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.
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.
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.
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.