Dear President Obama,
Congratulations on passing the stimulus package! I hope that the stimulus package will help the economy get back on track.
One thing that could help is to eliminate some of the approximately five billion dollars a day that we waste as a world economy with closed source, proprietary software.
How do I arrive at that figure?…
An open letter to Barack Obama
Posted by Greg Laden on March 16, 2009
(2)
Comments
-
I’ve found that the greatest time sink is generally dealing with my employer’s security and IT management. Not the software its self. I lost about a day getting WinBUGs installed on a work machine and then getting access to a folder that I’d created outside of “My Documents” (it was an issue with an R package that called WinBugs not being able to deal with long pathnames). I don’t have administrative access to the machines at work which is the problem.
-
From: French police: we saved millions of euros by adopting Ubuntu
A recent report has revealed that France’s national police force has saved an estimated 50 million euros since 2004 by adopting open source software and migrating a portion of the organization’s workstations to Ubuntu Linux. They plan to roll out the Linux distro to all 90,000 of their workstations by 2015.
The writing is on the wall. I happily watch the market share which has been enjoyed by MS Windows for so long inexorably shrink. Proprietary software brings with it proprietary problems. With a very good IT staff, problems encountered in open-source software can be taken care of by custom patches by in-house development (or simple searches on Google).
March 16, 2009
March 17, 2009
, which is now available for the 
