New advocacy group pushes OSS for the USA

[Daniel ~]

Written by Daniel
Thursday, 23 July 2009

A diverse coalition of open source software vendors, universities, and nonprofit groups have come together to encourage broader adoption of open source software in government IT.

By Ryan Paul | Last updated July 23, 2009 7:40 AM CT

[Front page...]

[dsio]

Its starting to gain some traction here as well. The big problem govt and edu institutions seam to have with FOSS is the precieved lack of support along with the price difference between Microsoft trained staff and Linux trained staff

Personally I think this is partially due to the fact that Microsoft hands out MCSE certs like bogrolls while companies like RedHat and other major FOSS vendors make you do some serious study and examination followed by a bare ass ceremonial paddling before they give you their cert, leading to a glut of underqualified dumbasses that are "MS qualified" and substantially less productive and skilled than the handful of more expensive linux jockeys.

Rant aside, I do believe that SuSE / RedHat / Ubuntu support is getting close to if not beyond windows commercial support now. This university I'm at now has about 6 Ubuntu labs just in this campus in the buildings I've visited (could be more I haven't even seen), easily 300+ computers running it, and they have proper cannonical approved support from a local company that does a terrific job of keeping those machines updated, running and most significantly, with no downtime. The windows labs are managed independantly and often we come in to see entire labs being reimaged once a week at least, and even the mac labs have some issues.

[Gizmo]

Yah, back when I was studying for my MCSE (circa 1998), you actually had to have some kind of clue to be able to get an MCSE. Then came all the 1 week boot camps and such. The number of MCSEs out there who can't even figure out how to bring up a command-shell is pretty scary.

[dsio]

The MCSEs that we have floating around the labs at uni are not overly concerned with things like shells, all they do (seriously) is carry around one of those Novell Ghost USB thumb drives on a string around their necks, and if a computer has any problem, ranging from a lack of network connectivity to a mouse with its cord cut off, they stick the Ghost thumb drive in and re-image. That's it.

And I've even watched one of these guys bending over a computer at an uncomfortable angle so that the thumb drive could reach the computer while still being around his neck, for a solid 20 minutes before realizing that if he took it off his neck he wouldn't have to bend over any more.

To the chagrin of the engineering department they even insisted on buying HPs this time around (the HPs have these terrible keyboards with a Sleep button directly above the ESC key, such that while ESC-banging in VIM you can put your computer to sleep, losing your work). They supposedly bought the HPs because the Dells that were being offered did not have front mounted USB ports, which made their lives difficult.

[Daniel ~]

Dude! You have to right a book! LOL