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Oregon Government Supporting Open Source

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the lets-get-em-all-on-the-wagon dept.

amountlad writes "In a pair of articles released today on N4N.org, Oregon continues to lead the way in government open source adoption in the USA. The Oregon State University's Open Source Lab will host a Government Open Source Conference in October. The GOSCON has strong support from within the state government. The State's Department of Administrative Services released a white paper detailing their use of Asterisk for audio conferencing for more than 500 conferences a week. The set-up includes a web-based interface for judges to manage recording the hearings. In doing so the State joins Metro, a Portland area regional government which uses Asterisk along side its Beowulf Cluster."

4 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. Not ALL of Oregon Govt. by murch · · Score: 5, Informative

    Unfortunately, not all government agencies in Oregon are following along. I work for the Oregon Judicial Department, and there's not a drop of open source in use that I know of. It's pretty much all Microsoft, Lotus, and Corel.

    What's even worse is that there's a lot of alternatives in use between counties. For audio recordings in the court, most counties use either FTR or CourtSmart. My court uses Office products, even though the "official" standard is the Corel suite. It makes it difficult at times when working with other counties.

    I think it'd be great if we went with Linux and Open Office, but that'll never happen.

  2. Re:Open source + no hardware innovation: reusabili by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    The average computer uses as much as seventeen swimming pools worth of coal to run on any given day.

    No, it doesn't. Not even close. Please, for the love of God, don't pull "facts" out of your [thin air].

    For those of you who aren't complete idiots, a computer uses about 300 Watts. 300 Watts in 24 hours is 7.2 kiloWatt-hours. That's a little less than 17 swimming pools worth of coal in energy.

    *burying face in hands*

  3. Re:I wonder... by genericacct · · Score: 5, Informative

    Nope. Intel has a central campus in Oregon, and is home to other major tech companies like Tektronix and Flir. Don't forget OSDL's main HQ is in Oregon. The west coast in general is technology-dense.

  4. Re:I'm a lawyer, and there is a hitch by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative
    "So you can imagine our suprise when we were informed by a lawyer that we would be required to publish our source code for others to use. It was brought to our attention that Linux is copyrighted under something called the GPL, or the Gnu Protective License. Part of this license states that any changes to the kernel are to be made freely available. Unfortunately for us, this meant that the great deal of time and money we spent 'touching up' Linux to work for this investment firm would now be available at no cost to our competitors."
    Always ask your lawyer before you sign the deal. Besides, "making the changes freely available" means giving people the source code if you give them the binaries. You don't have to give the binaries or source to anyone except the investment firm. The GPL also makes it clear that you and the investment firm can separately agree that they will not redistribute the binaries or code.

            "Furthermore, after reviewing this GPL our lawyers advised us that any products compiled with GPL'ed tools - such as gcc - would also have to its source code released. This was simply unacceptable."

    Replace your lawyer--he can't read. The GPL does not require you to license things under the GPL simply because they were compiled with gcc.

    If you don't believe me, read it yourself.