Comments on: An open letter to Barack Obama https://gregladen.com/blog/2009/03/16/an-open-letter-to-barack-obama/ Tue, 17 Mar 2009 23:44:11 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.8 By: Dan J https://gregladen.com/blog/2009/03/16/an-open-letter-to-barack-obama/#comment-532677 Tue, 17 Mar 2009 23:44:11 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/03/16/an-open-letter-to-barack-obama/#comment-532677

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).

]]> By: Darkling https://gregladen.com/blog/2009/03/16/an-open-letter-to-barack-obama/#comment-532676 Mon, 16 Mar 2009 22:52:35 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/03/16/an-open-letter-to-barack-obama/#comment-532676 I’ve found that the greatest time sink is generally dealing with my employerâ??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.

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