*shrug* That actually sounds appropriate for a large city center. My basic rule of thumb is if the employer doesnt start offering reasonable pay at least within the standard rates specified by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, I walk out; because then I know i'm being low-balled and they don't understand the value of what they want. When you get right down to it, software makes business run today. Without it, they are nothing in today's world. If that isnt worth something to them, then why work for them?

If TV props count as "prior art" then Star Trek beats most everyone to the punch.

one engages in crime (cyber criminals), the other is a generic term for a very skillful technology enthusiast. They are completely different.

He may be referring to the Windows Foundation series of capability in .Net (e.g., Presentation Foundation, Workflow Foundation, Communication Foundation).

Its not directly referred to much, but it is a great set of capability.

Its an evolution, but only time will tell if it is a revolution... I'm not particularly betting on it being one.

What you say is absolutely true if contracts are never involved. However, almost any procurement ends with a contract between the service or commodity supplier and the government, which really becomes the main barrier to entry to OSS and makes those questions from before more sticklers than commercial flavors of doing business. In the commercial world, everything is fine and rosy with contracts, they are flexible and can be redefined easily. In the government world, not so much. USC Title 10, the FAR, among other regulations, policies, and laws define how the government may do business, and they don't always easily align with the answers to those above questions. When they do, GREAT! When they don't, well, its back to closed source whether it wants to or not, because it may pass those wickets easier.

Don't get me wrong, the government can benefit greatly from the OSS community, and i also personally believe it should consider more OSS when looking for solutions to its problems. It is just many of the public policies, laws, and regulations make it much harder to do that than John Q. Public.

Who said this has anything to do with microsoft? These are common questions when dealing with anything open source. If you dont ask them, you are an idiot, plain and simple.

Ownership: who the hell do i talk to if there is an issue?

Security: who contributed to this project? Are they friendly? can i trust them? If there is a security issue, who fixes it? (me or them)

Responsibility: who is responsible for maintaining and updating this software? Do they care about my business? Do they care about the project to keep it up to date?

Reaction Time: if i find an issue, how long does it take for it to be fixed? will they fix it, or expect me to?

Governments can and do go open source; when they can and it makes sense. Governments cannot always go open source due to ownership, security, responsibility, reaction time, etc.

Additionally, It is very hard to push the onus of an issue onto a foundation, it is much easier however, to push it onto a controlling company.

While that may be true in the short term, it doenst always work out that way. Check out the horrible stories surrounding the commercializationof the Marine's Intranet

Also, when you would create one of these datacenters, you're essentially just consolidating all your datacenters anyway, so it appears they realized they wont need all the other junk anyway, and just did this instead.