# NHoS Closedown - the final straw **Category:** [NHoS/NHSbuntu](https://openhealthhub.org/c/nhos/35) **Created:** 2018-01-17 14:30 UTC **Views:** 13194 **Replies:** 39 **URL:** https://openhealthhub.org/t/nhos-closedown-the-final-straw/1385 --- ## Post #1 by @pacharanero Sorry (and of course thanks) to anyone who's helped out with the **NHSbuntu** Linux project and it's revamped version **NHoS** but I think we've finally reached a point where we've had enough. The entire NHSbuntu/NHoS team (4 core members) have been working as volunteers, with a few small work packages and pieces of funding courtesy of the Apperta Foundation, but we have received absolutely **zero** backing from those higher up in NHS Digital and other NHS organisations. We're clearly not the 'right' kind of innovation, it seems. Most of our interaction with NHSD and NHSE at high level has in fact been deleterious to the project. In particular we have had a number of conversations which led to several cancelled-at-the-last minute meetings with Will Smart and Paul Rice - who (unbeknown to us) were also duplicitously **negotiating with Microsoft about a new NHS Enterprise Wide Agreement** In fact, I now strongly suspect that the reason we were getting any engagement at all at these levels was in order to strengthen NHSE negotiating position with Microsoft, by being able to say to M$ 'there is a competitor, we are meeting with them next week'. The final straw is that despite having changed our name from NHSbuntu to NHoS and significantly changed our branding style in order to satisfy the DH Brand Police's first legal letter (fair enough I guess, we were definitely pushing it with NHSbuntu) we have now been served with a second letter for NHoS (see below). We spent a significant amount of volunteer time just in changing all our tooling and branding from NHSbuntu to NHoS, and following a second takedown letter, the lack of any forthcoming material assistance or support, and in particular the duplicitous behaviour of NHSE CIO and team, we've decided simply to shelve the project. We can't afford the personal time required to rebrand _another_ time. We have other work to do. The NHS will just have to solve its own terminal addiction and lock-in to Microsoft. One day we may reinitiate the project, when we have some people backing us at high level who actually believe in the project's aims and aren't using it as leverage to help them get their political ends. You hear a lot about Innovation in the NHS, but if this is the way innovators are treated - with the full might of DH Legal against an unfunded volunteer organisation - then you can see why we have no **actual** innovation, just bullshitters retweeting each other about a vague fantasy Blockchain and AI future, while the NHS burns for lack of basic functionality. Marcus Baw Rob Dyke NHoS Directors Here's the latest takedown letter: [2017-09-20 NHSBuntu - NHS Trademark Infringement.pdf|attachment](upload://bFMRFcq884BtPkiKYynvPiRTbex.pdf) (185.4 KB) [2018.01.17 NHoS DH takedown 2.pdf|attachment](upload://aAqmbgjB6JTgXXqJG9rge4M1mcw.pdf) (177.0 KB) --- ## Post #2 by @DrPaulAtkinson A sad day. I understand and respect the team's decision but it's wrong for the NHS. :cry: :cry: :cry: --- ## Post #3 by @kenni3958 Whilst I would in no way count the last (Almost a year now) of working as a core member on this project as a waste of time, I do echo Marcus frustration at the lack of vision at the higher levels of NHS IT (perhaps there is a letter missing)! I was extremely honoured and proud to have been part of something that has so much potential, and has introduced me to to and I believe made friends with some amazing people with a vast array of skills that are under-utilised. Marcus passion for Open Source and Rob’s amazing skill set, alongside Tony’s bullish determination, was, we thought, the right mix to move this forward. As all good revolutionaries, we will go back underground, and continue to chip away at the bastion of NHS IT (That letter missing again), and will no doubt emerge once the powers that be have spend £Millions, nay £Billions of tax payers money on Windows 10, but only if we retire the EDGE Browser, block all access to Google Chrome and Firefox and only use IE11 because we need to update our E-learning on ESR :confounded::disappointed::cry: :nauseated_face::nauseated_face: Kenny Kennington, NHSBuntu/NHoS Core team member --- ## Post #4 by @paul.williams This is a real shame as the project has so much potential but I can sympathise with your experiences. Your work with the opensource Identity Agent had the potential to be a game changer in Linux adoptation in the NHS as this has been the main blocker for us whenever we have looked at anything in the past. --- ## Post #5 by @wolandscat Commiserations. This should not be happening. The letter is mostly nonsense bureaucratese. I consider there to be a category of work practice I call 'criminal incompetence', which is to say, people who accept highly paying jobs on the pretence of professional competency and alignment with the ultimate aims of the organisation, but who instead are incompetent and work knowingly against those aims, all the while taking their pay, and of course blocking up the organisation in the sense of the Peter Principle. The last time we saw this in a serious way was in NPfIT. But it appears that it never goes away. --- ## Post #6 by @Timothy I'd like to take this opportunity to thank all involved for their much needed efforts to help make the world a better place, and wish you all the best with whatever you decide to dedicate your free time to next. And here's to hoping that enthusiasm for this project may pick up at some time in the near future. --- ## Post #7 by @linuxrespin I want to thank you for your work. While this is a loss for our community, you worked as a community for community and even to the very end, informed our community about what was happening. This is why community is so important! I am not surprised by all the turn of events, by heart breaks by all these actions - including using volunteers to leverage talks with M$. As someone who also was recently working on a distro - I know all the work that can go into such a project. All I can say is the time was useful in learning and experience. It really breaks my heart also that trademark is again stifling potential good in this world. :frowning: Marcia Wilbur --- ## Post #8 by @dalmolin Wow it's a bit of a stretch to think that NHoS infringes on NHS... perhaps it's all the references to NHS in the website etc. that's knotting up their knickers. Regardless this is bureaucratic bullying without a doubt and it's wise to shelve things until the climate changes... and it will. What is astounding is that this nonsense is stifling an attempt to address a serious security weakness in the NHS's infrastructure... not to mention squashing potential competition for MS. --- ## Post #9 by @pacharanero The NHoS takedown letter implies (as did the first NHSbuntu takedown) that somehow as well as the trademarks and logo, the NHS owns **certain parts of the EM spectrum that are blue**, all **_ITALICISED CAPITAL LETTERS_**, and also the **letters N, H and S**. We've had numerous high level discussions with people who would have easily been in a position to make all this legal naming issue go away, by making us an official or 'supported' NHS project. Not one of those people decided to do so. Not one of them had the balls to give us an actual reason why. Had we been adopted as an official project (which one person in NHS Digital did work really hard to make happen) we could have kept the original NHSbuntu! --- ## Post #10 by @dave Shameful to see such manoeuvrings blocking excellent innovation. Thank you core members. And I hope that as Kenny hinted, at some stage we'll see the "son of NHOS/NHSbuntu" making an appearance --- ## Post #11 by @MatthewVita I am confident that the talent and leadership behind this project will identify a new or existing project to apply themselves to. As we all know, there are many problem gaps (esp. in the developing world) and open source healthcare is an amazing platform to fill them. Although I am new here, I have been impressed by Marcus' unique approach to open source healthcare and believe that OpenHealthHub will continue to grow and make a positive change in the world by bringing together various project leaders and minds. Thanks, Matthew Vita --- ## Post #12 by @zeeshan Sorry to hear about this. Could this be simply solved by moving the project to a neutral name such as UKhealthOS? Whether they realise it today or tomorrow or next year, NHS needs linux/open-source solutions. It's just a question of time. --- ## Post #13 by @Grant I was going to say something similar, but you beat me to it. I wonder if NHS Wales, Scotland and NI would view the trademark bulls*** differently ? Or does the NHS trademark extend through the devolved nations ? They all seem to use it, so assume yes. Saying that, I doubt very much that NHoS would be received any better in NHS Scotland. +1 to the idea of a brand-neutral Linux distro whose target users are healthcare workers. Also, why restrict to the UK, maybe just HealthOS ? --- ## Post #14 by @pacharanero Thanks everyone for the supportive comments. I think we're going to take a good long break from this project, make sure DH are clear it's closed down, and wait until the threatening letters have definitely stopped. ANd then I suspect we'll be back with a similar project, this time we will probably go with something much more conservatively named, like the above 'HealthOS' & similar suggestions. Cheers all, Marcus --- ## Post #15 by @paul.williams Could you not put the branding into part of the build process? So it could pick up all required images/strings from a directory or zip to be baked in? This would also allow for adhoc customisations etc? Just thinking out loud --- ## Post #16 by @robdykedotcom That pretty much sums up how the identity aspects of the project are sliped in to the packages now. But it's a little more involved than that... We rebranded before. It took weeks. All the package names need changing, and the names of the repos, and the organisation set as the owner of the repos, and that is while checking and rechecking that end to end we still produce a working ISO... The labour is not insignificant. The frustration with that labour is that it doesn't further the project in the slightest. Marcus and I LOVE work. Its wasteful labour we can't abide.... --- ## Post #17 by @pacharanero We had quite a few YouTube videos with NHSbuntu branding on the desktop background... You can imagine the rigmarole of having to re-record all these for the second time! --- ## Post #18 by @zeeshan Could the videos with NHSbuntu branding in background be corrected with video editing software rather than re-recorded? Where are the videos? --- ## Post #19 by @zeeshan OK, found https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCStu_DS17x25mnNf5w0nIvw/videos --- ## Post #20 by @robdykedotcom Hi @zeeshan It does seem that the videos are one of the things that Govt Legal are concerned with. I've switched the video on the home page to a new video which does not have the old NHSbuntu logo on the desktop. I'm not sure how far that will go to placate the Powers That Be. The other videos need to be reproduced with the latest version of NHoS anyway... Volunteers? --- ## Post #21 by @zeeshan I've never made a recording from my desktop, but apparently gtk-recordmydesktop can do this. I'm willing to help out. However, does it make sense to make yet another set of videos that will produce yet another legal notice? In my view, the rational way to proceed is to first rebrand in a way that NHS legal dept cannot possibly object. The letters NHS and the trademarked blue colour should be eliminated first. --- ## Post #22 by @robdykedotcom I'll write up a HOWTO on making the NHoS videos and post them to this forum. Briefly, I used either recordmydesktop-gtk or the record video output function of VirtualBox to capture the screens. To edit the videos and to add the title slide I used kdenlive. Rob --- ## Post #23 by @robdykedotcom On the subject of colour, take a look at the NHS England Brand materials https://www.england.nhs.uk/nhsidentity/identity-guidelines/colours/ The NHS blues are clearly specified in detail, with CKMY, Pantone and RGB values. The blues we use are not the NHS blues. The NHoS blues are closer to that of IBM or Facebook... The primary font of the NHS brand is Frutiger with Aerial as secondary. NHoS also uses a sans-serif font (as do pretty much all tech identities) called Ubuntu. Neither colour or font are sufficient to be used as a basis for successful legal action. Potential grounds for legal action would be that the use of a mark that could be argued is similar to the NHS mark include obtaining financial benefit by a perceived association and misleading consumers by an apparent association. As to obtaining financial benefit, it is no secret that we have received a grant from Apperta, the NHS Digital funded organisation which supports open source in the NHS, and have been paid by NHS Digital for hack week activities. As NHoS is released under an open source - free as in beer and speech - licence, I can't see a financial benefits argument being successful. As to misleading the market, well, I'd argue that the people who work in NHS tech are sophisticated and technology literate and are unlikely to misdirected by the NHoS identity. And while the NHS trademarks are registered in the classes which include computer operating systems, to my knowledge the NHS does not produce a computer operating system. I'll be asking Govt Legal to detail the specific actions they would like us to take as the request for us to take 'any such action' has all the clarity of bucket of mud and the hallmarks of an overreaching patent troll. Rob --- ## Post #24 by @MatthewVita I love the name `HealthOS`. The _world_ needs this! Of course, I'm booked with my own projects, but I'm sure you'll be able to find volunteers to go through the pain of the rebranding. My community is in need of redoing/cleaning up our wiki documentation (an extremely painful and unsexy task - especially since most videos/images are using the old version of the software and have to be completely redone). We are thinking about having a weekend "doc-a-thon" event (kind of like a hackathon) to spin it positively, inviting community members and strangers to join together in a virtual room/google hangout in breakout teams. Obviously, this concept is untested as we have yet to schedule/promote the event, but I wonder if you can employ a similar approach! -m --- ## Post #25 by @dalmolin https://www.healthos.co/#/home/search --- ## Post #26 by @zeeshan ukhealthos.org domain is available. --- ## Post #27 by @gary.kennington There goes that idea then! --- ## Post #28 by @MatthewVita Okay, let's come up with a better name then :). **OpenHealthOS** ? --- ## Post #29 by @vin 'Linux Health' as you'll always be using the kernel with a Mint Green livery (better than blue anyway) --- ## Post #30 by @MatthewVita @vin Great idea! If possible, one of the project leaders of NHoS should ask the Linux Foundation about "Linux Health" and if they'll sponsor it. :) --- ## Post #31 by @vin Could be a winner. As far as I can tell there isn't an ubuntu flavour tailored for healthcare, specifically, so the NHoS guys were definitely on the right track. Shame that copyright issues thwarted it. Would be great for clinicians around the world (including UK) to have their own free open source OS to run programs on like your OpenEMR. I know that freeMedForms comes bundled with Zorin 12 ultimate, so that's a good start at collaboration. btw Linux Health could have any colour livery, not just green (don't want to tread on Linux Mint's toes!) as long as it's not the disallowed nhs blue, of course. --- ## Post #32 by @MatthewVita _r.e.: "Linux Health" and a functional Ubuntu-based healthcare distro:_ My humble open source team put together https://github.com/GoTeamEpsilon/PersonaScripts (still pretty beta) to help bring a popular UX concept (personas) to the Linux desktop. I'd love to see if there is interest in building up the base persona ["General"](https://github.com/GoTeamEpsilon/PersonaScripts/blob/master/personas/docs.md#general) as well as ["Clinician"](https://github.com/GoTeamEpsilon/PersonaScripts/blob/master/personas/docs.md#clinician). I suppose clinician is the weakest of the offerings at this time - it's just a medical image viewer, link to install OpenEMR Cloud, and some electron webviews around popular clinical resources such as Pubmed and an ICD10 lookup tool. With the advent of [Flatpak](https://flatpak.org/) and [snapd](https://snapcraft.io) (as well as the continued awesomeness of apt), a full-blown distro may not be needed. Just a thought - open to any and all ideas here! -Matthew --- ## Post #33 by @Darkseid Hello Marcus Baw, my name is Tyler Torvinen. I'm wondering, will NHoS Linux make a return and how long until NHoS Linux is back? Do you have the final ISO of NHoS Linux for me to download and use on Oracle VM VirtualBox? Please reply whenever you can, please and thank you. --- ## Post #34 by @Grosse i'm wondering the exact same thing as Tyler, is there someone who can reply? i see this was written a month ago and still nothing. i also search for [oral steroids](https://suppsforlife.to/category/oral-steroids/) for my health if someone is an expert here. but anyway if some can help that would be amazing. thanks --- ## Post #35 by @adrian.wilkins The project is closed, but the sources are still open, so, you may have some luck with [this repository](https://github.com/NHSbuntu/ubuntu-defaults-image) and it's siblings. > Included is the NHSbuntu build helper `build.sh` , a wrapper for ubuntu-defaults-image. You can use this script to create the NHSbuntu ISOs for yourself. It is the same script used by Travis CI to automagically create the NHSbuntu ISOs. --- ## Post #36 by @robdykedotcom Closed? We are taking a nap... --- ## Post #37 by @vin Hi, just some general thoughts. I'm still finding the subject of an open source Windows alternative for the NHS interesting. I was wondering, if your project had been adopted by the NHS powers that be, who would have supported the OS? Seems like a huge task. If someone like Canonical approached the NHS with Ubuntu (dressed with an NHS skin) would that be seen as a serious alternative to windows, as it comes with larger scale support? I wonder if they ever did? Also, local IT support companies with NHS contracts only seem to have limited experience of/interest in supporting linux based systems (I don't know - just a presumption). Microsoft still seems to rule supreme. I think that would be a factor as to why the NHS are so resistant to moving away from MS - lack of non MS skills. My impression is that other countries have embraced linux based systems much more readily than UK. The NHS are missing out. They need to be brave and at least consider other alternatives. I also wonder why more EMRs and healthcare apps are not browser-based (open source browsers of course!) so that they can run on any platform? Another idea I have is that the future of the NHS could be clinicians using Android tablets as a replacement for desktops, so that would at least be a Linux-based/open source alternative to the current expensive Windows, though not as cost saving as using Ubuntu. --- ## Post #38 by @adrian.wilkins [quote="vin, post:37, topic:1385"] lack of non MS skills [/quote] That's the nail. When I was at NHS Digital (albeit this was 4 years ago), Linux was very much an oddity - the only Linux boxes I was aware of were run by my very small group, and we got zero central support (which to be fair, suited us fine - we installed an SNMP agent on our servers to keep IT happy, and they left them the hell alone because they didn't grok Linux). e.g. If you wanted single sign-on for your Linux web application, you'd have to badger IT to get the Kerberos integration for your server sorted out in Active Directory. At which point they'd look at you like you'd grown a spare head and do nothing about it. A substantial majority of IT dept. resources, as far as I could tell, while I was there, were consumed by * The project to migrate from Windows XP to Windows 7 * (which went on for yeeeeaaaaarrrrs, in no small part due to driver issues with the smartcard auth that, if they'd instead solved for Linux, they'd have solved forever) * Installing a whitelisting client on all the workstations * (and thus having to work to whitelist everything, while charging £5,000 a pop for custom applications) * This prevents "power users" from doing anything dangerous, subversive, or productive like writing batch files * Managing the SAN for the system that archived all your VoIP calls and fed them through a military SIGINT program. * Oh, I wish that was a joke. Then you have... * All the Windows-only applications * The sheer number of "web apps" that depended on ActiveX controls, and thus strictly IE6, was part of what caused the Windows 7 migration to take so long * Not insignificantly, all the applications written as Office macros in VBA * This accounts for a large amount of "hidden estate" * And of course, just MS Office * LibreOffice is only a solution if you're all using it. The only thing that's even halfway good at being compatible with Office is (the same version of) Office. * The Cabinet Office suggested ODF should be universally supported. MS responded by a. Providing ODF filters for Office b. Withdrawing the NHS Enterprise Wide Agreement (which makes the job of replacing office into a war of attrition instead of the possibility of a bold single move). * Cloud office products might be a viable option if you could self-host them It's not all black. Web applications are pretty much the default now. And it's eminently do-able to develop application clients that run everywhere - again, because the browser has become a universal platform and the tech that it's composed of is now good enough for most purposes (viz. VS Code and Atom etc). (never mind that in hospitals I *still* see a plethora of "greenscreen" applications that are clearly running on some VT-100 terminal mainframe, probably on an AS/400 in a broom closet, and that running clients for these on Linux is if anything, easier and better supported than Windows) --- ## Post #39 by @adamlees [quote="adrian.wilkins, post:38, topic:1385"] (never mind that in hospitals I *still* see a plethora of “greenscreen” applications that are clearly running on some VT-100 terminal mainframe, probabl:grinning:y on an AS/400 in a broom closet, and that running clients for these on Linux is if anything, easier and better supported than Windows) [/quote] Many of those will be old Mumps applications (Pathology being a particular hotspot for those). To be fair those will be likely running on a *reasonably* recent (10 years or so :grinning: ) Windows or Unix server running Caché and using its legacy Mumps language support. --- ## Post #40 by @vin Good info. The time will come, one day. Not yet, evidently. As you say, more web apps running in decent browsers will make something like NHoS a reality. Maybe things will happen in small stages e.g GPbuntu to start with. You were/still are years ahead of the times. Times are changing, though. --- **Canonical:** https://openhealthhub.org/t/nhos-closedown-the-final-straw/1385 **Original content:** https://openhealthhub.org/t/nhos-closedown-the-final-straw/1385