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Oregon's Governor Backs Open Source Development

Posted by samzenpus on Wed Jan 26, 2005 05:56 PM
from the building-a-center-near-you dept.
Government Businesses Politics IT
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?"
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  • I certainly hope so. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jdray (645332) * on Wednesday January 26 2005, @05:59PM (#11486000) Homepage Journal
    Since I live in Portland, this could be good for future prospects in the employment-in-interesting-jobs arena.

    • Re:I certainly hope so. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by superpulpsicle (533373) on Wednesday January 26 2005, @06:19PM (#11486221)
      Well Portland is not the central hub for open source. It's any techie's basement, which is in any state.

      That's why it is such a threat. M$ can't just buy the entire state.

        • I don't know the history of Open Office in particular, but many big open source projects start off as one person's personal effort. If they become popular, people join in.

          Apache, Samba, Emacs, Perl, Python... What's that other one.. The guy did it as a grad school project... Oh yeah.

          Linux. Perhaps you've heard of it?

          Of course not all basement projects end up as open source. There's plenty of popular proprietary software that had humble beginnings, even Microsoft.

        • 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.

  • Well, since it rains 363 days of the year there... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Harry Balls (799916) on Wednesday January 26 2005, @06:01PM (#11486031)
    ...there's not much to do in Beaverton besides staying indoors and writing open source software.
  • Cambridge Mass. last time I checked. you gotta give it some weight. VA also has a lot of OSS projects within its borders.
    • across the Charles to Boston http://www.fsf.org/fsf/fsf.html Really, this is silly! You would only have to have a world capitol of OSS if it were a business, or if it were run primarily by people with unhealthy needs for recognition, domination and money...that happens north of Portland or very near the Potomac. The coolest thing about the FSF website is the who's Gnus page...contributed software comes from all over the planet.

  • State of Oregon DHS IT standards (Score:5, Informative)

    by valkraider (611225) on Wednesday January 26 2005, @06:04PM (#11486064) Homepage Journal
    DHS is Oregon's largest branch of government (or second maybe), and they use very little open source. Here [state.or.us] 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.

  • The unemployment rate among IT'ers in portland is so high that clearly, the only development that goes on is unpaid.

    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.
  • And I'm hoping this does something for home prices in the area- which have been in a slump since the .com bubble burst (average residential occupancy in Washington County is at 25%, which is great for renters but murder on homeowners trying to refinance or sell). That- and maybe it will do something about the county's 12% unemployment in the high tech sector.
  • ...is Portland becoming the center for Open Source development in the US?

    Hmmm, that would be kind of fitting, actually. And just a short-day's drive from Redmond too.

    I guess, however, it's not like the GOD (Good Old Days) where you could quit your job at Microsoft one day and start working for an Open Source employer the next. The job market is such now that it's much more picky. (Unless you are working in Java which tends to be OS color-blind)

    BTM
  • Great for Beaverton!!! The town hasn't been the same since Tanya Harding moved to Wash.

  • I used to work in the Oregon DOT, and (Score:4, Interesting)

    by HungWeiLo (250320) on Wednesday January 26 2005, @06:33PM (#11486367)
    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.
    • 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.

      That's not limited to government. It happens at large companies all the time. My parent company paid several million dollars for some Websphere and DB2 licenses (Based on the advice f
    • That war is not secret, and has been going on for a long time.

      • Re:Economic battle? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by einhverfr (238914) <chris.travers@gmail.com> on Wednesday January 26 2005, @09:09PM (#11487753) Homepage Journal
        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.
      • 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?
      • With source code, there is no scarcity in the way that there is scarcity with
        other products. If a baker bakes 1000 cakes, he can only sell 1000 cakes before
        he is cakeless. A programmer, on the other hand, can write code and share that
        code with an infinite number of people.

        With this in mind, trying to treat any philosophy of open source as an
        economic model is doomed since the basis of economic theory is the management
        of scarcity and in open source, there is no scarcity. Any comparison will
        be shallow at best

          • Re:Wait... (Score:4, Insightful)

            by Dan Ost (415913) on Wednesday January 26 2005, @07:56PM (#11487086)
            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.

      • Re:Wait... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by squidfood (149212) on Wednesday January 26 2005, @06:44PM (#11486456)
        The question I have about US government support of open source is this:

        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.

      • And, we don't have Self-serve in Oregon, so there are kind people who will pump your gas. Also, depending on the gas station, they may wash your windows, and do a better job than the homeless guy who runs out in front of your car at a intersection with a squeegie.
      • But if -- God forbid -- you actually MAKE any money in Oregon, they take some 10% or so away. And they do have a Gasoline tax. And some cities have an additional local tax.

        Nothing like laying the burden squarely on the productive members of society so everyone can save 30 cents on their trips to Pete's Coffee.

    • Re:Seems logical (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Oregon is full of dirty hippies. Especially Portland.

      Excuse me? We are, for the most part, very clean-cut hippies.

    • I seem to recall some Debian developers doing a computation to find the "centre of mass" of Debian developers - the closest you could get to a "centre" for open source. If I remember rightly it was somewhere north of Iceland. You can go there if you want.

      Jedidiah.

    • Re:Has Oregon repealed it's nasty anti-coder laws? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by pclminion (145572) on Wednesday January 26 2005, @06:32PM (#11486361)
      This guy is full of shit.

      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."

      • Re:Has Oregon repealed it's nasty anti-coder laws? (Score:4, Informative)

        by BrookHarty (9119) on Wednesday January 26 2005, @06:56PM (#11486559) Homepage Journal
        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 [lightlink.com]

      • 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 ille
    • You think that's cool? The president of my company lives three doors down from him.

      • Done deal. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Russ Nelson (33911) on Wednesday January 26 2005, @09:10PM (#11487762) Homepage
        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.
    • 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 [tinyurl.com].

    • "Protected" from who? The State Police mission is mainly traffic related. They also do things that help out sheriff departments and such from time to time. And the state Medical Examiner is part of the state police. But what does the number of troopers have to do with protecting the coast?

      I am a fan, and own Farenheit 9/11. But you HAVE TO ADMIT that much of the film is sensationalist, and there are huge debates over the details. But the whole Oregon State Trooper thing was a stretch at best.

      The coa

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