[Gllug] Dealing with "Word-Only" organisations

[Christopher Hunter]

On Fri, 2010-11-05 at 14:06 +0000, j.roberts wrote:
> On 05/11/10 13:45, Rich Walker wrote:
> > ... And I find it ... strange ... that a government organisation can
> > require ownership of MS software to enter into government programmes.
> > (Especially since you can't charge that as overhead...)
> 
> Having had to deal with many councils, almos, gov. bodies, libraries, 
> schools and colleges over the years who all have the same issue (MS Only 
> Spoken Here) I have wondered if in fact MS did purchase the UK gov. some 
> time ago... (or was it just a knighthood he bought?)

Gates bought Blair a nice house in Belgravia and lots of presents for
government ministers at the time.  This ensured that this country would
be cursed for many years to come with MS brokenware.

As an aside - it is notable that NO labour government IT project has
EVER worked properly, to budget and on time.  The Fire Brigade IT
disaster followed the NHS one (the FB affair was quite effectively
hushed-up, but a little research will reveal the whole ghastly mess),
and every other government IT project has been an abject failure,
without exception.

It has been calculated that, in the government department my daughter
works for, a change to FOSS software (and they only need email, web
access, word processing and the occasional spreadsheet) would pay the
entire staff wages bill.  The bloated, unnecessary software suite that's
loaded on to each machine there costs more per year in licence fees than
the salary of the staff member that operates that machine!

C.


-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug