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Comment by oneeyedpigeon | Hacker News Reader

Looks like Microsoft dropped the ball on this one - it's a government, they could probably have charged billions. Hopefully, the UK government will realise this, and either a) go open source b) get their house in order much earlier next time.

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How open source will fix it for an organization that can't bother to move from a decade old operating system? In 10 years we'll reading about the UK govt having trouble moving away from Ubuntu LTS 14.04.

They only have option b) if they won't to avoid this in the future. Open source or not.

Upgrading an OS OS is a lot cheaper than upgrading a proprietary one.

Yep, if they run into any issues, just post to the Ubuntu forums, and lazer420 will tell you how to fix it!

Or there's always the paid Canonical support. But the thought of David Cameron hunched over a laptop having some tea and getting assistance from lazer420 in saving the NHS from the next heartbleed is priceless.

No, they ask their IT department. The difference being, they can fix issues with the OS themselves (or hire someone to). With something closed like Windows, there's only one place to go for support.

If you are a major customer, like many national governments are, you can get the source code to a lot of Windows.

Access to the source code is one thing, but you'd need also developers who are familiar enough with the source to be able to actually make changes. With OSS, there is a large community from which you recruit these folks, with Windows, not so much (outside of MS).

These kinds of posts are destructive, and provoke arguments. Please don't do this on HN.

It's not the license cost that's keeping these people from upgrading. It's verifying that the hundreds of applications, many of which were built by systems integrators that you have a strained relationship with that need to work correctly on whatever you're replacing it with. It's training users - some people "need" a two-day offsite seminar and a couple of weeks of reduced workload to transition to a new system. Also, something invariably goes wrong, so you also have to account for lost productivity when that happens.

I believe you get that with all OS upgrades.

If their installed apps mean they can't move from XP to Windows 7, it's hard to see how they can move Linux....

In any case, if they have the usual volume licensing deal with Microsoft, they can use any version of Windows without charge.

They slowly are going open source.

A big example is Gov.UK which is mostly mostly open source as well as a few other big UK gov services like police.gov [1]

A large part of the NHS was moved off of a proprietary oracle system just a few months ago [2]

[1] http://github.com/alphagov [2] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/10/nhs_drops_oracle_for...

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