Bill Vass, president and COO of Sun Federal, sees light at the end of the tunnel, and that light will soon dawn on the federal government opening itself to the improved security, procurement speed, quality and reduced cost available with open-source solutions. He announces in a recent blog that he expects all of this to start happening during 2009.

Vass says he has been proselytizing for open source for some time now, advancing six compelling reasons for the federal government to break its proprietary shackles. His reasons:

• Improved security and privacy over proprietary software
• Increased procurement speed that makes for faster program deployment
• No single-vendor lock-in; support comes from the community
• Reduced cost of license and support enables open source products to provide comparable functionality at a 80-90% lower cost to the taxpayers
• Improved quality resulting from the three levels of quality review that open source products are subjected to: community review, indemnification review, and then "productizing".
• Once it becomes part of the open source community, the government can directly inject its specific requirements into the product.

Vass promises a blog on each of the six above reasons in the near future in an effort to move government decision makers off the fence.

As an example of the value to government of open source, Vass cites the experience of the National Health Information Network (NHIN), which has developed a pilot solution enabling multiple federal agencies to securely link their existing systems to NHIN. This network allows for the beginnings of a true electronic healthcare record, Vass writes, adding that the pilot was developed with no need for long procurement cycles or massive costs since the entire software backbone is 100% open source.

In the view of Bill Vass, an open-source future would present scenes like these:

• A White House free from the restraints of proprietary systems and able to take advantage of both the transparency and the security of open source solutions.

• Agencies freed from the need to focus their IT solution criteria on legacy and integration, and able to seamlessly adopt new solutions based on cost and functionality.

• IT deployments that are timely not only when they are ordered but also when they are implemented.

"Yes, that light at the end of the tunnel is approaching quickly and, luckily, there isn’t a toll booth at the end," says Vass.

More Information

Bill Vass on the light at the end of the proprietary solutions\' tunnel

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