A Nation of the People and IP Addresses

Open source, closed mind

CIO magazine blogger Bernard Golden recounts a brief run-in with one state government IT professional over the issue of open source software.

Massachusetts still on open source track

Peter Quinn may have left his position as the CIO for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, but the cause for which he may be most remembered lives on. CIO since January, Louis Gutierrez, according to Government Technology's Public CIO, is backing the OpenDocument push too.

Tod Newcombe, writing in Chief Information Blog:

'Our action is to do what we are doing right now, which is working toward the goal. We believe in the utility of open standards,' Gutierrez told News.com. His stance comes in spite of a report that heavily criticized the process behind the decision by the Information Technology Division (ITD) to standardize the state government on the OpenDocument format by January 2007.

Microsoft's Office application will not support OpenDocument in its 2007 release. IBM, Novell and Sun Microsystems, however, back the competing OpenDocument standard.

But rather than remove MS Office from the commonwealth's computers, ITD is looking at an Office plug-in that would permit employees to save and circulate documents in the OpenDocument format, according to Newcombe's blog post "Open Mass."

While the issue may be in flux, there is one development could tip the scales back toward the status quo. A new governor will be elected in November.

"Netroots" changing telecom lobbying game?

CIO Insight takes note of the so-called "netroots" action in favor of network neutrality, suggesting that the grassroots movement might be changing the nature of the lobbying game.

Open source telecom?

Could the open source movement be headed to telecom? Om Malik offers his take. He also has a great post on EarthLink's efforts to diversify its traditional business by entering the mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) and municiple wireless networks space.

California Senate to discuss open source software

According to BusinessWeek's The Tech Beat, the California Senate was scheduled to hold a hearing today on using open source software to build confidence in vote counts.

New CIO in Massachusetts

Government Technology notes the new Massachusetts CIO, Louis Gutierrez. Among his many duties, Mr. Gutierrez will oversee the implementation of the state's oen document format proposal.   

Software companies reexamining old business models

CNET has a nice article on how open source movement, ad-supported software and hosted applications are forcing software companies to reevaluate where they get their revenue.

Microsoft at sea, leaks plan

If you haven't done so, check out the comments on Bill Gates' and Ray Ozzie's vision for a new Microsoft. Most observers make the obligatory comparison to the 1995 Gates memo on the Internet, but all have slightly different takes on what it means. Of note:

• Dave Winer
• "Ozzie ascendent"
• "The Bill and Ozzie Show"
• "Playing the Game"
  

A full roundup, including a lot more on the implications of the move, can be found at Tech.memeorandum

UPDATE: kinda hard to imagine I left Scoble off the above list. Here is the Microsoft uber-blogger's reaction here and here.

Government IT open source organization created

Government Technology notes the creation of a new organization to promote the use of open source software in government IT shops. From the article:

The National Center for Open Source Policy and Research (www.ncospr.org) is a non-profit organization established to promote the use of open source software solutions within government IT enterprise environments for the benefit of government agencies, the general public and public sector entities.

Common data, common ownership

BusinessWeek's Blogspotting feature posted an interesting thought related to how consumers in the future will get the information they need. State government consumers -- you and me, the citizens, the owners of the information held by state government -- could get such services from a set of information tagged and collected by aggregators like Del.icio.us, Flickr or Technorati, instead of using an "end-to-end" state government portal.

Blogspotting asks: Do the Giants Win?

It's an interesting question. We all know that applications are more and more separate from infrastructure. As it turns out data can be more and more differentiated from applications. There is no strict need for a Web portal to run the application to generate the data for those seeking it. I'm thinking in particular about Rhode Island's decision to free the public data it holds in the Secretary of State's Office. Who knows how this public data might be remixed to meet an as-yet unknown need? Whether the Secretary of State or another party provides the data seems, to me, to be irrelevant.