Slashdot Mirror
2008 Olympics Aiming For Open Source
An anonymous reader writes "The IOC is considering switching its IT infrastructure to an open source platform for the 2008 Beijng Games, according to an article on silicon.com. The Olympic IT program director says the move will save money on licences but warned that support costs for open source in China could yet derail the plans. There are also some photos of the Olympics IT operation."
Obivously such important systems shouldn't be connected to the Internet. And if the password is secure (as in long and not based on a word) there should be no problem, plus no one should never ever allow root to login though ssh.
But China is as well the worlds #1 for censorship
I think you'll find that the world's #1 country for censorship is NK. The place is a true information black hole, there isn't so much as a peep from the population that comes out of it.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Here is an interview with their IT guy.
In the Sydney 2000 Olympics I worked as a volunteer in
the Sports Results section in Adelaide, South Australia.
We had 6 of the football (soccer) matches and one final.
Our small team had to:
- Print the start lists of players when they came through
at beginning of the matches
- (Watch the game.. a perk)
- Print the results of all the matches played around
Austalia at the end.
The printouts (100's) were then run out to the various
people who needed them around the venue. eg. Game Results,
Media, Olympic Family (VIP's)
It was a low tech result, but it relied on IBM software
for the print jobs, and was centrally managed/controlled
on their network. Everything went through Sydney.
I don't know what would have happened if the network
had failed, other than we also had been given a Fax machine
as a backup.
It was a good experience, and FLOSS should be able to bring
somethign to the table...
W
They sort of do that, to a point. Atos Origin, formerly SchlumbergerSema, formerly Sema, was contracted to provide the IT services for four games starting with the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City. The software for the 2002 games was written from scratch (since IBM had performed that duty in previous games) and those systems will evolve through to the Beijing games in 2008.
There could probably be some good arguments for having the IOC take control of the IT services, or a portion of them, but I believe that responsibility currently resides with the body organizing the respective games (Athens, Torino, etc).