Posted on 10/11/2006 8:45:51 PM PDT by Golden Eagle
The chief information officer of Massachusetts' Information Technology Division (ITD) resigned earlier this week, citing a lack of funding for the state's IT programs. Louis Gutierrez had been a champion of open standards and was a strong supporter of the state's plan to implement the OpenDocument format (ODF) and his resignation could slow the ODF rollout, which is scheduled to go live in January.
Gutierrez had been sounding the alarm over the lack of funding since August when the state's legislature failed to approve a bond issue that would provide financing for various IT programs including the move to ODF.
(Excerpt) Read more at governmententerprise.com ...
Isn't all the good software free these days? Who needs funding for free stuff?
I guess the free stuff costs more than they thought.
What, after saving all that money on open systems software? Oh, did they reduce his budget by the amount of "savings" and he found that the "savings" statement was all smoke and mirrors?
chirp chirp
AIT...
I think they're having the same problems with these open source rollouts over in France and Germany. But for some reason they are still passing laws requiring it.
I guess Golden Eagle can always take over for Casey Stengel...
FUNNY!
As I understand all you confusion about how this little flack could happen let me try to explain the benefits and drawbacks of Open Source Software. The benefits are that, in many cases you don't have to deal with expensive licenses and costly maintenance agreements. Open Source Software is frequently monitored for security and operational bugs. There is an Open Source Solution for every commercial application in existence. Now the drawbacks is you need to hire IT personel familiar with these applications. In many cases this can offset the cost savings of the Software being free or low cost. In some cases, there are companies that provide support or maintenance agreeemnts for Open Source, and often much cheaper than for commercial applications. But again you need staff that is familiar with the software.
If all IT people quit their jobs over lack of sufficient funding there would be no IT people left.
LOL.
JRios1968,
Thanks for the prompting. Casey did have some beauts:
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/c/casey_stengel.html
I've been saying that about "free" software for years.
Don't forget training costs for the users. There are also productivity costs as users adapt to the different look and feel. That is the whole point about cost savings statements generally being overly optimistic, usually because of errors of omission.
The benefit of the software being free does eventually overtake the drawback of having to hire "specialists". You have to understand that there are other benefits as well. I.E. you can customize an Open Source App to your business model, while commercial "off the shelf" products are not customizable (in most cases). You don't find SDKs for SQL Server 2000 or Oracle unless it's the Enterprise edition and your organization is paying tens of thousands for licensing, support, and maintenance.
Open Source is still in it's infancy, and while it might be a tough sell, those organizations with vision will see the eventual cost savings. Those without vision will continually line the pockets of Larry, and Bill.
Thanks, those are great! I love baseball, actually had a softball game rained out tonight.
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