Just another power grab. I am not surprised.
Well, Obama is the first foreigner to be elected POTUS. The first President to give stock tips. The first President to pick a fight with the radio show host... I can hardly wait to see what he does next...
Congress approves Cabinet appointments — Obama is over reaching his powers (again) — the Bureaucrats will ignore the Appt.
Is he a former H1B Indian Import ?
So DC is the model of tech achievement?
What a job! Just think of all the kickbacks,bribes,and hush money in such a position! Wow! That guy will retire rich!
Forcing would be bad. Software choice shouldn't be a political decision, whether you're Stallman pushing open source, or GE pushing closed source. Buying software according to quality, security and functional criteria regardless of the development model would be good. Why government standardizes on the worst, slowest browser on the market is beyond me when the open source Firefox is free and much better, and the code can be freely examined for security purposes.
such as the Beowulf clustering software NASA developed and released under an open source license years ago which is now used free of charge by everyone in the world who wants their own supercomputer
From the original Beowulf documentation:
Beowulf also uses commodity software like the Linux operating system, Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) and Message Passing Interface (MPI). ... Beowulf is not a special software package, new network topology or the latest kernel hack. Beowulf is a technology of clustering Linux computers to form a parallel, virtual supercomputer. Although there are many software packages such as kernel modifications, PVM and MPI libraries, and configuration tools which make the Beowulf architecture faster, easier to configure, and much more usable, one can build a Beowulf class machine using standard Linux distribution without any additional software. If you have two networked Linux computers which share at least the /home file system via NFS, and trust each other to execute remote shells (rsh), then it could be argued that you have a simple, two node Beowulf machine.Beowulf was built off the contributions of foreigners, and has since then been much improved by foreigners. Also don't forget that the core of large Beowulf installations, PVM and MPI, were written mostly by universities, which tend to publish and share their research anyway. One of the founders of the reference implementation of MPI, Open MPI, is a German university.
This is not about open source. If you work in Federal IT you’d know that.
The biggest problem is the graft and fiefdoms in the procurement procedures. Some agencies are running with 80+ different database and software systems. Projects are started and stopped on a whim, and less than 40% of projects that actually are completed, are completed with the same management team that started the project.
One of the UnitedBusinessMedia publications had an extensive series of articles on the problem written and published in early 2008.
two perspectives:
http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=715&doc_id=170587&piddl_msgid=175412
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=109&STORY=/www/story/05-06-2008/0004807499&EDATE=
President Bush had made similar appointments, his three appointments all quit in disgust after very short tenures.
This isn’t the right way to go about things. They’ll only hurt the OSS movement.
Kundra will have budgetary authority to launch entirely new systems within government departments, or kill existing multimillion-dollar IT projects. His decisions could have a large impact on government contractors, such as SAIC and Booz Allen Hamilton, that have come to provide the bulk of IT services to agencies.
D.C. Tech Chief Tapped for White House Slot
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/05/AR2009030501060.html