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It should at least be in the datacenter.

I have worked in public ed at one of the largest districts in the country. Open source should have easily been in the data center but it wasn't and I'll tell you why.

No real study was done when there came a time to change technology. In fact theres never any study done when new systems are needed. The powers that be LITERALLY say "What does Microsoft have for that?". If MS doesn't have something to accomplish the task then thumbs are twiddled until they do. Consultants come in and sing the praises of MS to the business people while discouraging open source. A PM and I almost had to leave the room to laugh as one rep made the lamest argument against open source we had ever heard. He stated that we had no way to know what we were getting....in open source code.....

The other reason was because we had a mostly MS only set of admins. Ironically the best admin there had been pushing for a switch to Linux for years. She knew she could handle a bigger workload using Linux. She eventually left. The rest that were left there were "clickers" and could only solve a problem if it could be done by clicking next. Otherwise you could have servers dead for weeks while they twiddled their thumbs.

The worst moment there came when I walked into a meeting where the hiring of a consultant was being discussed to come and get some code off Linux. I was puzzled because I didn't think we had anything in shop running on Linux...we were and ASP.Net shop.

Ironically I found out later that this code being discussed was the source code to the app I had just been assigned to modify and maintain. It wasn't running on Linux but was stored in a CVS instance on a Linux box. The admins were so incompetent that they felt they could not even boot the box. Before I knew the situation I asked them where the source I needed was stored and I was told something was wrong with the box it was on. I inquired if it was a hardware problem or something because I would take it and try to just get it off the hard drive. The admin then told me with a long pause and somber look....that it wasn't broken but that it was running Linux. I said....ok.....give it here. His eyes lit up and he said "You know Linux!?!?!?!?" Yes I replied...which distro is it. Going back to that somber look he said Red Hat or something I think. Within 30 minutes of this convo I had booted up the SUSE box and got the code out of CVS.

I can't help but imagine this is the same type of foolishness thats going on at other districts while our tax dollars are wasted.

Posted by: storm14k   Posted on: 01/28/09 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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