April 19th, 2009
What Chopra offers open source
New federal CTO Aneesh Chopra is not an open source executive. He’s not a programmer, either. And he has no political fingerprints on the open source-proprietary divide.
What he has is practical experience shepherding projects through a government bureaucracy. He had been state technology officer for Virginia. He understands the buzzwords (above), he is a genuine tech tech enthusiast, and Tim O’Reilly loves the pick.
TechCrunch went with the headline “Obama Spurns Silicon Valley” but how many quality entrepreneurs there really want the hassle of a government job? And how relevant is business experience to this job anyway?
Not that Chopra lacks it. Before taking the Virginia job, he got his ticket punched as a venture capitalist, as a manager of a tech incubator, and as an advocate for health IT.
Perhaps Chopra’s most relevant experience to open source is his work on rural broadband under Virginia Governor (and now Democratic National Committee head) Tim Kaine. There he worked to give private WiMAX operators access to government-owned radio towers. He also gave local governments a toolkit for evaluating broadband technology and funding it.
All the official statements from folks like John Doerr and Eric Schmidt look good. It’s seems Chopra will give open source a fair chance, that he supports open standards, and for those who believe in open source that’s all it needs.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 04/20/09
