NH & OSS.

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Thu, Jan 26, 2006 at 08:14:25AM -0500, Ken D'Ambrosio wrote:
> "Many of state's applications are mainframe based, most likely no similar
> packages."
>
> Which makes me wonder if:
> a) The vendors are even kinda-sorta competent, and
> b) if there may not be mainframe-side stuff that OSS could offload onto
> Linux boxen at huge savings... IF the OSS vendor could actually --
> successfully -- replicate the mainframe application's functionality.

In the meeting, this was discussed: the above note was not "There is no
way that it could be replaced with open source", but rather, "There is
most likely no complete solution to the problem already available". The
former is almost certainly untrue (barring patents/proprietary
interactions which can not be duplicated without consent of the vendor),
but the latter is almost certainly true: I highly doubt that there are
many people out there who have built high-capacity Health and Human
Services transaction storage mechanisms, or what have you.

The problems that a state needs to solve are oftentimes niche problems
with no information on the solution required available to the "public at
large" that is open source hackers. However, I am sure that given a list
of requirements, most solutions could be duplicated in the open source
world, especially if there was an incentive of cash to throw at it.

So, the next step for evaluating that is the next step that the HB will
be taking: Get the IT people in there to explain 1. What htey have and
2. What they need.

-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer