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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?"
Since I live in Portland, this could be good for future prospects in the employment-in-interesting-jobs arena.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
...there's not much to do in Beaverton besides staying indoors and writing open source software.
Dedicated Linux servers (root access) $45 p.M.
DHS is Oregon's largest branch of government (or second maybe), and they use very little open source. Here are their "standards".
Other state agencies probably have theirs posted as well...
Is Portland becoming the center for Open Source development in the US?
As much as any other town with more than 1 famous Open Source developer. One swallow does not make a(n Open Source) summer (camp), even if that swallow flew in from Finland and even if it likes penguins for reasons you do not even want to know.
Way to go out on a limb there, Oregon. This should jumpstart your economy
After intense lobbying by a large redmond based software company, GW declares all out war on "Those Commies over thar' in Portland". Airstrikes to begin immediately on the nefarious, shadowy group known only as OSDL.
Beaver, Oregon
The best part is the "Beaver Locator".
it's miserable in Oregon.
Please stay away.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
There are lots of voluntary and free programs in the US and have been since its inception. How have soup kitchens, the scouting program, and church service projects effected the US economy? Why should we expect open source software to have any different effect?
Great for Beaverton!!! The town hasn't been the same since Tanya Harding moved to Wash.
__________ Leave me alone I'm compiling a RPG II program on my S/36...Thanks to metamucil I'm a Regular Meta Moderator
Another OT factoid: He has been to more military funerals than any other major politician. I think he has been to almost every single funeral of an Oregon service member killed in Iraq.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Excuse me? We are, for the most part, very clean-cut hippies.
First of all, Randal Schwartz was arrested because he was cracking passwords. The fact that he was the system administrator is irrelevant to the discussion. He was told not to do it, and he did it anyway.
Yeah, Intel had a somewhat contradictory set of policies. On the one hand, he was charged with improving network security. On the other, he was told he couldn't do certain things. Where Randal went wrong was when he saw that the policies were contradictory and went ahead anyway. There is always another option which won't get you in trouble: stop what you're fucking doing, and get clarification from management. Being an arrogant ass, he didn't, and so he was arrested.
If your boss says: "Yes, sure, release that code as GPL", but your contract says: "All code is propery of The Company(TM)", then your legal position is unclear, which is very, very bad.
In such a situation, you get written clarification, or you quit your job. You do not break the law and then whine when you are sent to jail.
Then your cell-mate will say: "I like this one. He's cute!", and you will say "Why did I ever move to Oregon!!! !!!". Not good. Not good at all.
You're pulling this out of your ass. I work in the Portland area as a software developer and have never heard of anything like what you are inventing here, except for the case of Randal Schwartz, which was a pretty clear-cut case of misuse of computer resources. The guy knew the law, he broke it, he went to jail. Tough shit.
He could have simply gone to his employer and said "I cannot carry out my job function under this contradictory set of requirements. I need clarification."
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.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
A HUGE library of public domain mathematical software, mostly FORTRAN, was written by US Gov. researchers over the years, for example in use in climatology.
The affordability of my (academic) research depends entirely on the government's public domain coding policies stretching back as long as computers and acadamia have mixed.
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.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I think Schwartz said it best.
I became a felon for doing my job with a bit too much enthusiasm.
He used normal security techniques of auditing passwords, he never used the passwords in a dishonest way, and he was authorized to work with the systems. The passwords never left Intel's computers, he didnt actually "HACK" or steal access.
He should of been fired if Intel had an issue, but Oregons law basically make things like using someones xbox without written permission a felony.
Just because a company doesnt like the way you go about doing your jobs shouldnt make you a criminal.
You can read more about it here. Lightlink
Personal Telco Project
I don't believe there is any merit to this simplistic view of economics, which seems so prevalent on Slashdot. For example: "Digital music files can be reproduced ad infinitum, are, therefore, without value, and thus can be traded freely with no impact to the recording industry."
None of the ingredients in a basic cake are particularly scarce. So, once the baker has sold his first 1000 cakes, he can bake more. This, and the fact that just about anyone can bake a cake, is why a basic cake costs so little. If there were only those 1000 cakes in the world, they would cost much more. This is the application of scarcity.
A better analogy would be to compare a (good) programmer and his source code with an experienced cake decorator. You can buy a sheet cake for $50, but a fancy wedding cake could cost you hundreds, I suppose. You're paying for the decorator's service, his skills. Similarly, source code, as little more than a text file, is in some sense worthless. However, not just anyone could have written the code to do what that code does, in just the way it does it. When you pay the programmer to write it, you're paying for his knowledge and experience.
I live in Wilsonville (close to Portland). I've lived in many other areas in the country. Actually, the weather here is generally really nice in the summer. Between May and October, it is not too hot (usually) or too cold, not raining (usually), and not humid.
The winters are rainy, but compared to other places I've lived its a lot nicer. I've lived in Oklahoma (central), Missouri (Springfield and St. Louis), and Houston, TX.
Houston has a lot of rain in the winter, too. But in the summer, it is far too hot to enjoy the weather outside.
In Oklahoma it is always either far too cold or far too hot to enjoy the outdoors. Same for Missouri.
I love the weather in the northwest. It may only be good weather for half the year, but for that half its great.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
All the derogatory comments in this blog regarding Oregon are true! We are just strange people that love living in these horrible living conditions (like lots of rain and that sort of thing)! You wouldn't like it here, so don't even think of coming here (unless you want to vacation here for a week or so).
Heard any good sigs lately?
Did I miss something? What does the color of the houses have to do with development of OSS? Furthermore, with all the trees, it's mostly green around here. We're also known as being blue on the political map, though closer examination shows that to be in the metro area, with Eastern Oregon being mostly red. Still, I don't see your point.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
Absolutely. Waiting for the bus in the rain keeps us well rinsed.
Says someone named billybob.
Imagine a machine that could duplicate any wedding cake you place in it at
essentially no cost. The initial cake might cost $1,000,000 worth of time,
effort, facilities, and raw materials, but once the initial cake exists, an
infinite number of identical cakes can be produced for no additional cost.
Also assume that just about anyone who wants one, can easily acquire one of
these machines.
The only way the master cake decorator can make money selling cakes is if
it is illegal to duplicate wedding cakes with this ubiquitous machine. If no
such laws exist or the laws are unenforced, then the master cake decorator
must instead earn a living not selling cakes, but performing the service of
customizing cakes for people who don't want the standard cake and are willing
to pay him to make the desired changes. The master cake decorator no longer
produces a good in the traditional sense, but instead performs a service.
Sure, anyone can write names on a cake, but to some people it will be worth it
to pay someone to have it done well.
The only difference between the above ficticious cake scenario and the
software industry is that poorly written names on cakes don't actually have
the potential to make the cake worthless/inettible while poorly customized software
can make the software worthless/unusable.
*sigh* back to work...
Next slashdot headline:
"Linus eats at McDonalds, does this mean McDonalds is finally going open source? Could this be a new trend in the fast food industry OS adoption? Is this the year of the Linux desktop? "
I'm thinking it would be posted by Michael then duped twice by Timothy.
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
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I am not sure if you are trolling or espouse this view held surprisingly often.
I am a consultant, and I specialize in open source software. Open source, from a hobbiest's view may be antithetical from the idea of compensation, but from a professional's view, it just represents a different model for distributing the work that needs to be done and the compensation therefore.
Also note that with open source, at least among professionals, compensation is often in near direct purportion to productivity, while the curve for proprietary software is anything but linear (if you sell twice as many copies of the code than your competitors you make more than twice as much, and your software need not take twice as much work to make).
Open source will help everyone out. But I don;t really see it being Oregon-specific. Open source is something that is difficult to export efficiently because it is based on services, and in the services market, local parties have a serious advantage. Though for hosted solutions and a few other areas location doesn't matter.
On the other hand, freeing up licensing fees for software may allow for better computer networks in schools, etc.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
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.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Yes, it was a frightening miscarriage of justice and common sense. Washington County simply did the bidding of Intel (its largest employer). The irony of Washington County now becoming a center for free software is not appreciated widely enough.
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.
Yeah, Intel had a somewhat contradictory set of policies. On the one hand, he was charged with improving network security. On the other, he was told he couldn't do certain things. Where Randal went wrong was when he saw that the policies were contradictory and went ahead anyway. There is always another option which won't get you in trouble: stop what you're fucking doing, and get clarification from management. Being an arrogant ass, he didn't, and so he was arrested.
Being an arrogant ass shouldn't be illegal. What you're saying is, "Yes, parent poster, the law was wrong to put him in jail, therefore it was his fault for not recognizing that potentiality, and violating the stupid law."
The point isn't whether the law, as it stood (which was NOT clear until after the trial), made what he did a crime, it's whether that's a good and intelligent law. It isn't.
In such a situation, you get written clarification, or you quit your job. You do not break the law and then whine when you are sent to jail.
Way to miss the whole point. The point is that the system is unmoral/disagreeable/anti-the-little-guy/whatever related adjective you prefer. Your reply blames the victim and does nothing to address the problem. It's like saying (during the witch trial eras), "Well, that's what you get for having a birthmark and a pet black cat!"
What Randal did shouldn't have landed him in jail, but it did. He probably shouldn't have done it even if it was completely legal, but that doesn't mean he should be imprisoned for it!