[Klug-general] answer to my FOI request from Kent County Coucil

[Dan Attwood]

>Agreed. But they talk about a "strategic commitment" to Microsoft. Do
>you know what a "strategic commitment" is? Do council members have stock
>options in Microsoft? Seriously though, why on earth would anyone have a
>"strategic commitment" to a corporation?

They mean their 5 and 10 years plans. ie.
We currently have Windows on all our machines and it works and we happy
with the associated costs, current staff training etc.
We expect, and MS have told us ,that they will release new versions of all
their products and  we will have a clear supported upgrade path to those
products
Within that we have a estimated life span and refresh rate of hardware etc.

If they switched to OSS they would still need a "strategic commitment" to
that as an organisation

On 13 October 2014 21:40, Jonathan Kaye <jdkaye at riseup.net> wrote:

> Jo Sharrad wrote on 13/10/14 19:58:
> > Wow.
> >
> > Need more time to process it.
> >
> > But still my first response is .....wow.
> >
> > As a quick note the only problem I would foresee out of all of the
> > bullet points against moving to OSS is the software one, all the
> > others can be argued against. That one is tougher, and can be a big
> > stumbling block.
> Thanks for the comments, Jo. Do you mean software for the end user or
> software for administrative purposes. Concerning the end users, I am
> working in two Kent Libraries, Margate and Westgate, as an IT Buddy
> volunteer. I have also been leading a group whose theme is computing for
> the retired. I don't believe that these people would experience any
> difficulties with respect to using browsers (Firefox instead of
> MSExplorer), email clients (Thunderbird instead of Outlook) or Office
> suites (Libreoffice instead of MSWord). I have helped out some
> neighbours with their computers and there have been no complaints about
> the software. If you mean administrative software, I can't understand
> why the council has not consulted with other libraries that have already
> made the change and ask them about the difficulties (and expense) of the
> change. They speak vaguely of possible issues when we have the ability
> to determine exactly what degree of difficulties were involved in the
> change to free software. Why speculate when real-life experience is
> available?
>
> >
> > One example for a bullet point that can be argued is staff training,
> > ok we did it on a smaller scale, but we did zero staff training when
> > it came to moving staff to Linux/OSS like libreoffice, firefox. Most
> > of the time if we did not tell them it was Linux they didn't even
> realise.
> >
> > To be honest they didn't need to do a massive roll-out they could of
> > just done one department to see the impact.
> >
> Agreed. But they talk about a "strategic commitment" to Microsoft. Do
> you know what a "strategic commitment" is? Do council members have stock
> options in Microsoft? Seriously though, why on earth would anyone have a
> "strategic commitment" to a corporation?
> > Thanks for taking the time to get this FOI, it is a big insight.
> >
> > Jo
> >
> > ps. Meant to be doing an assignment......must.....resist.....the
> > urge.....to research more into this........
> >
> >
> Sorry, sorry, sorry. I'm retired so I have more time. I'll try to get
> more info from organisations that have already made the change.
> Jonathan
>
>
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