Oregon seeks open source business
31 Aug 2005 
in the early afternoon 
Matt Winckler
Oregon is trying to make itself more attractive to open source business. Evidently they’re trying to capitalize on what they see as a “fast-growing movement”. By making Oregon an “informal ‘open-source campus’”, that will help “make open source a powerful economic force”.
I don’t pretend to be qualified to analyze this news, but it strikes me as odd. As the article points out, the open source movement so far has not been the boon that other technologies (such as semiconductors) was in the past. As far as I know, the primary source of income for the open source movement is in the service industry, consulting companies migrating to open source solutions. With semiconductors, you can make them in one place and ship them all over the country. To me, that paradigm doesn’t seem to carry over into services quite so neatly or on the same scale, but I could be wrong.
I think it’s nice that Oregon is supporting the open source community, but it strikes me as a little odd that the governor seems to think this will become a huge economic profit center. Still, I suppose there is a pretty big chunk of the open source movement that gets along well with the green freaks that make up so much of Oregon’s population centers. Actually, come to think of it, this is probably all a vast green conspiracy set in motion by Ralph Nader to reinforce his bastions of political strength in the area. “One of these days, I’m going to win Oregon in a presidential campaign! And Stallman is going to help me do it! Yeah!”