On Tuesday 26 October 2004 21:48, Tim Churches wrote: > Richard Grainger, the head of the NHS IA Certainly he is in charge, but of the NPfIT which is esentially taking over from the NHSIA. The IA was established when the Information Management Group (IMG) was dismembered into the IPU (Information Policy Unit - a part of the DH - Department _of_ Health) about 1992 in order to make it more difficult to make large mistakes rapidly in a monolithic centrally directed organisation.
1992 was therefore the time of the last big spasm in NHS IT policy, and gave rise to the plans to introduce X.400 email systems running in a virtually private network. X.400 went away last year or the year before, never having really worked, and having been introduced in about 1999 or so (I forget). > contracts being offered. That probably means that open source won't get a > much of a look in. Adrian, is that a correct surmise? There is expressed the theory that after it all goes wonderfully well for us, the rest of you will buy it and we will share the profits into the Exchequer. It sounds like a sales-talk to me but I know little of such things. There has never been any prohibition on the use of open source software, however one of the quid pro quos for the deal - if unspoken - seems to be that the developers get the onwership and control of the results... so as to make it easier for them to extract large amounts of money from the rest of the world which they will share with teh NHS and .gov.uk Who knows. Perhaps it might work. The developments in quantum computing seem interesting, they also operate as I understand it, in an arbitrarily large number of parallel universes. -- Adrian Midgley Open Source software is better GP, Exeter http://www.defoam.net/
