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Texas Bill Would Require Open Source Consideration
Skapare writes "The Texas Legislature now has before it a bill ( ASCII text here, PDF here), submitted by State Senator John Carona, to require the state to consider open source and open standards as part of the acquisition of software. Texas, like many other states, has a budget crisis going on. If this passes, I believe it could help the state save a lot of money. Texans need to make sure their state representatives and senators know they want this to pass."
I'm the network manager for a medium-size city government in Texas. Although city govts are distinct and separate from the state, we can still buy our software off of the "state contract" prices from "QISV" vendors without having to go thru the RFP/open bidding process.
Half a decade ago we embarked on acquiring only "vendor-supported turnkey software apps" and ditched our in-house written systems (mostly old mainframe stuff) because it was perceived to be more cost-saving route, rather than having to keep our own expensive tech staff on payroll. What we've actually learned over the years is that "vendor-supported turnkey apps" is a farce. The vendors corrall and herd you into a corner where they want you, the support prices skyrocket overnight while the quality of tech support plummets. They force you onto a never-ending upgrade gravy-train which only benefits their bottom line. They do not keep knowledgeable support staff because that is a cost center to them, you get to wait on hold forever only to get to talk to a bubblegum-smacking teenager with a condescending attitude who barely can parrot back the owner's manual to you and cannot solve any real technical problems.
In the end, running complex computer systems costs a lot of money, whether you pay thru the nose for "vendor supported turnkey apps" or keep your own staff of technical experts it eventually costs the same in the long run. When you do the latter, you are in much more control of your own destiny, you upgrade if-and-when you decide, not when the vendor decides. You can customize the system to fit your own internal business needs.
I am using open source software everywhere I possibly can in my organization. We're feeling the budget crunch too, and the purchase cost savings of open source is definitely popular with my managers, though they are concerned with "who will support it", well the answer is the same people who would be supporting the "vendor-supported turnkey apps" --- the city's own I.S. staff, because whoever the commercial software's "owner-of-the-day" (the companies are constantly getting bought out by other companies) is generally incompetant anymore.
As an I.T. guy/admin for a Texas agency this isn't going to happen. First of all, at least 75% of the tech staff at your average state agency isn't going to be able to learn to support open source software. It's not like in the real world where a good number of people in I.T. are interested in learning new things. Where I work there are techs that are possibly going to retire simply because we're going from Win 9x to 2k. Now if that throws them that much what do you think is going to happen when you put a Linux/BSD box in front of them? Also, it's painfully obvious that the people that run these agencies could care less about saving money. For example, we paied $300 to have a cpu fan replaced in a computer the other day because if we went out and bought one ourselves and installed it we'd be in violation of a contract with the harware repair vender. I deal with things like this every day and there's nothing that can be done about it.
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