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NHS Awards Contract to Microsoft
ChocLinux writes "Microsoft has won a £500m nine year contract to supply software to the NHS, a week after the OGC (the government procurement body) released a report describing Linux as a viable desktop alternative for the majority of government users."
I think "Microsoft has also agreed to carry out £40m of research and development to provide guidelines and toolkits that will allow ISVs to deliver an NHS-specific user interface" is the candy here.
MS probably knows it can still compete in customised applications with its almost unlimited resources.
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Not to be considered a troll here, but there are virtually NO practice management solutions for Linux. I say "virtually" only because the ones that do exist are low-budget/low-feature solutions with limited (at best) deployment. You can't expect doctors to run Star Office and manage their patients and records using multiple applications that are hacked together to form one solution. The support margin would be huge in such a case.
Linux is great for certain things but practice management would be a disaster without custom software.
A few years ago, pirating MS software in the government sector was relatively commonplace. Along comes Microsoft and says: "Either you commit to our systems, or we force and audit and retrospectively sue your arse off for breach of copyright."
:v)
Lo and behold, government departments find themselves locked into expensive Microsoft "deals" thereafter, even though FOSS would be more beneficial to them.
Paranoid delusions? Well, it's not a decision based on the quality of the code, or the support, and it's not the TCO.
Vik
Linux, at least when we are talking about it being provided as a solution by a company, isn't free. Regardless of who develops the system, and regardless fo what OS it's based on, they are going to want money to do it. So one cannot assume that Linux is cheaper in this case. Not saying it isn't just saying you cannot assume that it is, you'd need to look at the quotes.
Also peopel are missing what the OGC said. They didn't say Linux was a better OS, just that it was a viable alternative. There's a real difference between the two. Saying it is a viable alternative means that they found it can do everything that it needed and thus can be considered. That's real different from saying it is the superior alternative and should be used.
I think people need to realise that when you talk big custom contracts that involve support, OSS isn't always cheaper or better. It can be, but it's not automatically. Companies are going to want something to develop and support your environment, and they are going to want it regardless of if they use a free OS as the basis.
This goes double when the solution provider is also the developer of the commercial OS. If IBM offers a solution based on zOS, it doesn't cost them any more in licensing than a solution on Linux, since they own zOS and Linux is free. Likewise it doesn't cost Microsoft any licensing fees to use Windows.
Another legit worry is what will happen to Linux. Windows has a very big, very stable company backing it up. There's not really a question that it will continue to be developed and supported in the forseeable future. Linux is developed by a group of peopel working on it because they want to. What happens if they decide to stop, and no one steps up to take their place? Yes I realise that's extremely unlikely, but it's a legit concern for companies.
You didn't take into consideration the following sentence for context.
I fail to see how choosing Linux doesn't result into 'lock in'. At least to any extent greater than with Microsoft Windows.
So with Windows you're saying that I am basically free to choose clients, even with Windows servers running on the backend. That the migration path from Windows to Linux is not as hard as many make it out to be. That the operating system, what with standardized environments like browsers and Java, is essentially a commodity and wholly interchangeable.
I think this is the original point. That switching to Linux means that you have switched to Linux and all the lock-in related to that platform. It is difficult to port Linux systems to Solaris and vice versa. The systems are different. Even among different Linux distros porting systems is not a matter of copying and pasting as Linux distros differ internally among themselves. Selecting a specific distribution results in lock-in to that distro, same as with any other operating system whether it be Windows, Linux, MacOS, or whathaveyou.
The concept of vendor lock-in is useful in the short term, but as you've correctly pointed out, in the long term (and with appropriate resources) vendor lock-in is an illusion.
People are used to Windows because it's popular. Why do they want Windows? Because they are used to it.
You're forgetting one more point - all the software they use runs on Windows. Sure, most of it may well have an equivalent alternative for Linux, but in my case that's certainly not all.
Sure, that's not true of the average office worker, who really only needs email, web access, a word processor and maybe a spreadsheet, but that's the thing about averages; they don't apply to everyone...
It's official. Most of you are morons.
So what? It's not like Red Hat will answer the phone, or return your phone calls, even when all you want to do is throw money at them.
Exercise for the reader: figure out who your Red Hat rep is and ask them for a price quote on one of their products. Get this done within two weeks. Ready... go.
That is using Biztalk and C# as its interface and business logic layers. And truth be told, the more I look at Biztalk 2004 the more impressed I'm getting.
Now while you could replace Windows with a Linux desktop and Windows servers with Linux servers I'm not fairly sure Biztalk runs on Windows only. And if your major software base is Windows why on earth would you use something else, elsewhere.
Linux on the desktop will happen, but it will start with call centres, budget airlines, etc, i. e. in situations where the set of software that people are using is small and standardised and there is a lot of pressure to reduce costs, where people need small amounts of training on the software, and where staff turnover is high (you are loosing the knowledge that people have of existing software anyway when they leave).
Once it starts getting used extensively in these kind of environments, it might gain sufficient critical mass to overcome the "we use Windows because it is popular" trap.
Whatever anyone else says about the costs of switching to Open Source, the fact is that long term, a Microsoft licensing deal costs a whole lot more than an OSS solution and that is good money that the NHS should be spending on giving better salaries to the nurses, GPs and other health workers that are leaving the NHS in their droves for the private health sector.
Add to that the fact the patient care is still suffering and that people are dying as a result of superbugs due to poor cleaning routines in our hospitals, I don't know how that crook Gates can sleep peacefully at night.
I am absoultely disgusted with my government.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
So our doctors and nurses are now going to spend minimal time on an OS that just does stuff and maximal time on actually fixing people, rather than letting people waste away while they spend hours trying to figure out why the hell copy and paste doesn't work.
That's not entirely true. Windows is quite common on medical equipment controlled by PCs. The MRI scanners at the hospital where I work are being switched to win2k. We already have a 3 Tesla scanner running it. If wrongly configured it's a lot like a microwave and the RF coils are quite powerful. The software, not hardware, prevents this.
e tic+resonance+ burns
Despite the safety measures, there are a few documented cases:
URL:
http://www.google.com/search?q=magn
Wouldn't want a trojan infecting the scanner. There was actually a major hospital-wide infection last year. Imagine a sadistic script-kiddie frying a patient...
No, they got a very poor deal...
The price of hardware has been falling for years, there is competition in the hardware market, hardware is getting better and cheaper at an astonishing rate..
The price of software has just been going up, because there is little or no competition, and there are underhanded ways to eliminate competition than making a better product..
It still costs real money to produce a piece of hardware, it costs absoloutely nothing to produce a "windows license", hardware is a physical item which has raw materials and production costs associated with each sale, software is write once sell infinite times.. According to economies of scale, software should cost pennies by now..
You should only have to pay for hardware and manpower (support) since these have real costs associated with them.
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It's interesting to note that the report mentioned in the article has, as you can see by following the link, been removed and replaced with a message basically rubbishing the contents of the report. But there is an archived version available.