Re: Cost of M$ in councils.

On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 04:28:36PM +0000, John Thomson wrote:

> For the past 3 or so weeks, I have requested details on how much local
> councils all over the UK have been spending on software, compared to
> how many computers they use. 

That's a really interesting project. 

From my enquiries, it seems a lot of Scottish government purchasing is
done on the basis that Windows comes free with the hardware, that is,
buying a bare PC is possible but the cost reduction is minimal (as
expressed to Scottish Government bodies, and then to me.) This is
certainly a widespread perception. A lot of purchasing is not done
centrally, although there are ways councils and other non-centralised
bodies can take advantage of central purchasing. If you have located an
expert on how IT purchases are handled across Scottish government I'd
love to meet them!

From the perception that Windows is free the line of reasoning follows
that the bar for Linux is a lot higher, because Windows is compatible
with everything currently in use. Thus Linux is introducing cost for no
short-term functional gain.

--
Dan Shearer
[email protected]