[SGVLUG] Inside Team Romney's whale of an IT meltdown

Christopher Smith cbsmith at gmail.com
Mon Nov 12 13:31:14 PST 2012


I have no idea about the details of recovery.gov, but usually software
licensing is  a trivial fraction of the cost of such projects (though open
source projects do tend to have overall costs that are lower), and more
importantly costs may have been much higher had they gone a different way.
Last I checked, recovery.gov was a pretty involved website...


On Mon, Nov 12, 2012 at 1:08 PM, Stan Slonkosky <stan.ke6zc at gmail.com>wrote:

> If they used open source software why did the recovery.gov web site cost
> $18 million to redesign?
>
>
> On Sat, Nov 10, 2012 at 12:46 PM, Miguel Hernandez <migtek at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> No QA (or Beta period) will net those results EVERY time hehe. The more
>> important question is: Did Romney not learn anything from Obama's tech
>> team? You know, Obama being the first president to ever openly embrace open
>> source software & whose tech team used open source at most levels of their
>> IT's organizational structure (starting w/Obama's campaign website all the
>> way to recovery.gov, whitehouse.gov & its IT spending dashboard just to
>> name a few). As an example, his IT & Web staff not only used Drupal
>> extensively but also contributed code back to the Drupal community as well
>> as got involved via presenting at DUGs (Drupal User Groups), DrupalCamp's &
>> the largest of Drupal gatherings, DrupalCons.
>>
>> Here's an initial news blurb:
>> http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/10/whitehouse-switch-drupal-opensource.html
>>  Here's a short video:
>> http://drupal.org/whitehouse-gov-launches-on-drupal-engages-community
>>
>> cheers,
>> --miguel
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Nov 10, 2012 at 7:48 AM, Arthur Baldwin <eengnerd at yahoo.com>wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> The burning question on my mind is "have they learned anything from this
>>> experience"?  Will they try Linux servers next time...seeing that around
>>> 90% or more of web site servers are already Linux servers?  I voted for
>>> Romney and I knew that something very wrong had happened.  I told myself
>>> that Americans could not possibly be stupid enough to choose Obama.  This
>>> "meltdown" is poetic justice.  It should teach Republicans that the
>>> Microsoft business model (as set forth in the Halloween documents) is not a
>>> viable path to choose.  Open source makes sense and now they (campaign
>>> managers) have the proof in a hard earned personal lesson.  Let's hope they
>>> learned something.
>>>
>>>    ------------------------------
>>> *From:* matti <mathew_2000 at yahoo.com>
>>> *To:* SGVLUGDiscussion List. <sgvlug at sgvlug.net>
>>> *Sent:* Friday, November 9, 2012 3:32 PM
>>> *Subject:* [SGVLUG] Inside Team Romney's whale of an IT meltdown
>>>
>>> Really!?!? .. wow...
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Inside Team Romney's whale of an IT meltdown
>>> Orca, the Romney campaign's "killer" app, skips beta and pays the price.
>>>
>>> "To build Orca, the Romney campaign turned to Microsoft and an unnamed
>>> application consulting firm. The goal was to put a mobile application in
>>> the hands of 37,000 volunteers in swing states .. Part of the issue was
>>> Orca's architecture. While 11 backend database servers had been provisioned
>>> for the system—probably running on virtual machines—the "mobile" piece of
>>> Orca was a Web application supported by a single Web server and a single
>>> application server"
>>>
>>>
>>> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/inside-team-romneys-whale-of-an-it-meltdown/
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>
>
> --
> Stan Slonkosky
>
>


-- 
Chris
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