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Businesses Government Politics IT

Oregon's Governor Backs Open Source Development 303

Posted by samzenpus from the building-a-center-near-you dept.
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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Oregon's Governor Backs Open Source Development More

Oregon's Governor Backs Open Source Development

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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.

      • 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.

        It is a lovely fantasy.

        But how many programs that have brand-name recognition, like OpenOffice, are a geek's home-brew basement project?

        • 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.

        • Well Linux is one I can think of offhand...

  • 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) 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.

  • logical (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Captain McCrank ( 583414 )
    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

  • Ya hoo!!! (Score:2, Funny)

    by mbrewthx ( 693182 )
    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
      • I understand that - that's why I laugh whenever someone tells me that government is inherently less efficient. I've worked extensively in both and can tell you that I'm actually leaning towards the notion that private enterprise can often be more wasteful and inefficient than the public sector.
      • Dont think that a smaller company is any less prone to this type of activity, either.

        I just got laid off from a 'small comany' (77 employees) - that recently threw 500k into a massivly failed CRM implementation.

        The key is finding a good company. Size is irrelevant.
        • Dont think that a smaller company is any less prone to this type of activity, either.

          Maybe not. I probably just feel more comfortable when I know what is going on and when the decision makers actually listen to me...
          • Yeah, thats what drew me to the smaller company in the first place, too. I beleived that my voice would be more prone to being heard. It wasn't :)

            Bottom line is, it all depends on the people. If you get big company people hired into a small company, things get fubar really quickly.

        • Dont think that a smaller company is any less prone to this type of activity, either. I just got laid off from a 'small comany' (77 employees) - that recently threw 500k into a massivly failed CRM implementation. The key is finding a good company. Size is irrelevant

          The difference is that a big company can continue to waste money like that for years and still stay in business. A small company will often go out of business with a mistake like that. That's why you don't see so many small companies being

  • Oregon is angling for some _really big_ discounts from Microsoft.
  • Portland is also home to Free Geek [freegeek.org], a model for what computer reclamation / redistribution centers can accomplish.
  • Anyone who can win a major political office with a name like "Kulongoski" has my support. ;)

  • Sounds like pure hyperbole to me. Seems like OS development is inherently pretty decentralized [debian.org].
  • All the derogatory comments in this blog regarding Oregon are true! We are just strange people that love living in these horrible living conditions (like lots of rain and that sort of thing)! You wouldn't like it here, so don't even think of coming here (unless you want to vacation here for a week or so).
  • I have just the perfect project that could make
    the new Open Source Center literaly the center of
    the open source universe.

    I'm talking about a real, good, solid replacement
    for Microsoft Exchange. Take a combination of the
    projects that we already have (openexchange,
    opengroupware, etc) and use the best components
    of each one and come up with something that is
    truly open source, industrial strength, and with
    as many 'enterprise' features as Exchange.

    We already have the backend components this can
    use; postgresql (
  • Don't forget that Keith Packard lives in Portland also. So you have the core of Linux development and the core of X development.
    -russ

  • How about my state? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by ahziem ( 661857 )
    Write your local government officials. But first, do a little research.

    Check out the budgets. Look at their spending and objectives. If an objective states, "Identify possibilities for increased efficiences in information technlogy," there you go.

    If all their documents are in Microsoft formats, draw their attention to Commonwealth of Massachusetts open standards policy [mass.gov] and how open formats [mass.gov] are helpful.

    If you can find they are violating a their own policies regarding document storage or accessibilit

  • Never mind that big fancy OSDL out in Beaverton.... this is the heart of Portland linux.

    http://www.freegeek.org/ [freegeek.org]

    OK, one of the hearts. But at least Free Geek is located in the real Portland, inner southeast, as opposed to out in sterile, wealthy, Geography of Nowhere, Silicon Forest, stripmall land....aka Beaverton.

    Still it's neat to have Linus himself living here in our little old forest.

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