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Will Obama save money on government computers?

A news story from the BBC broke today describing Obama’s invitation to Sun Microsystem’s CEO, Scott McNealy. Obama asked McNealy to present a report on the benefits of Open Source software. Already many national and state government entities in the United States and many over-seas governments successfully use Linux and other Open Source software. What do you think? Should the United States government go on a software diet?

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 26th, 2009 at 9:19 pm and is filed under Riding Shotgun with Rick. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

One comment

  1. Anonymous
    February 1, 2009 at 5:37 pm

    I think the cost of retraining every keyboard tapper in the government to use open software would be huge, and not justified by the presumed benefits. Further, because open software can be readily changed, each agency with an IT department will customize the software for their agency. Soon there would be no hint of standardized software in the government, and productivity would drop overall.

    The reason we’ve all put up with Window’s deficiencies is because it is ubiquitous. That has dramatically helped the nation’s productivity.

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