Why in the world was an executive at a proprietary closed source company be interviewed?
(GitHub)

I dont know Richard that well but I have spent hours on different occasions talking with him
in a group. All the accusations and rumors above are just sad.

I bet the people making them have never sat down and even had a conversation with him.

He is eccentric and he lives life by his own rules as far as that is possible.
I admire that. I admire eccentrics.

For all the modern talk of inclusiveness, we are at the same time excluding eccentrics more and more.

I dont live in the right part of the country, but I would be happy to offer him a place to stay.

I have no idea what his financial situation is as some speculate above but i am sure none of the commenters know either.

What I do know is that he is not driven by trying to get rich,

Even the smallest amount of research about the cost and time to implement an ERP would indicate that it will cost a lot more than you think and customizing it to fit your specific business will take both time and a lot of money.

ERP systems are huge, extremely complex and when implemented incredibly essential to the running of the company.
If an ERP system goes down, the business stops. That is why you spend the time, money and consulting fees to have it
configured as a very high availability system. Esp when we are talking about a company of the presumed size you indicate.

The fact that you have apps running in Excel and Access is horrible, common, but very bad for a lot of reasons.
This problem might have been discovered while implementing the ERP.

Since you are already investing heavily into the ERP, making it part of that system makes the most sense to me.
The benefits of integrating these data and functionality reaps benefits across the ERP system.

Now going to Slashdot, where a whole lot of people you have non idea who is, nor what their real life experience with ERP systems
are borders upon irresponsible. Would you take the information offered by a pimply teenager on how to solve your problems? Or maybe
its an ERP expert, how do you know.

Since you work at a company that has a lot of resources, the prudent thing to do, is to find a consulting company with a proven track record
in the ERP you are working with (different from the people you already have) and pay them to come in and do a discovery of existing excel
and Access applications, map out their functionality and do an estimate for each one, how much it will cost (ballpark) to implement them in the ERP system
and give recommendations for each application as to its suitability for migration. There is likely no one answer for all of them.

Microsoft is pretty good at giving away cheap or free licences to charities.

Whether you personally are a "Being a die-hard OSS geek" is as irrelevant
as if you are gay.

Unless you plan to stick around and volunteer for the next decade or
more, or you have a steady supply of "Being a die-hard OSS geek"
volunteers lined up replace each other, dont be an ass and land the
charity in deeper problems.

Are you donating cloud servers for them to use to host the
MySql plus python for the next decade with built in support?

Or do you intend to install it on one of their machines, maybe
with Linux on it, and install the app via docker?

You want a solution that is as easy for non computer people
to use but also to MAINTAIN, to MOVE, to UPDATE.

Access has a lot of issues, but even a volunteer with
little experience can move an access file. if required,
and fill out forms.

If the charity is lucky they will land another geek who
can add some fields to a form and make a new report
something like that.

In fact, a lot of the user would probably prefer to track
the whole thing in a spreadsheet, because its something
they understand.

Having your super duper optimized Mongo db Python
node.js application be super fast, and really OSS, aint
gonna be a good thing when Bob takes over from you
and they need two new reports.

For this kind of charity work KISS: Keep it simple Stupid.
and KIRSS Keep it real simple stupid.

You need to spend more time writing a user manual and
documentation that will live on after you are gone that will
be needed and loved by all than you do inventing a tech
stack and writing software to do a job Access does ok.

Want support for Access? Easy to get.
Want someone to support your Mongo, Python, node.js
application. Hard to get.

Access, probably wont cost them anything
Access, lots of easy ways to get support
Access, its in MS Office, kinda looks a bit like Office, People like Office.
Access, super easy to export data into Excel
Access, built in report generator that might be used by a power user.
Access, made for this use case.

Personally I dont want to touch Access with a ten foot pole,
and consider it evil, but if I am trying to help a charity get
going, raise money and general do good by them, for this
work Access is the best option, even if I have to humiliate
myself to set it up. Its not about you living your OSS dream,
its about helping those in need.

Why not a med camp.
Where you can really get to know what you need in a few weeks.
Plus you the costs compared to medical school would be a lot cheaper.

Ok so maybe they cant teach you all about anatomy and neurons and everything, but
few doctors need that.

If we can teach them for instance heart surgery, or general medical things like a GP would see
that would be more than good enough.

So windows 2012 server doesnt do anything for you huh?

Have you ever spent time writing VBA code?
Did you enjoy it?

If we want more people to take up coding, making them do VBA code is a great way to scare everyone away from ever programming again.

I actually think that replacing them with WindowsRT surface units would be better,
if they must go that way. There are some from other manufacturers that are laptops
running WindowsRT.

Putting Linux on the existing hardware would also make more sense, at least
its well established and can run full versions of available software in addition to
running Chrome apps. that would save them even more money.

But throwing out machines that could run a free operating system and replacing
them with brand new Chromebooks, that are very limited in processor capacity
and memory. Figuring that every document will be stored in the cloud somewhere
so that is not a concern.

What are the enterprise tools available for Chromebooks? Can you remotely
push configurations to the machines, make a change and push out new ones?

Are they going with Office 365 then? To use from their Chromebooks?

So Appple, due it being an American company and the Snowden revelations are not considered
secure by the Russians anymore.
Makes sense.

Then they chose a product from Samsung a South Korean company.
South Korean Intelligence is so tightly coupled with American intelligence as to make no difference.
Furthermore at the bottom lays an operating system written by an American company just like Apple.
There is no "secure" Android version from Samsung to be had.

Remember GnuTLS

The beast is pretty much a tank. Heavily armored with a lot of communications gear.
I dont think its viable at this point to make it electric and still give it the range it requires.

I am not sure what kind of engine it has, but it has to be something powerful.

That is one of the least informative articles I have read in a long time.
In fact I feel dumber for having read it.

It picks numbers out of thin air for the "standard programing" model,
then it has some magic pixie dust that represents the result in
reactive programming as a few lines of code.

The sum of money does seem low, but when an agency like the NSA
comes calling, I have a feeling that it they make you a proposal you
cannot refuse.

(Or you can do what Lavabit did, and just shut it down)

Since the government can harvest what they need via agreements/PRISM/backdoors/secret courts,
what you give Facebook you give the US Intelligence services which in turn are part of the government.

So we are contributing to each. Well I have never had a FB account and never plan to have one
but that is just me. I enjoy my friends in person, more than poking them on a website.

Did you want to start your OSS career contributing to the Linux kernel?
You will have to work a lot, and for a long time to ever get to be the target of Linus's rants.

Or are you saying that all OSS projects are abusive and bad?
Because that just is not the case at all.

Secondly and more importantly, if you were an aspiring chef, and you wanted to apprentice to hone your skills
do you want to do that with a guy who can teach you to sling burgers at mcDonalds, you will learn quick,
and it can be polite. Or do you you want to learn from a master chef, who has his Michelin stars and 30 years
experience? The latter will be harder, requiring sacrifices and be willing to take some shit. But at the end
you will be a much better chef.