HARINGEY Council & IT dependency on one monopolistic provider

SOME 10 years ago, Highgate Councillor Bob Hare—and I also as a Member, with some combined knowledge of computing—met with the-then CEO.

We sought to encourage the council to consider adopting the UNIX-class operating system, LINUX.

Since then, LINUX has come on in leaps and bounds, along with the free Applications that run on the free, Open Source OS.

"Officers" adore talking about and publishing the word Strategic.

However if such a long-term approach had begun back then, dividends in the form of savings would be felt and flowing today. My impression was the-then CEO lacked technical knowledge and we two councillors were merely humoured by the head of paid service.

Like many local authorities, this chronically failing council—and in particular its IT Department—is cosy with, wedded to and entirely dependent on the Microsoft Inc. and on a costly M$ site Licence. IMO, we need a new class of IT employee and not hostile to LINUX, change and improvement.

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The price of MS lock-in is paid today in other ways:

What we know about the global Microsoft outage

What we know so far about the Microsoft outage

Global Microsoft outage hits schools, doctors and businesses as com...e

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But this council has not and probably cannot learn from elsewhere.

Once described as Albania in this insular council, some LBH "officers" live in a bunker under a fortress island, and reflect the not-invented-here syndrome.

<— Alan: I've put these descriptions in a single, oven-ready sentence for ease of pick-up.

I fear the Greens may not be able to turn around this top-heavy super-tanker and not everyone wishes them well.

Elsewhere, Europe—especially France—is quietly moving aware from high-dependency on MS. France has a head start, because of the deep and long experience of their national police force, the oldest in Europe. They switched to LINUX years ago.

This rational move may have been helped by Microsoft wilfully and deliberately blocking the email account of the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, allegedly in compliance with U.S sanctions, as punishment for investigating Israeli officials. i.e. MS acted as a wildcat's paw on behalf of the bullying and malevolent Trump Administration.

Is anyone at the council paying attention?

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Most people reading this post will not appreciate that it is highly likely to be distributed over the internet via mature LINUX OS that runs on servers, powering the vast majority of the entire Internet.

Even this council's IT Department may be unlikely to "upgrade" their present Windows 10, due to the serious and widely publicised privacy concerns about "11". One day in the future, councils including our own dysfunctional local authority may learn and switch to a UNiX-class system.

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