[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/
More information about the PLUG-talk
mailing list