On Mon, Dec 03, 2001 at 02:10:10PM +0000, Mark Evans wrote:
In this area i don't think it matters that it's microsoft, the same argument would apply if it were reveresed and sun were charging 70 million for staroffice and microsoft were offering xp for free - as long as office offers value for money....
Except that in practice you could easily be talking in the order of a billion (US fortunatly) pounds to get the hardware to run this software.
As a school network manager I am disgusted at the attitude of our mp's
Being non teachers the usual position appears to be that we don't exist...
to ict education and, if this NHS deal goes through, believe me, it won't belong before the same deal will be inflicted on us - never mind that we could'nt afford the hardware to run it on in the first place.
Wonder how much it would cost to produce educational "content" which worked with Linux/*BSD/etc. Either as locally running programs or web based? (In the latter case I certainly don't mean "must have IE 5...").
I would'nt protest if the government were prposing to spend xx million with lotus because smartsuite offers better value for money than office does.
Or maybe X million on a sustainable open source system. One other problem with this money is that it isn't a one off payment it could end up as 70M (plus X% compound) per year.
The government should really fund a sustainable open source system for the NHS and schools, 70 million would get the ball rolling nicely. As you say it's not a one-off payment for the MS software. As other businesses are aware it's just one payment of many whereas an open source project it really would be a one-off expenditure. It would be interesting to know if they've managed to negotiate themselves out of the enforced upgrades that other businesses are being saddled with by MS. What terms have they negotiated? Or are they going to keep this to themselves? I think we should be told and I trust that this whole sorry business is going to be scrutinised by the public accounts committee. -- Frank *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Boroughbridge. Tel: 01423 323019 --------- PGP keyID: 0xC0B341A3 *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* http://www.esperance-linux.co.uk/