Adrian Midgley wrote:
>
> Interesting
> Linux on S390 for large organisations
> http://consultingtimes.com/Serverheist.html
> Cheaper than MS Exchange server.
In the USA, the health care industry has more than one problem with
Microsoft:
M$oft is ratcheting up licence fees, making licences more restrictive,
and giving educational discounts less freely to teaching institutions.
MSoft is continuing to include "features" (some of which are very nice
for programmers or end-users) that are specifically designed to make
connectivity and portability of data and apps to non-M$oft platforms and
applications difficult.
And each new release seems also to be internally incompatible: the new
Word, for example, produces files that can't be read by old Word
versions, forcing upgrades
Software vendors serving the health care industry are pell-mell porting
apps that work well under UNIX (various flavors) to NT and not to Linux,
substantially increasing the licence fees, energy costs, and hardware
costs to users while providing a less stable, less secure platform.
Those software vendors that are not doing this are using NT boxes as
thin clients to provide users with "familiar" window behavior, meaning
that the institution is saddled with licence fees to little functional
purpose.
Thus the health care industry in the US is facing twin vendor lock:
once at the back end and once at the front end, by vendors who are
forcing users into NT.
Microsoft's Active Directory plans include technology that will
displace samba and make data interchange with non-M$oft platforms
difficult to impossible, potentially crippling the ability of open
source software to continue to run the Net.
Dan Johnson reporting here from ReallyReallybad, USA.
