Oregon's Governor Backs Open Source Development

Colonel Panic writes "Oregon's Governor Ted Kulongoski is backing a plan to establish an Open Technology Center in Beaverton (also home to the OSDL). The purpose of the center will be to boost the adoption of open technology among developers and industries. Given that the Portland area hosts OSCON and is the home to the OSDL and now Linus, is Portland becoming the center for Open Source development in the US?"

Comments

logical

[Captain McCrank]

The unemployment rate among IT'ers in portland is so high that clearly, the only development that goes on is unpaid.

Way to go out on a limb there, Oregon. This should jumpstart your economy

I used to work in the Oregon DOT, and

[HungWeiLo]

this is just saber-rattling to get volume MSFT discounts for state government IT.

Since the state government doesn't have enough funding to hire really good people, it's mostly just temp consultants from degree mills who get their knowledge and advice from PC World and the now defunct Windows magazine. For the longest time, (it might still be there), there's a pallet of at least 50 sets of retail-boxed Intel Pentium Pro Overdrive upgrade kits (still shrink-wrapped) sitting in one of our meeting rooms which were purchased by some tech lead (for $200 when they were retailing for $80) and when P2's were bottoming out in price. In the same year, someone decided to pay a Canadian consultant $5 million to write a simple Access frontend to a database. And that's not all - they had to fly his entire family down and feed, house, and clothe them for an entire month! Granted, at the time it was difficult to find good people because of the dot-com rush, but they could have easily found a pimply-faced high school intern to have done it for $10/hr.

The point is - there are not nearly enough qualified IT people in state government there to utilize open-source solutions.

Re:I used to work in the Oregon DOT, and

[EnronHaliburton2004]

For the longest time, (it might still be there), there's a pallet of at least 50 sets of retail-boxed Intel Pentium Pro Overdrive upgrade kits (still shrink-wrapped) sitting in one of our meeting rooms which were purchased by some tech lead (for $200 when they were retailing for $80) and when P2's were bottoming out in price.

That's not limited to government. It happens at large companies all the time. My parent company paid several million dollars for some Websphere and DB2 licenses (Based on the advice from a consulting company which charged them a million dollars) in order to migrate a website from an old platform. They made this purchase BEFORE they evaluated the old platform. Now it's 6 months later, they've scrapped the whole project because they couldn't figure out how to migrate from the old to the new platform.

This sort of shit happens all the fucking time in Fortune 500 companies... the machine just keeps churning it's wheels. People that point out the errors are fired or laid off.

It's why I want to work at a small company... at least you have a better idea what is going on, and you can go out for coffee with the CEO ...

Once again, MM tells the truth and lies

[Marxist Hacker 42]

about 8, that's eight, state troopers

That's true- because in Oregon parts of the beach are still the State Highway System. What MM doesn't tell you is that there are also 8 fully operational Coast Guard bases, 2 National Guard Bases, and the rest of the Oregon Coast that isn't covered is right on the edge of the continental plate and is protected by huge jagged rocks, pounding surf, and the ghost of Bandage Man.

Re:I certainly hope so.

[brianosaurus]

I don't know the history of Open Office in particular, but many big open source projects start off as one person's personal effort. If they become popular, people join in.

Apache, Samba, Emacs, Perl, Python... What's that other one.. The guy did it as a grad school project... Oh yeah.

Linux. Perhaps you've heard of it?

Of course not all basement projects end up as open source. There's plenty of popular proprietary software that had humble beginnings, even Microsoft.

Oregon: A Nice Place to Visit

[Russ Nelson]

Sheesh, you both have it wrong. It was a billboard just north of the California border that said "Oregon: A Nice Place to Visit", with the emphasis on "visit". We used to live there back in 1981. Worked at HP's Calculator Division in Corvallis. Worked on the HP-41 CMOS power supply chip. "Oh, I heard that the HP-41 only ever had a bipolar power supply chip." You'd be right, sigh. Never did get the damned thing working, but at least we scared Harris into improving its incoming yield rate.
-russ

Done deal.

[Russ Nelson]

Actually, McDonald's have been running Open Source Software since around 1989. They use the GPL'ed packet driver collection to communicate between the registers and the back of house system. There was a time when I had open source software running on more CPUs than any other person.
-russ
p.s. hehe.

How about my state?

[ahziem]

Write your local government officials. But first, do a little research.

Check out the budgets. Look at their spending and objectives. If an objective states, "Identify possibilities for increased efficiences in information technlogy," there you go.

If all their documents are in Microsoft formats, draw their attention to Commonwealth of Massachusetts open standards policy and how open formats are helpful.

If you can find they are violating a their own policies regarding document storage or accessibility, mention that.