[ubuntu-uk] Has anybody seen this and what do you think......

[Chris Penston]

As local councils are supposedly beholden to the people that elect them and
thus susceptible to public pressure, I would have though that the best
place to start would be a letter to a local paper or better yet team up
with a friendly reporter/blogger to 'expose' the money that councils,
schools NHS, etc. (one consultant once insisted to me that the NHS doesn't
have to pay for the licenses while at the same time agreeing that the
tax-payer did on their behalf!), are wasting or being fleeced for.  Of
course this would need to be based on a lot of careful research and an
alternative proposal.
Don't forget you would be up against a well funded counter argument and
serious vested interested corporates so it could get very dark and dirty,
but I'm sure there must be some linux consultancies out there who wouldn't
mind doing the grunt work if only for the publicity it might generate.
It would be difficult for a council cabinet to justify a pro MS stance when
facts and figures have been produced that show the opposite.
I have often thought that talking to trade unions might also be a route,
though they are much less idealistic than they used to be.
Chris


On 23 August 2013 08:31, Jon Spriggs <jon at sprig.gs> wrote:

> Most, (if not all) councils outsource their IT to a 3rd party. This
> outsourcing will be very fluffy around what technologies they expect
> to be provided, but nearly all will state some kind of Technology
> Refresh after X years.
>
> The Service Integrator (SI) I work for wouldn't even consider making
> Linux part of the front-end refresh, so this will never be offered to
> the customer.
>
> So, rather than lobbying your MP, local Council or Ward officials
> (many of whom wouldn't know an OS if it bit them on the nose), maybe
> the people to speak to are the SI's or Outsourced Service Delivery
> managers? Or, better yet, the Non-Elected-Official who liaises between
> the council and the SI? They will "own the relationship", and will be
> in more of a position to suggest that "perhaps next time round you
> could put together a cost model for rolling out a Gnome/Unity/KDE
> desktop, as well as pricing for Windows, just to see what the
> cost/value differences are?" Which, incidentally, might be able to be
> FOI'd - just saying...
>
> Bear in mind that the focus at the moment is to move more services to
> "The Cloud", whether that be something like Google (unlikely),
> Rackspace (hmmm, slightly more possible), EC2 (in some cases), or an
> SI's own "Local Cloud" (such as the one I'm working on at the moment),
> and most of the integration to that will be using Citrix, not a web
> browser, you might find it pretty hard to convince people.
>
> I'm not saying the situation is untenable, but just that maybe people
> are focusing on the wrong areas, and not looking into how these things
> get going.
> --
> Jon "The Nice Guy" Spriggs
>
>
> On 22 August 2013 15:39, Paul Sutton <zleap at zleap.net> wrote:
> > On 31/07/13 20:42, Pete wrote:
> >> I guess most if not everyone out there know that Governments use
> >> Windows XP (Uk Gov't) and that it costs quite a huge amount to pay in
> >> bulk licenses, including local councils. Does anyone know how much
> >> these bulk licenses cost and how many the UK Gov't have?
> >>
> >> Well, onto the main reason I am posting - I have sent an email to my
> >> local MP to look into using a Linux based OS instead of Windows as
> >> they wont need to pay for licenses which will presumably save hundreds
> >> of thousands.
> >>
> >> Why not send an email to your local MP or the MP that deals with the
> >> IT or whoever it is that does.
> >>
> >> What's your thoughts on this?
> >
> > More to the point ask what the plan is once XP reaches end of life,  in
> > 2014 and suggest alternatives,  but people are going to need training,
> > support in its use,  etc,  who can provide that, who can provide tech
> > support, etc,   how much are canonicals packages on support.  etc
> >
> > on this basis  any pointers to people who can perhaps support local
> > government in this may be helpful,
> >
> > Paul
> >
> > --
> > ubuntu-uk at lists.ubuntu.com
> > https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk
> > https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
>
> --
> ubuntu-uk at lists.ubuntu.com
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
>
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