On Wed, 27 Oct 2004, Tim Churches wrote: ... > Richard Grainger, the head of the NHS IA, spoke at a seminar that I attended > in Melbourne about 6 months ago. I asked him about open source, and his > response was that he had no objections, provided there were open source > organisations who could tender and then deliver on projects with 18 month > delivery schedules and budgets of several hundred million pounds. ... > the impression that, armed with the 6 billion pound budgetary promise from > Tony Blair, he felt that he could, if not boil the ocean, at least part the > sea
Tim, Unfortunately, it may be easier to boil the ocean than to acquire/produce open source software. > - that is, exert a great deal of influence on and be able to extract > much, much better deals out of existing commercial vendors and system > integrators. Whatever influence 6 billion pounds can buy - it is clearly not _perceived_ to be enough to buy an equivalent open source deployment. Some organizations (e.g. NHS) clearly knows the value of having an open source infrastructure - but they may not be willing to pay for those open source advantages (with their time and money). ... Best regards, Andrew --- Andrew P. Ho, M.D. OIO: Open Infrastructure for Outcomes www.TxOutcome.Org
