Weekly Edition
Return to the Press page
| |||||||||||||
Open-Source Backers March on Washington (New York Times)
The New York Times
covers the push behind the
recently announced Open Source for America group.
"Look out, lobbyists: Here come the open-source zealots.
Some of the worlds largest technology companies have banded together in a bid to push open-source software on the United States government. Theyve formed a group called Open Source for America, which seeks to make sure that government agencies at least consider open-source software as an option in their buying decisions. The big, rather timely pitch behind this move is that open-source applications can help save the government money."
(Log in to post comments)
Open-Source Backers March on Washington (New York Times) Posted Jul 24, 2009 5:50 UTC (Fri) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link]
Like, for example, in Munich, where the move to Open Source helped saving over -2M$?
There are no zealots there, btw. Just lobbyists - except that they lobby for e.g. IBM or HP, not for Microsoft.
Open-Source Backers March on Washington (New York Times) Posted Jul 24, 2009 12:41 UTC (Fri) by kragil (subscriber, #34373) [Link]
?Citation needed. (Just FUD IMHO)
Even if it really cost $2M more so far. It is certainly due to the fact that they needed to defeat vendor lock-in. Once that is done and they can determine their own IT without anybody dictating updates etc. It will certainly be cheaper. I heard Limux' Floschi talk a few times and it sounds like an awesome success so far. Many cities will regret not doing the same once the budget crisis really hits them and XP runs out of updates.
Open-Source Backers March on Washington (New York Times) Posted Jul 24, 2009 14:01 UTC (Fri) by kragil (subscriber, #34373) [Link]
BTW: A Limux talk will held today at Debconf:
https://penta.debconf.org/dc9_schedule/day_2009-07-24.en.... (I think times are CET)
And the great Debian team provides realtime video streaming (other distros and confs take note! Compared to that you all suck donkey balls. GCDS videos anyone? Oscon videos? Guadec 08 videos? Fudcon videos? .. I obviously like my video instant gratification ;)
Open-Source Backers March on Washington (New York Times) Posted Jul 25, 2009 14:04 UTC (Sat) by krake (subscriber, #55996) [Link]
GCDS videos are here http://www.geeksoc.org/gcds/
Open-Source Backers March on Washington (New York Times) Posted Jul 25, 2009 14:08 UTC (Sat) by kragil (subscriber, #34373) [Link]
Hey! THANKS!
Why isn't that URL on all the planets??
Open-Source Backers March on Washington (New York Times) Posted Jul 24, 2009 15:28 UTC (Fri) by ccchips (guest, #3222) [Link]
Having been in the IT world for over 30 years, I always wondered how long it would take for the FUD experts to get around to the inertia problem and migration to Open Surce and/or Free Software.
I have seen one company ad after another that skews toward the impression that their product will help with inertia - this was particularly obvious when people started taking an iterest in RAD. There are consultants who promised to "quickly" migrate shops from say Assembler to COBOL, only to leave the management with programs that had data names lile:
D130H16
so that the aftermath staff had to reverse-engineer their own source code.
Any major conversion, whether it be from proprietary software to free software, or vice versa, must take these matters into account. Then come the day-to-day operations costs after the transition is complete.
I have also seen comments here on LWN about suitable replacements for bread-and-butter facilities like Active Directory, and for tools that make day-to-day management of medium-sized and large-sized client/server shops easier.
I think the place to start with this is to try and get some resolve, on the part of public officials, toward a common , open, document storage standard, and try to get them to stop listening to DRM advocates and supporters of proprietary formats. If we dont's start by doing that, we are placing an undue burden on future generations, and all the free software in the world won't fix that.
I would like to listen to audiobooks using Linux, by borrowing them from my public library. I cannot. Etc, etc. Maybe a two-pronged approach is best (free software, unencombered content.) I don't think we can have one without the other, if we want this to work.
Open-Source Backers March on Washington (New York Times) Posted Jul 24, 2009 16:36 UTC (Fri) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]
The real benefit of using open-source solutions in government procurement contexts is that you can get an off-the-shelf solution that essentially works, and then do separate additional contracts with different companies to add stuff. Since a lot of government deployments need to be customized, this is much more likely to be successful than a proprietary solution where the whole system has to be replaced in order to switch vendors, and there may be no vendor with the right specializations to be able to meet the actual needs.
Of course, for the normal stuff (office software for everyone with desk jobs), this isn't an issue, and there's no reason a proprietary solution couldn't work, so long as it was able to interoperate with the custom agency-specific systems.
|
|||||||||||||