Cities of the Future, Part 4: Open Source Avenue

“As city administrators grapple with the notion of tying all
their apps into one overarching network, should they be looking to
open source as an alternative to apps from vendors?

“Enterprise-level open source apps exist, and are used both by
the federal government and by large corporations.

“For example, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is
using a solution combining open source business intelligence
software from JasperSoft and business process software from
HandySoft to increase operational efficiency and organizational
effectiveness. This will save it 75 people-hours a day and more
than US$1.5 million a year.

“The NRC isn’t the only federal agency moving toward open
source. The Rapid Access Computing Environment, which is part of
the Defense Information System Agency (DISA), runs its network on
Linux. DISA also recently launched Forge.mil, a Web site for
sharing open source code within the military that’s modeled after
the popular SourceForge.net open source site.”

Complete
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