The Register reports that Microsoft is going after the UK's National Health Service threatening them with drastically increased software payments over claimed licence violations.
The company this month wrote to NHS organisations saying [recent NHS overhauls] made "this latest review and subsequent re-allocation necessary". It told the bodies to assess their software estate and cough for any "identified shortfall" by 30 June.
Microsoft's fiscal '14 closes this month and a spike in NHS revenues will help lift the numbers, no doubt, with some close to the company estimating several million pounds could be made from this audit exercise.
Any failure by an NHS body to hit the deadline this month will equally be a welcome boost to Microsoft's Q1 sales ledger for the next financial year.
How many shake downs will it take before the UK public sector realises that open-source solutions are a better option than being locked into a single commercial supplier's product?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by hoochiecoochieman on Monday June 30 2014, @06:42PM
Every time I hear someone complain about being fined for software license violations, I say "you had it coming". Open alternatives exist, if proprietary solutions are so important for you, you should be able to pay for the licenses. If you don't, don't complain when the men in black knock on your door. There's no free lunch.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Monday June 30 2014, @06:47PM
I suspect that Microsoft will rue the day that they made this threat. The NHS is government run, and if the government thinks that they are going to be dictated to by MS then they might just do what we are all suggesting - look elsewhere for their software. That would be a big hit just where it hurts for MS - their bottom line.
(Score: 3, Informative) by redneckmother on Monday June 30 2014, @07:09PM
Agreed. MS is (rightfully) worried, as their products are becoming too cumbersome and too hard to support. The world at large has noticed that MS file format lock-in, licensing confusion, and dropped support can be ruinous. (I still can't believe anyone thinks that DOCX is "open" or "a standard".)
Mas cerveza por favor.
(Score: 2) by strattitarius on Monday June 30 2014, @07:47PM
Slashdot Beta Sucks. Soylent Alpha Rules. News at 11.
(Score: 2) by meisterister on Monday June 30 2014, @10:27PM
For that matter, there haven't really been any changes that most people would care about since Office '97, or for that matter if considering only basic productivity use, Office 4.0.
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Blackmoore on Monday June 30 2014, @07:40PM
MS is betting that NHS is too entrenched in the product to move to another solution.
Which, might be right if NHS decided to hire cut rate programmers/Admins.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by purple_cobra on Monday June 30 2014, @09:48PM
I work in the NHS and while they don't pay peanuts at my large, well-regarded teaching hospital, they certainly employ a bunch of monkeys. A colleague was told her printer wouldn't work as they couldn't get a 64-bit driver for it; she would have accepted this had I not been sat there to ask why a 32-bit OS would need such a thing. The catalogue of disasters is quite lengthy but the *reason* it's so bad is that they employ former nurses as managers for damn near everything, including IT. I don't think a corporate network of ~4500 users should have, as its ultimate overlord, someone who used to wipe backsides for a living before he got too fat to fit between the beds, but I am humble keyboard monkey who doesn't even work in that department, ergo my opinion means naff all.
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Monday June 30 2014, @11:39PM
One of the downsides of social healthcare is that it attracts people who aren't in the best of health. This may contribute to poor decision making.
1702845791×2
(Score: 4, Informative) by geb on Monday June 30 2014, @07:52PM
The last time we tried to switch to a new medical record system, it cost us over 12 billion pounds over seven years, then had to be abandoned because nothing had been achieved. I don't think we're capable of moving away from MS products without burning down the entire country and building from scratch.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by choose another one on Monday June 30 2014, @10:56PM
How can you say nothing was achieved ?
There was 12B pounds worth of achievement, fully specified, ratified, signed-off, documented, in triplicate, duplicate invoiced under dual project codes, with quad-redundant parallel change control paths to handle 10k+ management execs worth of changes, the senior civil servants' Clustered Fully Upgradable Central Knowledge-base, and so on. The paperwork achieved would stack to the moon and back if you printed it all out - probably (sadly no one can because it's in the records management system which didn't quite work yet, but another couple of billion and you could get it all out...).
Apparently someone even wrote some software at one point - but he left after a couple of months and went back to India (or we think he did, but since UKBA can't organise an IT pissup in a brewery, we don't actually know, he could still be here having a more rewarding career as a takeaway chef).
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Monday June 30 2014, @11:47PM
Are you suggesting that it was a Cluster-FUCK?
1702845791×2
(Score: 1) by anubi on Tuesday July 01 2014, @06:49AM
I can certainly understand why it cost so much and you had nothing to show for it. That seems to be par for the course in a managed corporate environment, as the financial incentives are gamed towards cost-cutting and away from taking the time to think it through and do it right. I was in the middle of one myself, when the MBA types overran the techies and we soon found ourselves incapable of doing nearly anything but signing paper to get someone else, that is someone not under control of our management teams, to do it.
Advances in technology will be done. By some guy in his garage. Some companies can still innovate, but by and large, it only takes one bad promotion to management for an MBA type, then he uses his authority to bring in yet more MBA cronies, and soon the host organism is paralyzed.
The big guy can always run off to his government to make what the guy did in his garage illegal and unmarketable.
It will resurface in a country where our government's law does not apply.
Then we will have to compete with them.
Some people get things done by doing it.
Other people protect what they have by wagging their pens to make sure no one else can do it.
Its the way it works when one makes money by extortion, rather than by production.... also known as "crony capitalism".
It happens in the country that has the biggest guns of the day that back up their pens.
That is, until the other country becomes powerful enough they have better guns and do not have to honor the wagging of the weaker country's pen.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 01 2014, @11:24AM
Another Great Fire would probably cause far less damage than another 7 years of using unauditable, backdoor-infested, regularly-orphaned, poorly designed software...
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Monday June 30 2014, @07:05PM
The fact is that the licensing conditions are anything but transparent. They don't make it simple for large organizations to be (or prove) that they are compliant. More, the auditors have a huge incentive to find - or invent - problems. What, you bought "used" software? Sorry, those receipts don't count, etc, etc...
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by opinionated_science on Monday June 30 2014, @08:08PM
agreed. it should be illegal for public money to pay for private software. Make all contracts for software on a wholly owned basis, with clauses guaranteeing data export to other common formats. By all means write contracts for services, but the quicker we rid ourselves of the inertia of monopoly software provider(s) the better for us all....
radical enough?
(Score: 2) by Blackmoore on Monday June 30 2014, @09:06PM
At very least the purchase should be a purchase; not a copy, or a lease, or a license. A purchase limited by an EULA (that then states that you don't own the product) is about as bright as throwing money at the MPAA.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Monday June 30 2014, @11:03PM
Better idea - the NHS is such a big organisation and will need so much software that it must make economic sense to custom-develop it and fully own it. Could even start from open source existing stuff and NHSify it. Might be a bit risky - all eggs in one basket, but we could solve that by specifying it all to be on an open and interoperable platform and protocols and then getting multiple competing teams or providers to write the custom solutions, building on the open foundation. That way even if some teams/providers fail the whole thing will still be a resounding success.
Need to write to my MP with that one - really surprised they haven't thought of this and tried it before...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 30 2014, @11:34PM
custom-develop it
...or perhaps adapt some FOSS that already exists--like the USA Veterans Administration VistA. [google.com]
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Tuesday July 01 2014, @03:00PM
Problem is that NHS is several times the size and probably 100 times the bureaucracy of VA hospitals.
And for those that don't know, they already tried the custom develop approach - 10yrs and $20Bn later (for just one system - patient records) they cancelled it as it failed.
They, or at least some parts of the NHS, already looked at, and (mostly) rejected VistA (I believe). It is very unlikely to be easy or cheap to adapt VistA (or indeed any US clinical system) to the NHS - the whole provision of healthcare is structured completely differently to the US way of working. Some think it may be _possible_ however, e.g. http://www.woodcote-consulting.com/nhs-vista-and-nhs-open-source/ [woodcote-consulting.com]
What people don't tend to "get" about these big projects is that it isn't the software or the licensing that fails, it's the change management and implementation process and the matching of software to requirements that is the expensive and failure prone bit.
Open source doesn't provide a magic fix for that. It doesn't even provide much of a price advantage - I've worked on enterprise level bids where license cost was down to around 10% of total, and that is just the implementation project cost, add in support over (say) 10yr lifetime and licence cost is probably down to 5%, and that is just the price to the supplier, add in the internal implementation costs (even just staff time for training, requirements gathering, testing etc.) and the software licence cost is lost in the accounting noise.
Access to source code, right to modify, right to get third party to modify - all these FOSS advantages, plus ownership of code, can be handles through contract for custom development - but that still didn't save the NHS's last attempt from being a fiasco.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by edIII on Monday June 30 2014, @11:22PM
It can't simply be copyright treated no differently than a copy of The Hobbit.
No business has argued (successfully) that their reading of The Hobbit caused them real harm and the author/publisher needs to pay. A negligent coder putting a zero instead of a one could cause havoc, and has. Licensing agreements can spell out disclosures and indemnifications.
A licensing agreement is logical, and even fair in specific situations in which you don't want to allow ownership. I'd imagine ownership is pretty much modification of the code and subsequent sale. In some circumstances you might not want your code to be used in a way that is objectionable and or unwise.
EULA's aren't the real issue. What gets put into them *is*. I don't mind the licensing that comes with FOSS/OpenSource. Just find the right one for you. I agree, spending money where you not only don't own the irrevocable right to use the software privately, but all of your consumer protections are stripped out is pretty stupid.
It's either that, or amend Title 17 to include certain indemnifications by default and more specific rules regarding code re-use, derivative works, etc. keeping in mind a balance of consumer protections against frivolous lawsuits.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday July 01 2014, @06:55PM
Try rather "A licensing agreement could be a logical...". For it to actually be so depends on honest negotiation of a fair agreement. That doesn't exist for ANY MS product that I know of. (It used to be true for their keyboards, but I haven't looked at their keyboard license agreement of well over a decade.)
While I will agree that there is in principle no reason that a licensing agreement could be a good thing to accept, the only ones that I've found which actually meet that test are the licenses to some games (i.e., if it stops working, you don't loose much) and the licenses that qualify as FOSS. As a developer I, personally, prefer the GPL licenses (actually I prefer the AGPLv3 license, but that's for my purposes...and if you want a different license to what I offer, you can buy it from me). But all of the FOSS licenses suit some particular case. BSD, e.g., was developed to allow standards to be tightly specified. And for its purpose it was at the time the best available. These days there are other choices one could argue for, e.g. the MIT license. But which license is best depends on your use case.
For that matter, I consider the sale of software with the code hidden to be obscene, though it doesn't need to be available to the purchaser. It should, at minimum, be available in a "library of deposit", and be made publicly available (though still under copyright) after, say, seven years or whenever a program that reads the files generated by the software stops being sold, which ever is less. (O, and the price for the software thats being sold, referred to in the prior sentence, cannot be more than 100 times the cost of the original purchase, or, again, the code is released to the public.)
OTOH, I'm also not in favor of extended periods of copyright. 10 years from first sale should be plenty. 20 years is on the outer edge of reasonable.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Wednesday July 02 2014, @09:49PM
I really like this idea. Reverse engineering code and proprietary formats is an absolute bitch.
As far as the copyright periods being 10 years for software, I couldn't possibly agree more.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 30 2014, @06:46PM
If you can equally claim they're nefariously trying to boost Q4 2014 numbers or Q1 2015 numbers, then the specific quarter doesn't seem to matter much and the main question is simply the money. So, implying that MS is acting like a traffic cop at the end of the month doesn't wash.
Back on-topic, this seems like a prime opportunity for the NHS to move more desktops over to GNU/Linux. I can't imagine they all need Windows-only software. Whatever IE6-only type web apps they have going could probably be ported to something that would run in GNU/Linux for less money than the new licenses would cost.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday June 30 2014, @06:51PM
More realistically I could see them going all ipad and mac. iphone in the on-call pocket, ipad at the bedside, and mac at the desktop. None of the competitors have anything with an actual shipping track record that covers all those areas simultaneously.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by strattitarius on Monday June 30 2014, @07:01PM
Slashdot Beta Sucks. Soylent Alpha Rules. News at 11.
(Score: 3, Informative) by jasassin on Monday June 30 2014, @07:50PM
Excellent analogy. If I had points, I'd mod you up. If I ha some crack,I'd give it to parent poster.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 2) by meisterister on Monday June 30 2014, @10:34PM
How about regular avgas? The lead fumes help you justify the decision to yourself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avgas [wikipedia.org]
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 30 2014, @07:44PM
So you think Apple doesn't audit as thoroughly as Microsoft?
(Score: 2) by bucc5062 on Monday June 30 2014, @08:11PM
I was thinking along the same lines. Would not Linux with Wine do the trick for Winform based products? If they are stuck in an IE 6 mode then I would think they are fucked anyway since I'm not sure that ever works (well) with Windows 7+. Perhaps a savvy Tech person in the Bureau could experiment and show how it could work.
Better than having a government being rolled for some extra cash.
The more things change, the more they look the same
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday July 01 2014, @07:04PM
Wine isn't all that good, but perhaps it would work. I wouldn't bet on it though.
Besides, that still has them using MS software, and needing to worry about licenses.
What they actually ought to do is run the MS software in an emulator on Linux, and then stepwise replace the functionality, so that they have a working system at all times. It's slow though, and it would require strong support at the management level. But its still what they should do. For that matter, they could specify the function they wanted to replace next and take bids with the requirement that it be well documented and under a (particular) FOSS license. Probably many of the features would be easy to replicate from existing tools, but some would be difficult.
But the point of running under an emulator is that you can keep it working even as hardware and software changes underneath it. You don't need to switch to a newer version.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Informative) by cafebabe on Monday June 30 2014, @11:53PM
The problem is deeper than crappy web apps. The medical imaging systems are Windows-only and "safety certified" to only run on Windows. These medical imaging systems then communicate with Windows-only medical databases which then communicate with Windows-only patient record systems which then talk to printers with Windows-only drivers. The big problem is when your Windows-only peripheral costs £1.5 million, has no open equivalent and it is strictly forbidden to use it with any form of virtualization or compatibility layer. Unless you can fix that, all else is tinkering.
1702845791×2
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday July 01 2014, @07:10PM
And that IS a problem, but one that you would think an organization a big as the NHS could negotiate a solution to. It might be a bit expensive, but if that's the blockage...
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 12 2014, @04:28PM
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(Score: 2) by Alfred on Monday June 30 2014, @08:01PM
This is more like turn your head and cough because you know where we have our fingers.
Advance apology to the ladies if they don't get it.
(Score: 2) by e_armadillo on Monday June 30 2014, @08:37PM
That is where they are really putting fingers . . .
"How are we gonna get out of here?" ... "We'll dig our way out!" ... "No, no, dig UP stupid!"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tftp on Monday June 30 2014, @08:54PM
There is no interest in moving to a different OS because the risk in that is immense, and when the move fails it will destroy the people who proposed it. At the same time, there is no risk in paying for licenses, since it's exactly what IT directors are supposed to do. Why would a reasonable, thinking bureaucrat risk his career to save taxpayers' money if it's not even his job to save that money?
That is even aside from the fact that none of lower level IT people - who actually pay for licenses - are capable of initiating a country-wide migration. And aside from costs of such a migration, which may exceed licensing fees for a hundred years.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 01 2014, @07:03AM
They could probably incentivize or borrow some strategy-level IT personnel involved with Munich's move to FOSS [wikipedia.org] and get it over with, apparently at reasonable immediate cost and long-term net savings.