I spent this morning at federal open source policy workshop at CSIS. While everyone was networking and mingling before the session, I jumped into a conversation with one of the most senior technology officials at OMB (i.e., someone very high up in the executive branch). He's one of the good guys, likes open source, and was a former CIO for NASA.
Appropos of nothing, he asks (I'm paraphrasing):
Hey, did you hear about that project over at Los Alamos to hook up a few hundred Sony Playstations and turn it into a super computer? Isn't that cool? Pity you can't do that with the X-Box. Every time someone hacks the ROMs, Microsoft comes out with an updated model to close it up again. They even have someone on staff who's paid to hack the X-Box to find and fix these flaws no one can run Linux on it. It's like an arms race -- one side tries to liberate the hardware, and the other side keeps locking them out!It's nice to know someone this clued is this high up in government.
Re:encouraging
ziggy on 2003-06-12T19:43:39
*blush*Nah. I'm a private citizen here who knows people who know people.
:-) These days, I'm mostly consulting for a Baltimore-based company. I could tell you what I do there, but you really don't want to know. :-)
i thought of this: CSIS.
