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General Motors Embraces Open Source for New Community Site

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the let-em-have-it dept.

An anonymous reader writes "GM has introduced a new website called GMnext. The site utilizes Wordpress and launching in spring a Wiki allowing General Motors to get better feedback on topics such as energy, design and technology from the community. The interesting part is the executives at GM are participating in the collaborative website. 'We're starting our second century at a time of fundamental change in the auto industry,' said GM Chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner. 'We'll use GMnext to introduce some of our ideas for addressing critical issues concerning energy, the environment and globalization. In the process, we also hope to spark a broader, global discussion on these important topics.'"

5 of 80 comments (clear)

  1. Pffffft. by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 3, Informative

    I worked for GM. And when I worked there, the use of FOSS was absolutely, positively forbidden. Good to see them finally getting a clue.

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    My blog
    1. Re:Pffffft. by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 4, Informative

      GM was not an all-Microsoft shop when I worked there. Most of the engineering servers were running some form of UNIX -- either HP-UX or Solaris. They served to a mix of Windows and UNIX clients -- UNIX clients via NFS and Windows clients via CIFS9000 (yeah, yeah, I know. CIFS9000 == Samba. Tell them that.)

      The file and app servers actually used high-availability clustering -- commercial stuff, not open source.

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      My blog
    2. Re:Pffffft. by SnatchMan · · Score: 2, Informative

      Hmmmm... When I worked for GM (actually, a subsidiary that made chips, radios, engine controllers, anti-lock brakes, etc...) we heavily used FOSS in our UNIX environment. Ever hear of the Corporate Software Bank? It was a multi-architecture public domain software repository mounted on /usr/std and automatically updated with rdist. That spread throughout the sub into other GM locations. Even did a USENIX LISA presentation in the early 90's on the topic. (Caveat, I haven't been there since the late 90's so things could have radically changed since then.

  2. Re:Ugly .NET site with Wordpress knee-jerked in it by corsec67 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Not even slashdot passes that test
    Looks like some unencoded ampersands and style attributes.

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    If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
  3. Re:open source engine control by thatskinnyguy · · Score: 2, Informative

    If you want an 11 second car, the first thing to do is lose the A/C. It drops about 40 lbs of weight and it's less crap for your crank to have to deal with. My 11 second car has only the alternator hooked to the crank as an accessory.

    Megasquirt was a pain in the ass. But I took my good old time with installing and tuning it and everything turned out fine.

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    The game.