NHS: Thanks for the free work, Linux nerds, now face our trademark cops The small team behind an ambitious NHoS Linux project are calling it a day, citing receipt of a trademark infringement warning from the UK Department of Health's (DoH) "brand police" as the "final straw." The raison d’être of NHoS was to identify a way to roll out NHSbuntu, a remix of the open-source Linux distro Ubuntu …
Yes, but no.
Trying to do this was hugely laudable but ultimately folly without the backing of someone with a huge amount of clout in Gov or the NHS.
Never bet on your business stakeholders agreeing that your direction (however sensible) is the right direction.
They would have been much better off staying stealthed until they actually had a product. Probably even could have got a VC to stump up the cash to do it properly if they had cloaked in a services play and called it HealthIX or similar. Re-using or even appearing to copy someone else's TM's is always likely to bite you on the butt.
To be clear - I've nothing but respect for these guys - but sometimes nearly all of the time style counts over substance, especially in Business and Gov.
Yes, but no.
Also, the trademark thing is a real issue as daft as it sounds. If the NHS doesn't defend its trademark even on things like this then it could lose it and allow shysters to abuse it.
OTOH getting permission to use the trademark is often easier than it sounds.
And finally,… if this is just about the cease and desist then bite back the bile and rebrand as something like Ubuntu for health, make use of the term NHS in any text exemplary. And check with Canonical on the use of their trademarks!
Have an upvote for actually understanding the implications of the trademark/branding issue, rather than just going off on an "Oh Noes proprietary software!" rant.
Anon as I'm an NHS tech person. I extensively use Linux. On the desktop even. And we were getting questions about this project, when we were going to start validating it for use in the estate because it was "official", "supported" etc. When it was none of those things.
Good on them for trying, honestly. But some of us watching with experience of trying to get things done in NHS IT always thought it would be an uphill battle. Desktop Linux is already a hard enough sell in organisations far less technically dysfunctional^H^H^H diverse than the NHS.
Having been involved in debates on operating systems in lab environments in science I know how it could be. The killer thing in switching from Windows to Mac in one for eg was that the then latest automated dna sequencers only ran on the Mac and the analysis software likewise. We had just got rid of the last windows box when the head of animal services who had been tasked with replacing the paper animal ordering system with an online one which was 'platform independent', an intranet web app we thought came back with something he had paid his nephew to do. It was a windows only program. We had to buy a windows box whose only function was ordering animals. It did nothing else.
A lot of stuff in Biology was Mac only, I suspect because it was very visual. We dealt in pictures, graphics etc (a dna sequence came as overlaid multicolour waves one colour for each base with the sequence, editable above showing what had been called). Also scripting in Java on the Mac was seen as making it easy to develop apps.
Now the youngest who is in bioinformatics just uses her Mac to telnet into the mainframe to run large genome sequencing and analysis runs on large capacity servers using the command line. She is one of those who prefers the Terminal to the Finder us dinosaurs use.
I had dealings with Macs in labs years ago. They got their 'in' by virtually giving computers to education people. This was especially so in the USA and Japan. As I was working with projects that used Macs in industry we were 'screwed' blind by their prices and totally indifferent support in the UK. We did have people using Spark stations but that was far too complex for general use. Sadly, Windows worked well enough back in those days. (Linux or OS2 were jokes sorry to say.)
"Also, the trademark thing is a real issue as daft as it sounds. If the NHS doesn't defend its trademark even on things like this then it could lose it and allow shysters to abuse it."
Exactly, When I started reading the article I was under the impression that this was an internal project and some people were being made redundant... I felt bad for them.
Then I got a bot further and saw that they were volunteers and thought WTF? Finally I realised that this is a group who got together with a noble cause but with no backing from the NHS, not at the NHS's request and decided to make an OS for healthcare (Good) but used NHS in their branding (BAD).
Like I said, based in the product name I assumed it was an NHS developed system... This is why TMs need to be protected.
The duplicitous part is that the NHS had already discussed the original name and they agreed to change it to something else which was approved by the NHS people but still get served with another trademark infringement letter. The NHS people also agreed to meet them numerous other times, but cancelled at the last minute. Basically giving encouragement that it was worth working on the project, but it's clear that instead those on the NHS side were just stringing them along in order to extract concessions from Microsoft. It's a really shitty way to do business and especially so from a public body.
I concur here - I wouldn't expect any product to use the initials NHS, unless actually part of the NHS. Having been warned over NHSubuntu, they really may have foreseen issues with NHoS. On the other hand, immediately reaching for lawyers was a bit heavy handed.
I'm also surprised the NHS would actually consider anything produced on a volunteer basis by 4 workers. What about support concerns? Are they capable of moving fast in the case of breakage? There may be other factors at play.
f this is just about the cease and desist then bite back the bile and rebrand as something like Ubuntu for health
Just carry on with the work, rebranding as Medibuntu or something. It's not like there aren't other health authorities around the world, even if you stuck to predominantly English speaking, that would have to solve similar issues and get their systems to work with similar documents/messaging formats etc as well as potentially interface to equipment.
Short-sighted by the NHS on this one as they could have created this for their own use and then looked to sell it to private health and overseas markets.
No, just business as usual.
You need to watch the first season of Yes Minister where Humphrey explains the actual functions of a minister, civil servant and the department as well as the NHS episode.
Anything which will REDUCE the cost of IT will reduce the departmental budget which simply is not going to happen. It is against nature.
This simply the civil servant ensuring that his sprog can attend the same college in Oxford as he has attended. Nothing personal, just business.
"Can someone sub-edit this article so it's actually readable please? I got fed up with trying to decipher the typos, misplaced apostrophes and general misspellings halfway through."
Seconded. I was thinking about emailing my local MP and sending her a link to this article but given the mess it's in I doubt it would be a good idea.
>***Complains about lack of editing while using an adblocker***
You might be onto something here..... removing all capitals/punctation when people AdBlock or ROT13ing every fifth word might be a more effective approach than begging freeloaders for whitelist inclusion..
Big publications – from the NYT with its huge army of copy editors to the Grauniad with a sizable editing team - still let through errors. We have 3 region editors (North America, Europe, APAC), 1 news editor (UK) and 1 sub-editor (UK).
It's frankly fucking amazing there aren't more errors slipping through on El Reg given the resources available. The current rate is pretty low. It's hard to find good editors who can do sperlinng, snarky headlines, and are experts in tech and science.
C.
The cards are stacked against open source trying to break into the public sector. For one thing the opportunities for corruption both direct and indirect (and I do count revolving door jobs, consultancy and paid for travel, conferences and after dinner speeches in that) are few and far between. It also on shores a lot of risk and the managers would actually need to be good at their jobs and there is a certain element of go with what you know.
Indeed.
If the volunteers threw in £200 each, they could've wined and dined the heads of the NHS and pushed this through. Alas, their mistake was to believe that those who manage the NHS are doing it for the good of the organisation, and not for the good of 3rd party contractors who want to make a few quid off the back of a publically funded body.
Roll on the next general election, and get these shower of bastards away from the NHS.
"Roll on the next general election, and get these shower of bastards away from the NHS."
You think the issue with NHS level bureaucratic decisions in anyway comes from the political party in power rather than devolved to either centralised organisations battling regional trusts?
Check out that excellent documentary series on how UK politics and bureaucracy actually works - "Yes, Minister" and it's sequel "Yes, Prime Minister".
"And Yes, Minister DELIBERATELY didn't have any scenes in either House."
Not only that, but it was never made clear what political party was in Government at the time, and hence what party Hacker was in. In some ways that was the scary icing on the cake, the fact that it didn't actually matter who was in, because they all behave exactly the same.
I second the comment earlier that the NHS episode is very good - a half-hour of comedy that explains more about the NHS than a hundred documentaries ever could.
@ lorisarvendu
While you make a good point, AFAIK 'Yes, Minister' and 'Yes, Prime Minister' were meant to be a portrayal of the Conservative party and they way they worked at the time it was made, especially with regard to how the ministers were controlled via gentlemen's clubs, promises of directorships and other cushy future jobs etc. 'The Thick Of It' was supposed to be a version of how the Labour party did things, who (arguably) had less access to the above upper-class inducements as their rivals and so relied more on bullying as a means of controlling their politicians.
"If the volunteers threw in £200 each"
There were four volunteers. In what universe do you think £800 would have covered wining and dining the top level NHS to get the slightest bit of traction. £800 probably wouldn't cover the wine for the first course at the sort of place those guys expect to be wined and dined.
"The cards are stacked against open source trying to break into the public sector. "
They certainly were in this case. And for good reasons.
You're dealing with the NHS, which is what, the third largest organization on the planet (behind only the Indian railway and the Chinese army)? And what you're offering is a system being made entirely by 4 guys on a voluntary basis. I've worked with the NHS before, and this doesn't really strike me as a "Linux vs Microsoft" issue (though good work trying to paint it as one so this can be held up as a Holy War totem for years to come); this is a "stable, solid 40-year old megacorporation with hundreds of thousands of professional employees vs 4 dudes working in their spare time" issue.
I can just imagine the meeting.
NHS Rep: OK, we're the NHS, so obviously we need 24 hour support available UK-wide with a 4-hour SLA for any core system. If anything goes wrong, then people literally die, so we're pretty hot on this.
NHoS Rep: Well, there's 4 of us, and we all have day jobs that take up the bulk of our time. But I can answer my mobile at work and talk you through fixing most problems if need be. Well, unless we get bored and stop working on it, obviously, because there's literally nothing aside from goodwill stopping us from doing that.
NHS Rep: ...OK
I wasn't there, but an exchange something like this probably happened. And by the end of the meeting, the NHS rep almost certainly decided that this had been a complete waste of his time. The NHoS guys failing to pick up on that is just another sign of their naivety, tbh.
Hell, they were lucky that they got a meeting in the first place and weren't just dismissed as a joke out of hand. The NHS are probably genuinely interested in exploring an open source alternative, but quickly decided a tiny all-volunteer team was not the group to deliver it. Something like Red Hat, they might be more likely to talk to (and, in fact, I know a lot of NHS trusts are using Linux in various systems in their server rooms and have been for years).
Then you have the whole naming thing; the NHS asks them to stop using the name 'NHS' in their branding since it implies this is an official NHS product (which it isn't). When they react to this by changing their name to 'NHoS', they must've thought they were deliberately trolling.
This is the NHS. It is, by nature, deeply risk-averse, in the same way aerospace engineers tend to be deeply risk-averse, because if they take a risk and it goes wrong people die. NHoS was asking this risk-averse organization to consider swapping out a working system with gold-standard support levels for what amounted, in their view, to an untried hobby project, and then had the nerve to use NHS branding without permission, not once, but twice.
Naselus said
I wasn't there, but an exchange something like this probably happened. And by the end of the meeting, the NHS rep almost certainly decided that this had been a complete waste of his time. The NHoS guys failing to pick up on that is just another sign of their naivety, tbh.
Jonathan said
anyone down-voting Naselus's post is living in a fantasy world
So, the poster you referred to created a made-up situation based on guesswork (might or might not be true, I wasn't there either) and judged someone based on their imagined response to that scenario and yet you claim anyone who finds fault with that approach is living in a fantasy world?
I'm no great debater, but even I can see the holes in that particular argument.
I actually agree with the government on this (having read their letter). To say your product is for use in the NHS is quite acceptable. To use the NHS branding and logo is simply passing-off unless you get written authorisation to use them beforehand (they did get written authorisation didn't they???). It's basic licensing 101. The volunteer aspect of it is here nor there.
There is a huge difference between offering a product for use in the NHS, and claiming that something is an NHS product. That was the distinction the government pointed out in their letter.
Agreed, there's a significant risk of passing off and it seems petulent to complain about it as no-one in the NHS acutally asked them to do this stuff as far as I can tell.
If they want to piss off their only potential customer in a legally-acceptable way, they could just change the name to UbHUNTu.
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