Open source is very much more than just another business model, Scott McNealy maintains in a continuing effort to persuade the federal government to move toward wider adoption of open source solutions. He further urges the appointment of a cabinet-level CIO, whose office could coordinate federal IT policy in a more comprehensive manner than a federal CTO can. Patrick Thibodeau reports on McNealy's campaign in a recent Computerworld article.

McNealy, chairman of the Board of Directors for Sun Microsystems, Inc. and chairman of Sun Federal, Inc., cites his recent experience with an open source development project involving the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services during which one federal official pronounced open source "anti-capitalist" in nature. According to McNealy, this was not an unusual or isolated opinion.

"If you think about it, proprietary software is the software equivalent of a planned economy led by a dictators, whereas open source is all about choice, the market economy and multiple competitive players," said McNealy.

Microsoft, on the other hand, would have us believe that the proprietary market is not the cabal McNealy suggests it is. Susie Adams, CTO of Microsoft Federal, said that open source is "just another business model."

Thibodeau characterizes McNealy's argument, delivered while the Obama administration is still mulling over the design of its technology management efforts, as "particularly well timed."

In contrast to the laggard pace of open source adoption in the U.S., the U.K. has welcomed open source, seeing it, as the country's Chief Information Council has stated, as "the best for the taxpayer." Thibodeau adds that the office also urges British government agencies to speed up their rate of open source adoptions and to search out opportunities to re-use software when possible.

In the U.S., McNealy has an advocate for open source in Bloomington, Indiana's Director of IT, Rick Dietz, who says, "The city is committed to using and creating open source software whenever possible."

Thibodeau notes that Dietz does not see present day open source solutions as a panacea simply because there are certain specialized applications where open source alternatives don't exist. In agreement with McNealy, Dietz does think that the Obama administration could play a big role by encouraging the adoption and use of open source solutions.

"It would be an interesting project to look at what are the software needs across these government entities and then work on some uniformed, collaborative solutions," said Dietz, "so that governments aren't spending tens of thousands of dollars to support a myriad of systems, all of which are essentially doing the same thing." Exactly the sort of comprehensive oversight a federal CIO might be able to exercise, McNealy appears to believe.

Yet another argument opposing open source seems, at least to Bill Vass, president and COO of Sun's federal division, as groundless as the "anti-capitalist" label. That argument involves security. Vass observes that, open source has won adoption among U.S. intelligence agencies because they believe it is inherently more secure in the development process. Even so, he said, one of the arguments used by other federal agencies in rejecting open source concerns security issues, Thibodeau writes.

While open source is far more than "just another business model," Thibodeau concludes that, as a business model, it has won support from foreign nations and places such as Bloomington, and it's a business model McNealy intends to keep pushing at the Obama administration.

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Full text of Thibodeau\'s article.

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