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

[John Wang]

I don't know if $18 million is reasonable or not, but the programmers and the hardwares are not free.    If we look at the effort from the pubilc's point of view, even if it did cost the government more by going with the open source solution, if the quality and quantity of the contribution back to the open source community are good, then $18 million could be a bargain for all of us.






________________________________
From: Stan Slonkosky <stan.ke6zc at gmail.com>
To: SGVLUG Discussion List. <sgvlug at sgvlug.net> 
Sent: Monday, November 12, 2012 1:08 PM
Subject: Re: [SGVLUG] Inside Team Romney's whale of an IT meltdown


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