Apparently the NHS’s purchasing deal with Microsoft which has been in place for the last 12 years has now ended. According to M$, the NHS currently use around £270M of Microsoft software, yet they only pay Microsoft £65M per year for it.

I can’t help thinking that purchasing the software over the counter at PC world would have been slightly cheaper than the fantastic licensing deal the last government did for us. (£65M * 12 == £780M ?)

Given large parts of the NHS are still in Windows 2000 / Windows XP territory, and given the potential cost of upgrading, and given the desperate need to get NHS staff off IE6, using an Open Source alternative to Windows suddenly becomes a saving with real numbers attached to it !!

Related Posts

• Support from M$
• VMWARE
• Why should I be worried?
• SCO Unix
• Ubuntu

One Response to “UK Gov & OS – revisited”

1. madpenguin says:

   July 16, 2010 at 11:05 am

   No! Wait! It gets better!
   “Microsoft has warned any NHS worker who took advantage of the huge discounts available for installing MS Office at home that they must now delete the software.”

   Log in to Reply