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

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.

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.

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.