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. -- Mark Evans St. Peter's CofE High School Phone: +44 1392 204764 X109 Fax: +44 1392 204763