On 11/06/13 10:30, Nigel Verity wrote:
Dear All
In more than 10 years of working with public sector organisations I
have never found any appetite to change from Microsoft products, no
matter how the case for open source alternatives is made.
Partly it is because many public/civil servants have not the faintest
awareness of any alternative to Microsoft other than Apple, but the
single biggest reason I can ascertain is that government IT
infrastructures are so big, and there have been so may failed IT
projects and disasters over the years, that nobody has the confidence
to contemplate such a major upheaval.
Cost saving is not the driver it should be. Most departments still
operate their budgets on the "use it or lose it" principle. If they
make savings on their allocated funding this year their budgets will
be smaller next year.
Politics are also a consideration. Most government IT is outsourced,
often to consortiums of the big IT service suppliers. To anybody who
operates in the private sector the amount of money they charge
government departments beggars belief, but the public sector has been
ripped off for so long that the costs are seen as normal. Those
consortiums have the ear of government ministers and lobby very very
hard. Any new scheme that provided genuine value for money and
delivered big savings, whether open or proprietary, would call into
question the competence of the decision makers at the top who agreed
to the current contracts.
In the short to medium term the best I can foresee in the UK public
sector is the adoption of some open standards, but it will be a long
time before that translates into a adoption of open software.
One has to pose the question, though, if a department the size of,
say, the MOD decided to go open source tomorrow, are there enough
technicians with Linux skills and sufficient experience to take on the
job? I suspect not.
Nige
The UK tradition is, price the product to a level that the market will
carry, we do not like change, any suggestion of change prompts an almost
court-like demand, prove it, followed by cost and liability evaluation.
Linux gives me e-mail facilities, free movie viewer, (VLC works in
"Windows" as well !), internet access and I have a Windows 7 machine as
well, needed for "Silverlight" usage.
Balance the probabilities, most educational users will have "Windows" at
home, Microsoft has established a huge market, which has created a
massive "Windows" support industry.
There might not be a general awareness, that Ubuntu may dual-boot to a
"Windows 7" machine.
So why might Ubuntu appear to be a poorer choice than "Windows" ?
Microsoft has an established market.
Nothing begs belief, custom and practice is a longstanding UK tradition.
One is less likely to find Ubuntu trained technicians, in education
areas, than Microsoft ones, there are insufficient alternatives to
change this concept, we might feel as if we are being pushed into a
corner to do our own thing, as Ubuntu is not generally seen as an
alternative to "Windows"
Other things like copyright law affecting likeness to existing products,
narrows the availability of "Windows" alternatives.
For now, Ubuntu may be generally seen as another system, sadly not yet
as a real alternative to "Windows",
The government might aim to promote open source as an alternative to
"Windows", but they would not be impressed if support for open source
was more expensive than "Windows".
For now, it looks like "Windows has it".
Michael D
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