On Monday 03 December 2001 14:10, 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.
One of the intriguing things is that when I asked how they arrived at the figure of a £50m saving I have been met by deafening silence. I can only assume they are using something like the calculation for MS agreement in schools. ie take every Pentium computer, think of an amount like £40 and multiply the number by that amount. Now take each computer and calculate what it would cost using a MLP for upgrades and calculate the difference. Of course the obvious flaw is that many (most?) of the machines will not be able to run XP without significant hardware upgrades and these will not necessarily happen. Also many people using say Office 97 for routine admin will have no reason to upgrade. Therefore the saving is complete smoke and mirrors. Furthermore if the NHS say the individual heath groups are free to use whatever software they like, they are in effect paying up front for licenses that they will never use. I have pointed all this out to both the NHS procurement people and the National Audit Office and neither has provided the basis for the calculated saving so it makes me just a tad suspicious. In fact my dialogue with the NAO suggests they are completely clueless about licensing and they have relied on the NHS claim (Imagine an OFSTED inspection doing that :-) ). In turn, it seems the NHS could well have relied on figures fed to them by MS. Obfuscation is the name of the game so lets keep nagging until we get some clarification.
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...").
We all just need to work on it. Web based is probably best or based around Star Office - eg macros in spreadsheets etc. Best to target statutory requirements through QCA schemes of work. After all if all statutory requirements could be met with free content there is a pretty powerful argument for adoption.
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.
Thing is that with Star Office we can develop content around it knowing that we can guarantee to provide the program to run the content without having to expect the school or anyone else to have paid out.
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.
Its £70m over 3 years but in principle I should think 10% of that would provide pretty well full compatibility and all the gaps filled so that there were open source replacements for all tha applications. Hell, how many times have you heard them bleat "Its only a tool" In that case let's use the free one. -- IanL Open Source - save money - employ more teachers Use Star Office the free replacement for Microsoft Office