sad commentary on THEIR ability

[Christopher Browne]

On 5/12/05, phil <phillip-l+pbsqP8NtUm29vl6s1fFg at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On May 12, 2005, at 12:40 PM, Andrew Hammond wrote:
> 
> > Could it be that the reason you have recieve paternalistic and
> > complacent responses from bureaucrats is that the issues you raised
> > appeared childish and trivial to them?
> 
> Probably not.  Why would you assume such a thing?  (And even if you
> knew what you were talking about, they *shouldn't* perceive the waste
> of public money as being "childish and trivial".)

They aren't perceiving their approach to purchasing software as a
waste of public money, and to assume that spending money on
proprietary software is such is quite likely to appear childish and
trivializing of the issues.

Where are the "free software hospital management systems?"

Contact a "Linux enthusiast," and what they will "easily find" is
someone that imagines that installing Apache, MySQL, and a few Perl
and Bash scripts represents "building a system."  And who imagines
that avoiding a few reboots a year represents "high reliability."

(When the medical industry has quite a bit of VMS in place, where VMS
fans look at those "Pee Cee" things as unreliable toys, in comparison,
and where clustering is a sufficiently mature technology that VMS is
actually well down the "obsolete" path...)

If they go out and talk to traditional proprietary vendors, they can
easily find systems that can more or less completely cover the
operations of a hospital.  Are there bits missing?  Sure.  But is
there some sort of systematic coverage of 80% of the functionality
needed?  Almost certainly.

Linux is great stuff if you're needing to roll out servers with tools
for _building_ applications, but you'd better be able to tell them how
to migrate their MUMPS applications.  You can, by the way; there is a
"free software" implementation of MUMPS that runs nicely on Linux. 
But you'd better know about that, and know how THAT sort of thing fits
with their systems.

It would be meaningful for someone to go in and explain how GT.M
represents a way of getting a higher performance replacement for their
aging VAXen.  (Which assumes you have a compelling understanding of
GT.M, MUMPS, and VAX/VMS...)

But tell them that LAMP + OpenOffice.org will "solve all their
problems," and the time spent will be perceived as a "childish and
trivial" waste of time money...
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