On Thu, 2004-11-04 at 04:57, Tim Cook wrote: > In addition to the estimated 500M Pounds for licensing over 9 years. > > http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/windows/0,39020396,39172449,00.htm >
It actually says that Microsoft are generously going to throw in GBP40m worth of NHS-specific interface design R&D on top of the GBP500m licensing deal. Of course, you can guarantee that the "NHS-specific interface R&D" will be totally specific to Microsoft products, probably based on .NET and future Longhorn technologies, in order to lock third party health software vendors, ranging from the big ones like Cerner and iSoft (which already has Microsoft-only user interfaces) to all the small and medium vendors, into the Microsoft camp, and to make porting to Linux and Apple Os X as difficult as possible. It would have been much more canny for the NHS to give GBP40m to UK universities to develop portable NHS interface specifications, and then license those specifications to Microsoft and other vendors (with maybe a royalty-free license for open source developers/vendors). But no doubt the NHS NPfIT people feel very smug over the notional BP300M in Microsoft license fees they have saved, despite the fact that the marginal cost of providing additional licenses is very small, and thus the notional savings are about as long as a piece of string. > Seems as though the NHS's NPfIT is going backwards........maybe they > just need a big scapegoat? ;-) The problem is that they have massive funding, approved personally by Blair, which is burning a hole in their pocket - and each day that Blair's political fortunes worsen, the faster the hole is burnt. I am sure they feel that they need to sign contracts which lock-in that health IT refurbishment expenditure as quickly as possible. The question is, could any vendor have come up with a contract offer to swap 500,000 NHS desktops from Microsoft to Linux and OpenOffice and other open source within 3 years, including the porting of all the Windows-specific health software. If such a deal were signed, you could be sure that Microsoft would do everything it could to screw the NHS over any Microsoft licenses that needed renewal during the transition period - and any blow-out in the transition period would just worsen the Microsoft retribution against the NHS, which might also include Microsoft-backed court or administrative review challenges to the contracting process in order to delay progress. I suspect that the Midgley Linux desktops will remain a rarity in the NHS world, and that the NHS trial of the Sun Linux desktop, which presumably is still proceeding, is now a purely specious exercise. -- Tim C PGP/GnuPG Key 1024D/EAF993D0 available from keyservers everywhere or at http://members.optushome.com.au/tchur/pubkey.asc Key fingerprint = 8C22 BF76 33BA B3B5 1D5B EB37 7891 46A9 EAF9 93D0
