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 d...@shearer.org _______________________________________________ Scottish mailing list Scottish@mailman.lug.org.uk https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/scottish