I believe the real idea is that if you spent $1 billion in helping the OSCAR project along, you would have something useable by now. Even though OSCAR is only, as you say, a part of a larger solution, it still doesn't excuse the massive useless waste of space and money that eHealth Ontario represents.

If you take $1 billion dollars, and contribute it to Linux development, what would do you think would come out of it? Ask the same question for OSCAR, and you can start to see the real questions at hand.

I was in the non-profit space about a year ago, and we were thinking of trying out "Metrix" http://metrix.fcny.org/index.html . Developed by/for the Fund for the City of New York, it's a contact management / funding/donor tracking system built on top of MS Access, with integration into excel and word (mail merges). Since it builds on top of MS Office suite (ie word, outlook, excel, access, along with the free ms sql product), which most non-profits need to get licenses for anyways, it's a good fit if you're already on the Microsoft path.

I'd like to see something like Metrix built on top of Openoffice if there is such a thing.