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California Should use Open Source and VoIP
Albanach writes "ZDNet is reporting that a report from independent auditors and experts has recommended that the State of California adopts open source software and Voice over IP as part of a series of moves that, the report says, could save the state $32 billion over five years. Additionally, they recommend the State establishes a centralised technology division to handle all their IT needs reducing redundancy and generating further savings."
Does that mean that they did not have an IT department before? I quess they had one for each location/unit, but even that thought seems rediculously ludacrus.
who | grep -i blond | date cd ~; unzip; touch; strip; finger; mount; gasp; yes; uptime; umount; sleep
So CA is going to "use open source" in order to get price breaks out of Microsoft, then?
Isn't that how these stories always end?
-Rob L Dreene
When you think about how IT sprang up, it probably just sorta happened that way. Each unit that needed IT got it when it was appropriate. Now that everyone needs it, it makes sense to make one bigger IT group.
Some of the best VoIP software around it open source. The SIP stack at www.resiprocte.org is INHO one of the very best SIP stack I have seen - and I have see lots of them. Cisco open sourced an incredible mount of technology at www.vovida.org and recently Pingtel open sourced a IP PBX system at www.sipfoundry.org. The asterix system has been used by many people. There is a lot of open source VoIP software and it is used in many products and many large commercial deployments. Call traces from the things like Vonage and the leading SIP soft-phones sure look like they were generated from open source software.
The open source VoIP stuff is good stuff but I suspect that government and commercial organization might want to pay someone to support their critical phones systems regardless of if it is open source or not.
California should stop specifying implementation and start specifying functionality, development cost, and maintenance cost.
What the fuck should they care if their payroll is done in Perl on Linux or COBOL on MV/JCL as long as it hits the budget number?
Let the contractor pocket the difference, or negotiate a lower price.
I've been doing work recently for a startup company that uses VOIP and the quality doesn't suck at all. Maybe not all VOIP is the same.
--Richard
Because governments aren't businesses and price shouldn't be the sole criterion? Transparency for example?
Government use pushes software back into the public forums of education and function. Why shouldn't our subsidized universities produce software that everyone can use without further payment. We will always need people to customize it and explain it but we do not need Billionairs to sell it.
Government solutions should be for the benefit of all the populace. Hidden Source software resells the same solution over and over again. Why not solve it once for everyone.
The security and savings are far more than beneficial to the average voter than the millions spent by special lobby groups. I wish this was more widely known.
ls
If a patent is made that would apply to technology that already exists....how is it valid?
They are not, but the USPTO is so overloaded, and a daresay incompetent at upper managerial level, that almost anything gets through without proper checks for prior art. Groklaw is one place to go for info on that.