Re: [Ossi] Linux News: Open Source: Linux Use Drives Innovation S/B How Linux saved our lives

In terms of bigness, you can point to many larger wins than this. But
are they newsworthy in getting Linux better known by the government and
for general adoption?=20

The whole story of ERN has never been told. Who got the planes out of
the air on 9/11? Who found the perpetrators? Who safeguarded the 16
critical US infrastructures? People don't know it was a Linux box
sitting in an office in Dallas, TX. They also don't know that almost
four years later it's still the only Emergency Alert System in the
Department of Homeland Security and it's used by the Joint Chiefs of
Staff to communicate between the Military and Civilian sectors. It's
been field tested by the DOD.

ERNS also managed the communication for the Shuttle Disaster.

I promised you that if it had been built on a Microsoft .NET platform -
and Microsoft tried to buy it and port it over - that it would have been
in advertisements at the Super Bowl and Bill Gates would be pounding his
chest like a guerrilla.

But even Federal Computer Week cut out the main pieces of the story and
turned it into a feel good story. If you read the story they say th NASA
guys "attempted to" create supercomputing.

Every time I'm contracted by a serious publication to write about Linux,
I hear this "don't forget Microsoft is our largest advertiser".

ERNS cost the Federal Government $5000 and saved lives.=20

Who knows what constitutes the bigger win. I don't know. I just know
that this story gets buried regularly. It's one that has heroes - Jo
Balderas a small business owner in Ft. Worth, TX and a lot of FBI
people; Tom Ridge who bucked his CIO and said "put it everywhere". It
won the FOSE award for Best DHS application - but I don't see that
anywhere.=20

>From a personal point of view - I feel safer knowing DHS has at least
one way to communicate between Government, the Military and our critical
civil infrastructures. I don't get the same sense of urgency about Linux
getting into the financial sector - but I do see that as a major win for
for Linux.

It's a matter of perspective.=20

=E2=80=9CThere is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.=E2=
=80=9D (You
can substitute right or wrong if you want.) =20
William Shakespeare=E2=80=99s Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Act II, Scene 2=20










On Fri, 2005-05-06 at 08:42 -0700, Timothy D. Witham wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-05-06 at 10:32 -0500, Tom Adelstein wrote:
> > This article appeared in Federal Computing Week.=20
> >=20
> > Most observers, if they knew about the project, might consider it Lin=
ux's biggest win.
> >=20
>     I don't know - it seems to me that the near wholesale adoption of L=
inux
> in the Financial services industry was a bigger win than this.  I would=
 think
> that a company purchasing around 8,000  individual servers and=20
> deploying them within 5 years in a 7x24 around the globe set of divers
> applications is a really big win.  And almost all of the financial serv=
ices
> companies are in the same sort of situation.  =20
>=20
> Tim
>=20
>=20
> > Yet, I haven't seen the story in mainstream media.=20
> >=20
> > Consider that this is a LAMP solution using Red Hat Enterprise Linux =
and MySQL. It's the only information sharing system of which I am aware t=
hat has been working at the Department of Homeland Security.It's also a w=
in for Dell and Sun on the hardware side.
> >=20
> > You might pass it along to anyone you know in the mainstream media.=20
> >=20
> > Also, you might want to pass it along to your local government agenci=
es if you want an Emergency Alert System that proved itself during 9/11 a=
nd the Space shuttle disaster.
> >=20
> >=20
> > http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/Linux-Use-Drives-Innovation-126000X=
FH8B0.xhtml
> >=20
> >=20
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