“From Bill Welty’s perspective, the advantages of open source
software extend far beyond cost savings. The CIO of California’s
Air Resources Board (ARB) said the real benefits involve increased
agility, responsiveness to internal clients and team-building among
his IT staff of 50.“‘We are a can-do shop,’ he said, explaining that IT staffers
and agency engineers collaborate to solve problems. There’s an
expectation that IT can do things quickly, and staff members have
little patience for procurement cycles. ‘In fact,’ he added, ‘we
have a lot of smart engineers who download open source software
themselves, and if they think it is going to work for them, they
ask IT to put it on a server and support it…'”