[PLUG-TALK] White House goes Open Source

Pete Lancashire pete at petelancashire.com
Thu Oct 29 22:32:44 UTC 2009


I should also add the talent is there in most cases but the talent
is not part of the decision making process. In some cases those with
the most talent are avoided when there is any type of evaluation and
or q&a meeting is performed

-pete


> 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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