On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 7:06 PM, Susan Cragin <susancra...@earthlink.net>wrote:
> > The Concord Monitor has in the past given my articles good exposure, the > state is desperate to cut costs, and this could be a good thing for > open-source. > > The state employs several dozen programmers and the expected accompanying management personnel. Going from prior job postings, many of those programmers work in COBOL. Presumably that's for their back-office applications, but not necessarily all of them. From a current job listing: http://www.nh.gov/doit/internet/org/cio/hr/jobs/10611.php we can see they are already using a mix of open source and proprietary software. Actually, we can see that they are using open source software from just the URL. While I am an open source advocate, I really don't think the state's bang-for-the-buck is to be found in undergoing a desktop software switch, even if they are paying full retail for their Windows programs & support, which I doubt. The retraining would take over a year and the cumulative costs would be projected to take at least a year from the project's completion to achieve any ROI, if not longer. There's no political will out there right now to gamble like that. The cities are, for the most part, even more cash-strapped, and are using specialized applications too, but without the programming staffs, so now you are faced with dealing with proprietary applications that may or may not run on Linux. I think the only place you can reasonably expect a realistic opportunity to make a switch-over on the desktop are the school systems: little or no specialize applications, and smaller staffs which mean low retraining costs and shorter retraining cycles. mark
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