You are not alone. The UK government is doing something similar.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/07/uk-governm...

That works out at about £13,000 for our site, which is £16 per XP box. Our renewal program - like many big public-sector ones - is contingent on budget, manpower, and horrible crufty software for which there is no more modern compatible alternative or update. Or where the update is just broken (gee thanks), so we have to wait out vendors' promises versus a ticking clock.

£16 per XP PC is a big discount on the official rate of $200 for the first year....

> no more modern compatible alternative

Sounds like a good startup opportunity.

Looks like Microsoft dropped the ball on this one - it's a government, they could probably have charged billions. Hopefully, the UK government will realise this, and either a) go open source b) get their house in order much earlier next time.

How open source will fix it for an organization that can't bother to move from a decade old operating system? In 10 years we'll reading about the UK govt having trouble moving away from Ubuntu LTS 14.04.

They only have option b) if they won't to avoid this in the future. Open source or not.

Upgrading an OS OS is a lot cheaper than upgrading a proprietary one.

Yep, if they run into any issues, just post to the Ubuntu forums, and lazer420 will tell you how to fix it!

Or there's always the paid Canonical support. But the thought of David Cameron hunched over a laptop having some tea and getting assistance from lazer420 in saving the NHS from the next heartbleed is priceless.

No, they ask their IT department. The difference being, they can fix issues with the OS themselves (or hire someone to). With something closed like Windows, there's only one place to go for support.

If you are a major customer, like many national governments are, you can get the source code to a lot of Windows.

Access to the source code is one thing, but you'd need also developers who are familiar enough with the source to be able to actually make changes. With OSS, there is a large community from which you recruit these folks, with Windows, not so much (outside of MS).

These kinds of posts are destructive, and provoke arguments. Please don't do this on HN.

It's not the license cost that's keeping these people from upgrading. It's verifying that the hundreds of applications, many of which were built by systems integrators that you have a strained relationship with that need to work correctly on whatever you're replacing it with. It's training users - some people "need" a two-day offsite seminar and a couple of weeks of reduced workload to transition to a new system. Also, something invariably goes wrong, so you also have to account for lost productivity when that happens.

I believe you get that with all OS upgrades.

If their installed apps mean they can't move from XP to Windows 7, it's hard to see how they can move Linux....

In any case, if they have the usual volume licensing deal with Microsoft, they can use any version of Windows without charge.

They slowly are going open source.

A big example is Gov.UK which is mostly mostly open source as well as a few other big UK gov services like police.gov [1]

A large part of the NHS was moved off of a proprietary oracle system just a few months ago [2]

[1] http://github.com/alphagov [2] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/10/nhs_drops_oracle_for...

Quite shocked that they've struck a multimillion dollar deal to keep support UNTIL JANUARY! Is there a reason they couldn't just move their upgrade cycle up 9 months? Obviously they knew this was coming.

For the benefit of people that haven't had the dis/pleasure of working in a really big company, the large banks / govy places often have a ton of dependencies and at (least) one place I worked at had a custom tailored build of Windows with features they need.

They're also heavily regulated and if they can't show evidence that they've done all the required audit checks to ensure they're in line then the repercussions make millions look like chump change (think an investment bank being banned from trading on certain desks).

Depending on their priorities and at that size this might be the most economical move.

It's worse in government. I knew a very important Australian government department that used four levels of test for a service management system.

It's not just about upgrading the OS - it's also about upgrading the software built for that OS, which in some cases requires a complete rebuild.

Windows XP is incorporated so deeply in utility management systems, that it would cost an estimated US$100 million and several years of work to upgrade the outdated system. Research by EHI intelligence revels that 85% of England’s healthcare system IT systems were still using Windows XP. http://www.dazeinfo.com/2014/04/07/hackers-will-pounce-micro...