|
Videos
March 4, 2009 By Andy Opsahl
Using an open source content management system (CMS) to power the Newport News, Va., Web site is about advancing the "greater good of open source for all" to Andy Stein, the city's IT director.
Cost savings often motivate open source deployments, but Newport News hasn't yet saved money from the project. Since 2007, they city has spent around $300,000 -- roughly the cost of one high-end, off-the-shelf software license -- to make its open source CMS software usable government, Stein said.
Other governments can take advantage of the city's investment, tweaking it to meet their needs for comparatively little cost. Stein hopes those governments will invest their own resources to enhance the software further, benefiting Newport News and others.
"The different contributors can start by going to our Web site and downloading our software," Stein said. "The larger the community, the more everybody benefits because there will be more contributors and more organizations paying the bill and sharing the costs."
Off-the-shelf software gives IT staff an assured process along with an established vendor for debugging it if problems arise. With open source, IT staffers rely on their programmers or the open source community for fixes.
"The team is enthusiastic now and very comfortable receiving support and technical questions and answers from people on the Internet. They're people whom our team may never meet. We simply know them by e-mail address," Stein explained. "It's a different model."
Stein acknowledged that open source applications won't answer all of the public sector's software requirements. But they can be a viable option for many tasks, especially when money is tight.
You may use or reference this story with attribution and a link to
http://www.govtech.com/policy-management/Andy-Stein-Open-Source-Is-the.html
The actual cost for open source within the City of Newport News Va, has been about $1.8 Million. This figure takes into account the time and resources spent on developing a simple web page and packaging it around the open source content manager Plone. The use of open source as a viable solution for the City of Newport News Va has been essentially abandond. The city's current approach is tried and true, best practices, off the shelf business solutions.
Gwen, your Microsoft slip is showing.
Does "tried and true, best practices" include a rock solid operating system with 18 years of bug fixes that most of the world's web servers run on? (Linux) Your post displays ignorance of the open source process. The people that develop open source software love writing great software. They tend to be the rock stars of the programming world, so the software tends to be reliable, useful software. Even if we accept your $1.8 million dollar estimate (from where?), the benefits of the investment can be shared with any number of medium sized cities. If ten cities decide to use the software, then the cost drops to $180,000 per city. More importantly, the software developers of all ten cities get to collaborate on great software, not duplicate it. Your bias against open source is not shared by the Department of Defense, which recently promoted the use of open source as an equal alternative to commercial software: http://www.gcn.com/Articles/2009/10/28/DoD-OSS-II.aspx This is upsetting to Microsoft, which really, really wants to sell the seventh version of Windows for every person in the DOD and cities like Newport News.