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Wayne Wilson wrote:
| Tim Cook wrote: | On Wed, 2004-11-03 at 11:42, Tim Churches wrote: | |>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.
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| | Why is it that they haven't yet figured out that they are on a | | treadmill? They must take a longer term view if they are to break | this | vendor lock-in, upgrade on demand cycle. | There is another | view of this. It is not a treadmill, it's part of economic growth. | The longer term view of government is that they are building a | robust economy and helping local industry. And that's where the | case begins to get wobbly. One needs to break down the economic | impact to the UK economy and then show how a different kind of | contract would have had a better impact. Remember all those UK | companies and employee's getting paychecks from this? You need a | better overall outcome.
In Australia, the NSW government believes there is value in exploring open source options. It recognises the need for open source support in government and to that end is empanelling a group of suppliers for NSW open source government contracts (http://tinyurl.com/556oz). (There is already a list for proprietary products.)
The Australian IT trade deficit currently runs about $A14 billion (2003) and is growing faster than inflation at an average rate of 7.4% per annum (http://www.cfses.com/documents/ICT_Trade_Update_2003_SUMMARY.PDF). While the UK import / export ratio may be smaller I suspect the net deficit would be 2-3 times larger.
As an American senator once said, "Ten billion here. Ten billion there. Pretty soon you're talking real money".
David
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