News from PANUG/BizNix - April 9, 2003
http://panug.org - http://biznix.org


BIZNIX MEETING

Thursday night, April 10, at 6:30 pm is this months
BizNix meeting. No formal presentation is planned but
we'll discuss issues of Open Source software security
and anything else you might bring up. If you're new to
this list, directions are on the BizNix Web site at
http://www.biznix.org.


PANUG MEETING

The PANUG meeting is Thursday, April 17, at 6:15 pm.
The presentation will be Wireless communications. More
details will appear early next week.


HB2892
by Ray Robert

[This article is in response to the article by Ken Barbur
last week - ED]

Although Ken sees Microsoft agents behind every state
server, the reality is much more mundane. Open source
software is being widely used when and where one would
expect. The main problems with more state adoption are:

(1) the state purchase process is streamlined when it comes
to buying product. Red Hat and others are included in state
purchase contracts, but if you have to hire someone to
customize it an agency needs to go negotiate a more
cumbersome service contract.

(2) the vagaries of state budget make it more reliable to
buy, say, $25,000 of product when the money is available
than to acquire free software and try to negoatiate a
$1,000/mo. support contract over 24 months. If you run out
of money mid-budget or a sudden state-wide IT-freeze comes
along like this winter, you could be left high and dry.

But solving these issues won't make the Oregonian Business
page.


Submitted by Anonymous

How very interesting - Microsoft software spreads viruses
via email then Microsoft MSN claims to be able to eliminate
them. Sort of like companies that write viruses then sell
the virus scanners to find them.


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