[PLUG-TALK] White House goes Open Source

Paul Heinlein heinlein at madboa.com
Thu Oct 29 22:13:38 UTC 2009


On Thu, 29 Oct 2009, Rich Shepard wrote:

> On Thu, 29 Oct 2009, Keith Lofstrom wrote:
>
>> White House goes Open Source
>
> That's interesting. This morning I had a nice conversation with one 
> of the IT folks at Oregon DEQ. The state is very Microsoft-centric 
> and there's little FOSS software used.

The (short but fairly intense) contact I had with Oregon state IT last 
summer leads me to agree with that -- though I will say that SuSE has 
made some inroads here and there, as, to a lesser extent, has RHEL.

My impression was that the state IT folks were mostly quite capable, 
but very, very adverse to risk. They truly loved having a new feature 
or tool, but they hated being the one to implement it. I got the 
feeling that lots of the staff members would much rather "not succeed 
and not fail" than "succeed at the risk of failure."

Implementing a new platform like Linux and a new way of doing things 
(Unix v. MS) involves a lot of risk and, quite likely, some failures 
along with the successes. The IT talent is definitely there, but I 
don't think the state's IT culture encourages or rewards that sort of 
thing.

-- 
Paul Heinlein <> heinlein at madboa.com <> http://www.madboa.com/



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