Trimming The Growth Of The US Government’s Budget Will Promote FLOSS at Robert Pogson

“Dale Luddeke, who chairs the Industry Advisory Council (IAC), an IT industry group, said he expects to see a shift in government to things with "cost savings attributes," such as open source, and agile development and cloud technology.
see The sequester will hurt tech nationally.

I don’t see that a shift to FLOSS will hurt IT nationally. It will make IT much more efficient. Typically, systems running FLOSS need fewer servers and fewer bodies. That might hurt national employment but IT will be well off.

The only problem with this view is that it does cost something to migrate to FLOSS and some migrations may be too costly while budgets are being cut. The low hanging fruit may already be migrated.

Anyway, with US government spending $500billion on IT, a few $billion should be easy to find. For instance, if they lease PCs they could probably switch to thin clients more widely and get instant savings. A thin client may cost anywhere from $50 to $500 but a lot of clerical jobs can easily be done with $100 boxes, so for less money than a lease of a PC they could own a long-lived thin client PC. Same with office suites. LibreOffice is a no-brainer for savings. They can have similar services for less than one month’s costs for M$’s office suite.

I think US government has been interested in FLOSS for a long time. Some departments like DOD already use a lot as does Whitehouse.gov. This may be an opportunity to do more over many more departments. The Whitehouse holds: “We believe in using and contributing back to open source software as a way of making it easier for the government to share data, improve tools and services, and return value to taxpayers.” Amen. Now is the time to put those words into actions.

My Mission

My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. I do not care whether my solution is the same as yours. I like to think for myself.

My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. I have been blessed by working in schools where students and school systems have benefited by good, modular software easily installed in most systems.

I have shown GNU/Linux to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers over the years and will continue in some way doing that until I die in spite of the opposition.

1 Response to “Trimming The Growth Of The US Government’s Budget Will Promote FLOSS”

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1 ram Mar 6th, 2013 at 5:05 pm

Trimming ANY government will promote FLOSS. Less government with less tax mean more private enterprise. Private enterprise is mostly driven by the profit motive, not taking bribes and kickbacks. The much lower costs of operating with FLOSS are viewed as highly desirable by private businesses.