Sure, it's fine to refactor paper into bits and tout the benefits in terms of reduced capital expenditures, improved environmental impact etc., but without an electronic document management infrastructure that is widely adopted and intuitive for users it's not going to fly. Carrying my entire filecabinet with me sure beats having to pop back to my desk and rummage around for that all important bit of information, but what happens when I want to share it with you - how do I do that without breeding persistent duplicates (" just email me a copy") or forked versions ("email me your notes") all without having to be tech savvy? Perhaps this is a wonderful opportunity for an open source project like Alfresco or Knowledge Tree to step up to the plate and create an 'electronic print job' management engine. Some sort of central repository that uncouples the records management aspects from the traditional paper process metaphors, all delivered through an os-agnostic interface... True 'cloud printing', if you will.

As with all technological problems someone at Burning Man has already prototyped an elegant solution.

The target here is likely the HMI side of things. Many (most?) of the HMIs are Windows based and often built, installed and then ignored. The implementers routinely expect them to be running inside air-gapped networks, so vulnerability patching is not performed and sometimes even actively discouraged. Yes, there are open-source HMI projects available, but try convincing someone to deploy a life-critical system using one of them.

The LessFS project also deserves mention: http://www.lessfs.com/ . Just think of the effect of combining a deduplication system with an iSCSI shared virtual tape library like http://sites.google.com/site/linuxvtl2/