[Klug-general] How does Kent County Council select software?

[Dan Attwood]

>"By "bloated" I was referring to the code and the comment thereon made by
(former) employees of Microsoft. You and I (or at least I) don't have
access to that code so we can't evaluate it."

>From a geek perspective that's bad but how does that make one jot of
difference to the end user or system administrator? It's MS problem and
they deal with it

>"Again this is not a value judgement. Compare the length of the Microsoft
bug list with that of linux. "

All software has bugs regardless. The only ones that a organisation or end
user really care about are the ones that stop them doing what they want.

"True but, they will be behind a firewall and internet filtering system
which will cut out a lot of these problems. They will almost certainly have
local antivirus on them

At what cost? "

As a public body they will have to provide internet filtering regardless so
the cost will already be  there and internet filtering will
almost certainly have AV built in into the product. You could argue that
using an open source product such as squid or dans guardian would provide
this functionality at little or no cost - as Paul points out OSS at the
server level is a good way to start using this at a compnay level. The
council will probably be bound by ISO standards at some level at least
though and the product will need to support this.

>" All the time I was in Gorizia (nearly 5 years) there were no complaints
(only some questions) involving the linux machine. I rest my case."

You provided one to one support for a small number of users. How well does
that scale?


"The last time I used Windows was around 2006"

A bad experience with one machine 8 years ago. If I applied the same logic
to the start of my Linux journey there is no way i'd still be using it
(getting mandrake to connect to a dial up modem in 2004 was enough to
almost reduce me to tears - it worked perfectly in windows xp)
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