On Sun, 2005-08-14 at 13:57 +0200, Charles-H.Schulz wrote: [snip] > This is where things start to get interesting. This customer is the > Scottish Police; not a candy retailer. They certainly have some very > sensitive data on their documents or somewhere on their servers and > they'd let MS Office 2003 and XP, that is, an alien company take > control > over their data? Now think about that one: Sun has some manufacturing > plan in Scotland. What SO/OOo offers is invaluable: a truly open > document file format; and besides, by buying at Sun you help foster > the > local economy. I can't imagine the Scottish police CIO/IT director > being > lavishly bribed by MS. It's way too simple, and there must be other > reasons to this drawback.
It was Central Scotland Police - just one of the police authorities within Scotland. I'm not sure of their exact geographic boundaries but it probably does include Sun's facility at Linlithgow. Sun wouldn't view them as a particularly large account though. The UK police forces have traditionally been very protective of their independence, including their IT departments. This has led to some very public failures of communication in recent high-profile cases. So put yourself in David Stirling's position - you're the new boss and you find your department is running something different on the desktop to every other force in the UK. It's not a question of bribery - the cut-price deal for MS software has already been signed with the OGC (a central UK government purchasing body). All you have to do is sign up - a simple piece of risk mitigation. If there are issues with MS - OGC takes the blame. If there are issues with SO - or one of your officers emails an urgent document in .odt format instead of .doc and some other police force calls foul - then it's your neck on the line. Classic risk mitigation, I'm afraid. David won't get fired for choosing MS. John --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
