long time, and requires obtaining platform related skills trough education and hiring, and dictates other software choices to a large extent. Specific pieces of software (other than operating system) could be put into other categories.

Linux is continuously inspiring researchers and historians. Several histories of Linux and Free software (Bretthauer 2002) exist. The city of Turku has run a research project on using Linux in the public sector (Onnela 2003), including three thesis. There exists theory on choosing information technology products for companies.

Even though Free software development model has been of interest to researchers, less research is done about using Free software for purposes other than developing it further. On one hand, nearly all companies using information technology face the problems of software development – at least the choice between making or buying software. On the other hand, there must be some other goal for a company for adopting Free software than developing it for fun. Some research on Linux in a workstation has implicitly stretched the concept of Free licensing by considering and even recommending distributions that are practically not usable without non-free parts. This is strange, because one of the main reasons of moving to Linux (or any other Free platform) is getting rid of software licensing costs. What should an organization practically do to eliminate software licensing costs altogether? Are there other benefits for using Free licenses?

The purpose of this paper is to examine the choice of Free software for workstations in a medium or large organization. Because the size of the organization creates requirements for administering workstations, special attention is paid to find a unified combination of software and administrative tools. Number of workstations and the number of people involved can easily make platform choice an infrastructural investment, so methods for evaluating vendor reliability, release cycle and a steady stream of future updates is considered. The findings are mostly useful for small networks too, even though just a couple of workstations would not need the level of automation and standardization discussed.

The research problem is thus

• What are the benefits of Free software in workstations and how can these benefits be realized?

The problem can be further divided to sub problems

• What is Free software, and what benefits does it offer
• How an organization chooses a combination of Free software to be rolled out to workstation

Servers are out of scope of this paper. Where servers are a requirement for basic workstation tasks, they are mentioned from the workstation point of view. It is the writers belief and experience from administering and teaching on both Windows and Linux platforms that Windows has little or no place in server room.

A case example of a 1000+ workstation organization running only Windows workstations is discussed to bring proposed ideas and theory to practice. If possible, a working demonstration of all related pieces of software is created. Plans for roll out, education and internal marketing and cost comparison in case organization are considered out of scope and left for future research. The case organization in this work is Helia, Helsinki Business Polytechnic. Helia has about 1500 workstations and 6000 active users. This paper (mostly an earlier 2004 release) forms the basis for future research on open source and free software in Helia. This work is part of “Avoin Helia Helia” / OpenHelia, a project to find out possibilities, problems and benefits of moving workstations to open source software. There will be other projects in OpenHelia (outside this paper) such as testing the security of this software package, testing and choosing an office suite and analyzing the needs of legacy software. Possible costs and savings are analyzed to the degree possible in a work that is published. Some areas, such as research on existing systems in Helia, are intentionally very brief. As this is the first part of a a larger project, I attempt to point out interesting starting points for future research. Server related questions are not very interesting in Helia, as Helia has Linux servers and Free software in production, and IT center has already obtained practical experience about Linux on the server side.

The method used in this paper is constructive case research. The goal of realizing the benefits of Free software is approached by planning and building a workstation from Free software, including Free alternatives for most tools used in case organization. The size of the case organization is taken into account by also considering the demands of administering a large network of workstations, but massive roll-out is not tested in practice. Instead, workstation and installation tools are tested in small scale.

Chapter two of this paper attempts to define open source and free software and review the licenses implied by these definitions. If the results are clear enough, a recommendation for most suitable licenses or criteria for choosing a license will be provided. In chapter three lays out criteria for choosing software and lists the actual software to create a basic workstation. It will result in a list of programs and requirements for a suitable workstation. If possible, to simplify infrastructure, there will be only one basic workstation package for most users. Support tasks of installation, updating and administration are also considered, and a package of suitable software is listed. Issues affecting future costs are briefly discussed in chapter five. Finally, in chapter six, the above recommendations are compiled into a single recommendation. Main areas for future research are pointed out. If some parts of recommendations are not obvious, some secondary choices are pointed out too.

Some criteria for selecting a combination of Free software to organizations workstations was pointed out. A sample combination of distributions, software and administrative tools matching this criteria were listed. Using this combination, a working sample meta distribution was produced and tested outside production environment. A strong second choice candidate was pointed out. Features and costs were briefly compared in a case example. It became apparent from this research that it is possible to completely eliminate licensing costs of workstations. Roll out, education and day to day administration cost comparison were discussed, but left for further research.

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