The U.K.'s National Health Service Licenses JDS 124
deputydink writes "Recently the NHS licensed from Sun 5000 seats of its JDS system for tactical deployments within the health care service, adding that it deemed JDS a viable desktop alternative for certain types of user communities. The NHS has already deployed JDS in its back-office. This could be the high profile boost for JDS subscription services that Sun needs."
This is on the Desktop! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:JDS has been a Godsend for me (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:JDS has been a Godsend for me (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yikes. (Score:1, Insightful)
I would say just the opposite -- admins and execs like to run things other than StarOffice and gnome craplets. The ER would likely be running a single data entry application that could be developed for Linux.
Re:Could be a ploy (Score:5, Insightful)
If, on the other hand, MS realizes that you're bluffing, (and they'll probably get real good at sussing out badly designed deployments, if they haven't already), they might just deide to play hardball.
The deployments that have caused MS to really cut their prices were deployments where the customer was very serious about going to a non-MS solution.
In the Munich case, they went Linux in spite of MS's price cutting, In the British case, they had already done a (successful) pilot.
Now, if I were the CIO of a large company, I would definitely look at doing a couple of pilot projects. Worst case, I might get MS to drop their prices by a few extra points. Best case, I might find that the Open Source is a huge step better than the MS product, and worth changing to at any price.
Re:Yikes. (Score:1, Insightful)
Dont tell me about rare examples like mysql.
(Of course, now noone will get my point and they'll mod me down as a troll)
Just to confirm (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft selling software by subscription = bad.
Correct ?
Re:Could be a ploy (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:JDS has been a Godsend for me (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to make it easy for non-gurus to manage Linux, you need some management tools with GUI - and in the end, that is what JDS is.
Just to clarify (Score:3, Insightful)
Any business model anywhere that leads to Windows deployments = bad.
So Linux = good, while Windows = bad. But: it's not true that the sales model isn't the issue. Proprietary software is bad in many ways; how, exactly, it will bite you depends on the exact licensing model used. So to discuss Windows = bad at any length, you have to discuss why Windows + (this sales model, whether that be ``sell packaged goods + free support'', subscription sales, or anything else) = bad. That's the only way to be specific.
It would be nice if there was more discussion of why Linux + (this sales model) is better for the customer than Windows + (this sales model), rather than just why Winodws + (this sales model) is bad, couched as (this sales model) = bad. So you've got a point there, although you're too far down in the thread to have a mod
Re:Yikes. (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't it so that Sun for example may well be making money on open source, but has also made Openoffice.org possible by releasing the source code for their office suite? Red hat has also done some good things.
Furthermore, the developpers that do the work for (almost) nothing do that of their own choice, and if they wouldn't like that someone else would profit from that, they wouldn't work on open source software. The fact that some large companies make money with open source is even a good thing, since that kind of industry backing will make linux and open source a more credible alternative for closed source software in some cases.
All this support from those large companies is certainly good for extending the user base, which IMHO gives those aforementioned developers a good feeling, because more people are able to enjoy their work.
Re:Yikes. (Score:4, Insightful)
No. I don't.
First, they're not making much if anything.
Second, much of the payback of open source is in collaboration; I craft a stick to scratch an itch, and you improve on it so we both benifit. If you sell that improved stick for a profit, I still get the improvements free.^
The amount of waste and rework involved in closed + propriatory software is amazing, so using that instead of OSS has a steep cost.
I don't feel bad about Microsoft or Corel loosing out when OpenOffice is used, let alone when FreeBSD or Linux are used instead of OSX or Windows.
Re:Yikes. (Score:2, Insightful)
The whole point of free software is freedom, and that includes the freedom for other people to try and profit from your work. The only freedom not granted by the GPL is the freedom to change the license; the only freedom not granted by the BSD license is the freedom to remove copyright notices.
For programmers who agree with you that money should be shared as well as code, licenses such as the AFPL exist which forbid commercial exploitation. It should be noted that the AFPL is not a Free Software license, nor does it meet the OSI's definition of Open Source, for precisely that reason.
Re:Medical records and open source (Score:4, Insightful)
And that's just one package. The same could be said for glibc, GNOME, XFree, CUPs, Samba, Apache - you name it.
Likewise, the kernel is 2.4.19 based and therefore wouldn't pick up any driver or security fixes that have appeared since. Perhaps Sun / SuSE have retrofitted critical patches, you're still left with a heavily forked and obsolete kernel used by no one else. There have been eight 2.4.x releases since, and already most other dists are on 2.6.x with a 2.4.x fallback if need be.
And perhaps the update mechanism itself is less friendly than other systems causing users to ignore it. It's fairly trivial to update SuSE or RH, but apparantly you have to type your serial number to update in JDS. Who is going to bother with that?
Also, JDS has a bunch of proprietary Sun code sitting on top for network deployment & management. Who's to say what remote exploits are lurking within it since no one has had the chance to review it?
So old doesn't imply secure. Of course the same could be said for Red Hat, but to be honest, their QA and hardware support is miles better, upgrading is easy, and their tools are open source and can be reviewed by any one.
Open Source term being abused as per usual (Score:5, Insightful)
StarOffice == Open Source? I think not.
If we'd stuck to calling Free Software, Free Software, we wouldn't have to put up with this nonsense, but as it is we have a situation where people are in the throws of defining new government policy in the UK stating that the default purchasing policy in the UK should include "Open Source" software, despite the fact that nobody involved seems to have any clear idea what Open Source means.
That allows Sun to come in and say something like "StarOffice is Open Source becasue you get to see some of the source" and the NHS folks presumably say "Fair enough, where do we sign for a site license?"
I'm surprised Microsoft don't go totally ape about this, but then again, they probably think that JDS is open source too. It wouldn't surprise me if the Sun sales folks think that it's Open Source, in the same way that most SUSE sales folks used to think that SuSE was Open Source, despite the old YaST license.
Re:Open Source term being abused as per usual (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh poppycock! 99.99% of the world has never seen "The GNU Revised English Dictionary", let alone opened it up to read its particular definition of "free". Most people using English terms and phrases will be using a more traditional dictionary such as Webster's or Oxford's.
You can bitch all you want about the poor state of English having only one word for "free" and two for "freedom", but it is the language people will most likely be using when they run across the phrase "Free Software". No amount of linguistic redaction can change this.
The fact of the matter is that people will confuse "Free Software" with something other than what RMS intended. You cannot change this. Go tell your Grandma that a piece of software is "free", and the very last thing she will think is that it confers the right to redistribute modifications of the source code. Ask her if Internet Explorer is free, and she will most likely say yes. After all, it *IS* free. The FSF's intended definition just isn't being transmitted successfully by capitalizing the word "Free".
Yes, people get confused with the term "Open Source Software". No, it's not the most precise term in the universe. But it's far more accurate and unambiguous than "Free Software".