Toronto Municipal Open Source Revolution, anyone ?

Max Blanco blanco-S8qYAnHmZTt34ZA5RureAJ4VBq8PJc8F at public.gmane.org
Thu Nov 13 00:16:16 UTC 2003


On Wed, 12 Nov 2003, William Park wrote:

[snip]

> Maybe there is someone at the new City Hall who is interested in all
> this.  If not, then we're wasting time.

I don't quite agree.  Who wouldn't be interested in saving $100 million
right off the bat?  This would be a nice feather in someone's budgetary
hat... a young go-getter on staff...

There are two areas I'm interested in right now that seem to be eating up 
all our tax dollars (in an incremental sense... they seem to get a bigger 
slice of the yearly pie) one is computers, the other is medical 
technology.  The average person does NOT understand computers.  Hence, 
this is a golden opportunity for vultures to feast.  Heck, the average 
councillor does not understand computers.

When I look at it, the average office worker needs a) word processor b)
email c) push database client d) spreadsheet(?).  This requires a CRT
monitor, a used computer, an ethernet card, a 1 gig drive, a keyboard, and
linux. A CD install could do this lickety-split on *existing* machines.

The city IT staff would need classes and support to make the transition.  

The key would be that $100 million can be split off into $90 million 
savings and $10 million linux training services.  $10 million buys a lot 
of linux training services.

This will no doubt fail if too much is bitten off at one go, so
start small, with one department or building, or even one office.

The CD install in a fine-tuned presentation: bingo.





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