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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."
I've got to say the photos at least were rather disappointing - a few (three) shots of some terminals, two totally unrelated ones, and that was it. No actual server racks or anything, which would have been what I'd actually be interested in seeing.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
The 2008 Beijing Olympic Games could switch to a cost-saving open source technology platform under proposals to be considered by the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
The open source move will be recommended by the IOC's technology partner Atos Origin on the back of guidance from sub-contractors that include HP and IBM.
Claude Philipps, programme director at Atos Origin for the 2006 Turin Winter Olympics, told silicon.com the plans will be put to the IOC in a formal proposal and that the committee will then make the final decision.
He said: "For open source we have a plan to propose this for Beijing. It will save money on the licences."
But he said support costs could scupper the open source switch. "The issue might be support because especially in China you don't have all the companies we have in Europe and the US," he said.
I know the OSS advocates will wave their victoy flags, write eloquent stories about the demise of Microsoft, and rack up free karma, but nothing has happened yet. Moves like this are considered all the time when someone thinks they can save money with all this 'free' software. Hopefully with IBM in the mix, this will actually happen, but for now this really isn't a story. Come back when the decision is made.
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
support costs for open source in China could yet derail the plans
Where the hell are they going to find support for less than in China?
Wait a week or two and there will be a story where they did a sudden surprise turnaround and chose Microsoft anyway....
I'll probably be modded down for this...
How about some open source drug testing? Opening the whole thing up, making it completely public, would really help with cheating and all the other dirty garbage that goes on behind the scenes.
Berto
When I was a kid (back in the '70s) we used to sit and watch it darn near from the opening ceremony to the closing one, but that was back when you had almost uninterrupted coverage of just about every event.
Now all you get is a couple of hours of highlights (and almost entirely track events) at most after the regular sports news, and even that tiny offering is just crap about doping scandals, smothered in commercial breaks.
I honestly don't know anybody who really gives a shit about the Olympic Games anymore.
And there's the whole Great Firewall issue to deal with. How will the Chinese government deal with it? I don't think that journalists will like having the BBC blocked. Perhaps they'll unblock the space allocated to the Olympic village. But, even then, I don't know if the Great Firewall is technically capable of this. Even five-star hotels catering to foreigners are blocked, and they can show satellite news stations that are off-limits to Chinese nationals.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
"We're putting together an architecture that's quite big for a short period, but that's how it works. We have around 10,000 desktops, 500 laptops, 400 Unix servers, plus another 450 Windows servers."
That's kind of interesting, because the linked story offers the following numbers:
Anyway, that leads me to the point I want to make:
I've been promoting FOSS on Linux professionally since 1998, but this kind of muddiness always makes me question the wisdom of change. Not from a quality or philosphical standpoint, mind you, but from the perspective of protecting the clients from themselves.
See, here we are at the end of 2005, and the IOC is thinking about moving to FOSS and Linux by 2008. If they intend to move all 10,500 PCs and the functionality of ~900 servers to from proprietary software FOSS and run a 24-7 terrorist-proof operation with global reach, hooking into countless other data systems... They are, not to put too fine a point on it, terminally stupid. Any system-wide change this large should be the result of very careful study. Note especially the part where it says the IT system has approximately 2 volunteers for every single paid staff member. Try to imagine what the training would be like if the software isn't spot-on in its interface design.
BUT... if they're looking at re-working a few key systems in order to improve their robustness and lower their costs, then I would say that they've made an inspired choice that shows perceptiveness and leadership. 8^)
And that's the problem with much tech industry 'journalism' these days. We are given almost no useful details. I long for the days when a journalist's response to an ignorant readership was to educate them rather than to gloss over details.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
they better not plan on printing anything or using a wireless card.
If you're referring to the lack of driver support in Linux distributions, this is mostly an issue when switching from Windows to Linux on a given piece of hardware. In this case, if Microsoft isn't an Olympic sponsor, I'd hope that the IOC has enough clout to convince whatever business is selected at the Official PC Supplier of the Olympic Games to provide Linux-compatible hardware.