Truth be told, if they're anything like our tax department they likely need internet access to investigate potential tax fraud (i.e. someone claiming social security and running a business selling things on eBay). Something which literally requires the internet.

The USPS? You mean the organisation that would be completely self-sustaining if they weren't bound by law to account for the lifetime costs of pensions for their entire workforce in their annual budget rather than as they go? Something no other employer in existence has to?

There is no citation. It's just typical anti-Microsoft bullshit from someone who's still stuck in 1980.

Frankly the pro-Linux crowd does itself no favours with this sort of shit.

A "traditional" definition of marriage also includes a marriage between a man and 17 women, or a man and an eight year old girl.

You'll forgive me if I don't give a shit about what a "traditional" definition of marriage looks like.

I don't fully understand it myself, but option B isn't even an option because hiring an internal team means operational expenditure to pay for it, while contracting an outside agency means capital expenditure is used to pay for it. No government or large corporate will do what you're suggesting due to this, even though to those who aren't accountants it makes absolutely no sense.

I'm not sure how much easier the RFP process could be as well, either. At least here, it's just a matter of looking at the detailed RFP, and submitting a tender into the box with your estimates of cost/timelines/product options, and just make sure to check everything off on the checklist. Now, I have heard of instances where the checklist is written in such a way that they may as well have an unspoken checkbox that says "be Microsoft" or "be IBM", but those are fringe cases.

Amazon Route 53?

Lots of services have claimed that over history. A certain PHP bulletin board that now costs $199 with $40/yr renewals, Reflector .NET Decompiler (now $95, plus extra for every version or $199 for the "Pro" version), etc.

Distributing without selling or licensing is still distributing, and is still covered by copyright. You do realise that it is you who failed to disagree with me, right?

Of course you can decide who you *will* sell or license to, who the hell said you couldn't? What you're saying in your post is that not only am I not wrong, but that your previous post was wrong! Actually, your post is the very essence of a strawman argument.

The problem is that if you want an organisation large enough to support a really large client, you're quite limited - Red Hat is probably the only one that will bother submitted a response to the RFP (remember, governments only sign vendors that respond to the RFP... no tender, no appointment. Most Linux consultancies very likely eliminate themselves by never participating in this process).

And Redhat provides no support for the license cost - you pay extra in the form of a per-CPU support fee if you want that.

Actually, no it's not. The photographer owns the copyright to his or her work. When it comes to selling or licensing the photo, the model has all the say, barring an explicit agreement to the contrary because they own the right to public display of their image (exception: when the photo was taken in a public place with no reasonable expectation of privacy).

That's true. But the problem is that at the prices any of the Linux vendors large enough to support this kind of environment are charging, Windows is actually the cheaper option (Microsoft gives Windows etc for practically free to government, let alone education and healthcare organisations).

You know you can lock down Firefox if you use FrontMotion right? (We do that here)

Your statement is patently false. That one investment would need to run into the hundreds of millions of dollars, perhaps even billions, to produce every piece of software for which no Linux option exists... PACS software, laboratory information systems, radiology information systems, clinical portals, clinical coding applications, MRI controller software, linear accelerator controller software, haematology analyser interface software, EMR software, patient administration systems, and THAT's just for healthcare! Imagine the rest! On top of that, building all this software would take at least a decade.

So no, they can't switch to Linux and open source freely. In fact, it'd be bloody expensive and an incredibly long process - that would divert billions of dollars away from front-line operations (and stuff like pharmaceuticals etc) for no good reason.

Coupled with... well, what PACS is even available for Linux? Last we checked, none. Nor is there an EMR designed for very large implementations. Clinical Portals. Laboratory Information Systems. Radiology Information Systems. Clinical Coding Applications. MRI Control Software. Linear Accelerator Control Software.

The list (of clinical applications not available on Linux) goes on.

Switching to Linux in a hospital is simply not doable, right now. Someone either needs to get the vendors on board, or start their own vendor producing this stuff. I don't see either of these things happening.

The problem is that the Free OS vendors also charge a metric shitload. You seen the cost of a Red Hat Workstation license? It's actually more expensive than Windows! Red Hat Server? Also more expensive than Windows!