Hacker News Reader

Comment by setrofim_ | Hacker News Reader

It's nice to see something like this being proposed, but, the NHS probably have a tonne of bespoke software running on top of Windows, all of which would need to be ported. And given the fact that they don't have the funding to even keep their existing systems patched and up-to-date, a full-on migration is out of the question, unless the cash is raised...

View on HN

NHS Digital has a budget of 250M GBP a year. I don't think that's even the full budget however.

Looks like the full budget might be closer to 1B GBP:

http://www.pulsetoday.co.uk/your-practice/practice-topics/it...

Is this not enough provide infrastructure to keep maybe 200K PCs up to date? (I don't have number on how many PCs they have...).

I'm not saying it is, or isn't. But I would be useful to explore the issue. Throwing more money at the problem isn't necessarily the solution.

True, but it's a long- vs. short-term cash problem. The new system would cost a lot in the first few years, but less on the long term as MS licenses won't have to be paid.

NHS would need to pay someone for Linux desktop support. It's normally as expensive as windows.

I do not know how people can entertain this myth that linux support is as expensive as windows. The stability of linux applications is incredible compared with the brutal changes of windows (xp -> vista/7 -> 8 -> 10). Remote administration is far more easier and deployment on many machines is trivial. Machines rot is a lot slower, reducing the cost of machine replacement.

IMHO, the main cost is replacing the old window support guys by linux support guys because people a rarely competent in both and erasing the windows way of thinking is very difficult. The new team has to learn the specific needs and manner of NHS. Once they have the same experience as the previous team, the cost should melt.

It's nothing to do with the support guys. It's do with the support by the vender.

When you deploy an os over something as large as the NHS, your going to hit a few snags, perhaps at the code level. You will need somebody who you can phone up, who will then go bug fix those issues.

Vendors like redhat have support licences that support this. And those licences are still fairly expensive.

If NHS was going to deploy a Linux Distribution, they will have to bring a Linux distribution vender onboard which would take the role Microsoft does now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com