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’.