Juan J. Martínez used to talk here about Open Source and Other Things.
This is a blog in archive mode, you can read new posts at en_GB@blog
September 12, 2010
"To date we’ve invested £48.4m in a combination of staff training, network upgrades, server replacements, hardware and software — and we continue to drive efficiency through innovation."
OMG! The quote alone it’s worth a post like this, but £32k/day sounds like too much to be true. Unfortunately, it seems it is.
In Spain we’re used to this kind of money waste (well, may be not that much, but waste anyway). I don’t know how it starts. May be it’s just ignorance in combination with a very smart consulting firm, or may be it’s just corruption, but it’s astonishing how expensive can be maintaining a government website.
Anyway, I can see that this is wrong because I work on IT, but how many other expenses of the government are as overpriced as this one and I wouldn’t be able notice it? Scary, because sometimes nobody does.
The Birmingham City Council website doesn’t render properly in Chromium 6.0.476.0, neither does in Firefox 3.6.9.
Update: Hey! They updated it! Now it displays correctly with Firefox :).
I fully agree with those posts: the picture you show about your project is as important as the project itself. I think this is true in all the RoR projects I’ve seen so far. In fact, looking for a Trac substitute, I knewRedmine was a RoR application just for its appearance (well, I was lucky… it could have been a Django based application as well hehe).
How many times you have tried an application because of the screenshots? Yes, it looks cool, let’s make a try.
The problem is that not every developer has the skills or the good taste to make a cool website to support his project, and that sadly may affect the project success.
So, I bet there are good designers out there that want to contribute to the open source community. Would you adopt a project or developer?
PS: I would have liked to post a comment in the cited posts, but I don’t have an account. You guys should think about allowing comments of non-registered users.
