[aclug-L] Re: open source in state governments

[Lars von dem Ast <prenzl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

When I worked for Harvey County, I pushed for open source, but got 
nowhere. In county government there are the big, rich counties that can 
afford ESRI/ArcInfo (GIS), M$, Oracle, and those that can barely afford 
PCs. Harvey was blowing big bucks on M$/Citrix, even though they had 
absolutely no data management other than what came with the state (COBOL 
apps doing license, appraisal, etc.) on their AS400. I talked with the 
IBM man and he said, sure, let's set up Linux on their AS400, Web, DB2, 
etc. Harvey balked even at that because it would have required a very 
cheap memory upgrade.

In general, small counties are starving for data management, and cannot 
afford the price tag (many, many $1,000s) for Oracle, MS SQL Server, 
etc. The new Kansas appraisal system to replace (2004?, 2006?, ever?) 
the AS400/COBOL app is supposed to be database-neutral SQL, and there 
should be state money to buy SQL DBMS. When I pressed Topeka for details 
on whether an open source DBMS would also work, they brushed me off 
repeatedly.

I would say the next mySQL (4.x) will be on par with Oracle 7.3; hence, 
robust, mission-critical, and capable of doing lots of heavy data 
lifting. And IMHO, no county or state entity needs more than an Oracle 
7.3 level of data management, i.e., mySQL would be fabulous.

Unfortunately state and county government is very hostile territory to 
new IT thinking. They're bureaucrats who are in the public sector to do 
laid back jobs 40 hours/week, full stop. They get in ruts and stay 
there. New things usually don't interest them; hence, only heat from 
above moves them.

As I understand, Germany's government is getting heavy into Linux and 
especially KDE.

Lb

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