eWeek: Road to Open Source

[ Thanks to Matt for
this link. ]

“Whether it’s determining what constitutes a milk quality grade
or finding out when you can dig for clams in Narragansett Bay, the
citizens of Rhode Island are some of the first in the nation who
can find their government-issued dictates on systems created with
open-source tools.

“Rhode Island put itself on the cutting edge of hot-technology
uptake last year when it became one of the first state governments
to get beyond traditional government conservatism and implement
open-source technology. The gamble is paying off: The bill for the
state’s rules and regulations database came in at $40,000–only
$6,000 of which was hardware costs–and took one consultant four
months working only two days a week to complete.

“The project entailed putting a long-awaited rules and
regulations database online with MySQL, the open-source database
from MySQL AB, of Uppsala, Sweden. The implementation followed a
model for open-source deployments called LAMP that includes the
Linux operating system, Apache Web server, MySQL database and any
of three development languages–PHP, Perl or Python…”

Complete
Story