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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 $32 billion over five years. Additionally, they recommend the State establishes a centralised technology division to handle all their IT needs reducing redundancy and generating further savings."
Open Source in California Government
Does that mean that they did not have an IT department before? I quess they had one for each location/unit, but even that thought seems rediculously ludacrus.
who | grep -i blond | date cd ~; unzip; touch; strip; finger; mount; gasp; yes; uptime; umount; sleep
Only little girlie men wouldn't learn to use FOSS.
Jah.
Jah.
And VOIP be ooh so sexy.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
So CA is going to "use open source" in order to get price breaks out of Microsoft, then?
Isn't that how these stories always end?
-Rob L Dreene
... I tend to find them:
1 7236&tid=103&tid=117&tid=185&tid=9 8
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/13/13
Must be the season for dups.
It's it's a a great great idea idea to to use use open open source source software software to to battle battle redundancy redundancy!
A: Ja, I vant centralized control of all communication, power lines, and, ummm... all armed forces.
B: But, Governor, won't the people object?
A: Ja... so, throw some buzzwords to confuse them. Like that open source thing. And add VoIP to the list. We'll call it Sky(pe)Net.
-- "I'm not a religious man, but if you're up there, save me Superman..."
That this is a dupe. On the other hand think of the number of computers owned by the state of California. That's a bunch of license fees for M$ to lose, Win and Office. We can only hope.
A billion here a billion there and pretty soon your talking about real money - Sen. Everett Dirkson
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
Normally state government has a lot of redundancy. Most departments/divisions/agencies ( depending on they are called in California ) are nearly autonomous units, from the director right down to the mail room people.
There are reasons FOR this, since a lot of departments are forbidden by law to share resources ( funding sources ) and information ( privacy ).
Is this stupid? Perhaps in many cases, ( not all but many ) but its the way things often work in any governmental situation.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I always find it amusing how top-heavy bureaucratic governments (even 'democratic' ones) always seem to make choices based on common sense and simple efficiency only after the steady stream of free money they're grown accustomed to suddenly dries up. This is why budget spending really should be a lot more open to peer review than it already is.
Not that the average person cares much about trifles like the multi-billion dollar gap between Windows-imbedded programs and open source, but it would be a nice token gesture.
~Tirinal
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.
I noticed that the laws state that the judges and court rooms may use software, the the laws do not regulate how the software is used. For example, one software package made by California Family Law Report is suppose take the parents income and expensense and calculate child support amounts.
That software, DissoMaster, does not show its work on how it calculated the child support based on whatever given input. Currently, there is no way to appeal those calculation because that process is "closed." The input on the software is not verified. Anybody can enter any kind of input and have the software spit out some amount for which the court then deteremines as the amount to pay.
"The typical model for software acquisition in state government involves the purchase of closed source software solutions from the major vendors. Closed source software is any software whose source code is hidden from the public view. Under most licenses the user cannot modify the program or redistribute it."
br> I tried to contact CFLR to gain the source code to show exactly how the court erred in more than a 500 offset of the calculation. CFLR did not responde to my many attempt to contact them.
We can tell that such closed source software can be easily abused. The software didn't take in account many factors. It needs to be greatly improved. Not only does the input need to be verified, but the work needs to be shown so that parents can rebut the calculations for any factors that did not into the equation. We need to put the democracy back into the software the court uses by open source regulations and exclude privatization of such code. Any software code used in the court room needs to be as public as every other written law.
Now if only Slashdot could hire someone to find duplicates before they're posted. But then again, dupes help with revenue, as twice the stories means twice the adviews!
[NOTE: Just a little sarcastic tone, nothing bad meant]
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
...but other states will be able to adapt much of the software to their own use, with their improvements being rolled back into the software that California uses. Having each state as a testbed for open source software is a natural fit with our Founding Father's plan to have each state as a testbed for democratic governmnet.
A few years ago my ex-company, which lived on the bleeding edge, adopted VOIP. It sucked. People sounds like aliens. Our customers were turned off and complained. Eventually we went back to regular old phone service, while more expensive, actually worked.
I recently called d-link tech-support, I suspected they were using VOIP because the audio quality sucked. I actually asked the tech guy and he said yes, they were using VOIP and everyone hated it but the company was holding fast on it.
So my question is, if VOIP sucked back a few years ago, and still sucks now, why adopt it? Does anyone like it? Is the savings worth the fact that your customers don't like and your employees don't like it?
You know you're a geek if you've ever replied to a tagline.
Arnold: This Microsoft software needs to be terminated. Bill Gates is a girlie-man. Say Hasta La Vista to Windows, and say hello to Linux.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
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.
State Parks - they use Novell Groupwise and earlier this year were contemplating moving to MS Exchange; Since the Novell/SuSE deal I have been waiting for them to make the OSS move but so far no go. A lot of the IT staff are MCSE factory drones that had to "learn this Novell thing". They are hampered by spyware and caught by virii now and then.
If Novell could make embed OOO into their groupware, that would be the ticket.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
We can post new comments.
I am curious about the potential software-patent ramifications of having open source software adopted by state governments.
If the adoption is made, and open source code is widely and successfully integrated in one or more state governments, and THEN a legitimate software patent on some new technology prevents the state from being able to make use of the new technology, could this add any weight to the re-examination of the software patent issues in America?
Or will it just cause the state to change its mind and go back to M$?
Of course not. More interesting is how such an inaccurate AC post made +5 so quickly. Hello Redmond!
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
It seems that this is an obvious no brainer. Things that we will still have to worry about.
1. His Honerable Socialist Chairperson Muckety Muck in LA country insists on using his laptop. The network traffic produced by the viral infected thing screws VoIP up for the county.
2. Expect to see the regional bell SBC sue the state, and insist that it should be paid for a percentage of VoIP traffic that travels over the network
3. Expect legislation and/or rules designed to take the software that you and I pay for through taxes, and give it to some company/cousin of the grand high supervisor elect assistants manager of garbage collection.
Have you ever been in a state that has so many damn managers and so few people actually working? If California was a company it would be ripe for a "re-structuring". Most sucessful restructures cut out middle management and promote a lean work force (ie we kept the people that actually did something). At the end of the day, what will make or break California is it's citizens. The more services that they demand from their state, without wanting to pay for them, or help in any way the worse off they will be.
cluge
AngryPeopleRule
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
We got a VoIP system at work a couple months ago.
I love it because I can not answer my phone and then tell the person that was trying to call that the phone system had crashed.
I also love it when it decides to just disconnect my phone conversations in the middle of a
It's like using a mobile phone, only without the convience of being wireless.
I want my POTS back. I want a phone that works when nothing else does. I want a phone with 99.99999% uptime, because it turns out that a phone with 97.2% uptime really, really sucks. You wouldn't think it, but those couple of percentage points are the difference between critical tool and useless gadget.
This would be perfect for government agencies, who really don't want any contact with the people they're supposed to be dealing with, but can't appear to be avoiding them. I see this being a major cost saver.
"Hello DMV, can I help you?"
"I just want to know..."
-click- beep beep beep beep beep
They can reduce time wasted on calls to an average of 2 seconds, all thanks to the miracle of VoIP.
Mostly on a city basis, The Ontario City library (yes this is california we're talking about here) uses these linux thin terminals (they run off of cd.. and have no HDD) with a modified blackbox to run netscape. They paid a one time fee for the things and that's it.. they get online so you can get into the online catalog and reserve books or check them out online if they're not available at that branch.
When the World Trade Center, and surrounding buildings including Verizon's "7 World Trade", collapsed after the 2001 planebombings, NYC's phone system collapsed with it. Essential to managing the disaster, the NYC government's 70,000 desktop phones needed to come back ASAP. 2 days later, over 50,000 of those phones had been switched by the City's IT department, DoITT to VoIP. Shortly afterwards, that department produced a study that showed that the City's annual Verizon bill is over $100M: that's almost $1500 per phone, every year. After the 2003 blackout, and then a 1-hour Spring 2004 911 emergency switchboard outage that cost someone their life, DoITT has announced they're putting that fat Verizon contract out to bid. Despite any law requiring that, or even any precedent in the century of Verizon (by whatever name) operation of New York City's phones. NYC is currently receiving proposals for voice/data networking and moblie wireless networking projects, worth billions of dollars. The City Council (legislature) Technology in Government Committee has held public hearings on public wireless spectrum issues to ensure emergency services have access, and emergency 911 calls over VoIP service, to ensure that the move from circuit to packet switched phone calls preserves New Yorkers' service expectations. With 10-15 million people here every day, and everyone talking around the world, NYC is leading the way in planning for the transformation of VoIP. We're glad to have California along for the ride :).
--
make install -not war
Consider that California has, in the Assembly alone, some 80 separate offices...one for each Assembly member, both in Sacramento and in their home district.
I recently did some repair work in one of these District offices and got involved in a conversation about internet and access.
Keep in mind, California already has an internal phone system for all State offices, which many counties within California also access.
What has happened is that SBC has convinced the General Services of Calfornia that the State can "save millions" by buying and paying for DSL service from SBC.
For the Assembly alone, that's 160 _separate_ DSL accounts, all running at 384K.
Not such a problem? Consider why I was at their office...
It took four hours for the people in the District office to print something from the servers in Sacramento.
Every server within Sacramento is connected by a T-3/OC-12. Regional offices (California is divided into 12 regions for resource allocations) are connected by T-1 or better.
I fell back to the non-technobabble explanation of them having a drinking straw for internet and Sacramento having a firehose in terms of bandwidth and latency, and they seemed to understand it.
But the irksome part of the whole is that someone in General Services was stupid enough to buy into and use the SBC explanation to "save money", and never bothered to investigate the _real_ costs.
By the end of the year, every office not in Sacramento or in a regional facility will be dropped from all connections except ATSS (internal phone system) and SBC DSL connects.
"Eustace? Eustace? Are you there? Are you there?" = John Leeming