Sun is one of more than 70 organizations and individuals that have joined together to form a new coalition called Open Source for America that will promote the use of free and open source software to the U.S. Federal Government.

Open Source for America will work with government officials to help promote the use of open source software. As part of its mission, the group plans on working to:

• effect change in policies and practices to allow the Federal Government to better utilize open source technologies;
• help coordinate open source communities to collaborate with the federal government on technology requirements; and
• raise awareness and create understanding among federal government leaders about the values and implications of open source software.

"Open source software can help deliver improved government service - plain and simple - and the Administration recognizes this more than any in our nation's history," said David Thomas, principal with Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti and spokesman for the Open Source for America campaign.

With the U.S. Federal Government increasingly focused on utilizing and adopting technologies to better serve citizens, there is growing recognition that open source software and technologies, being transparent and cost-effective, are an obvious option for government agencies.

Gartner recently estimated by 2011 more than 25 percent of government vertical, domain-specific applications will either be open source, contain open source application components or be developed as community source.

"Most every federal agency does have open source, but essentially it's a paradigm change," said Tom Rabon, executive vice president for corporate affairs at Red Hat, a key driving member along with Sun Microsystems in forming the organization, explained InfoWorld's Paul Krill.

"This organization came about as a result of a number of companies and academic institutions and organizations that believe that there was a void in Washington in terms of having sort of a unified voice for open source," Rabon said. "We're mainly trying to create awareness right now."

Besides Sun and Red Hat, some other participants in Open Source for America include Google, Mozilla, Software Freedom Law Center, Alfresco, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Democracy in Action, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Jaspersoft, Ingres, Open Source Initiative, SugarCRM, Pentaho, Revolution Computing, Zmanda, EnterpriseDB, Yahoo's Zimbra and many more.

Thomas continues, "Open Source for America is bringing together some of the industry's brightest minds, who will work together with policymakers and the public so that technologies enabled by the software freedoms can help make government IT deployment more secure, more cost-effective, faster to deploy, with greater privacy and the ability to help eliminate vendor lock-in. Open source software may not be a cure-all, but it could save billions of dollars, help foster innovation and empower our government to work smarter."

Simon Phipps, Sun's Chief Open Source Officer and a member of Open Source for America's Board of Advisors, likens the new group as one with the principles of the Free Software Definition at the heart of its agenda. This will, in turn, provide governments with what Phipps outlines as Freedoms:

• Control of when and if they spend money on software
• More local IT investment
• Free access to the software without a "toll or tax" from any vendor

"Whatever other lessons we can learn from this new initiative, I note that it was easy and rational for people from all the apparent factions of the free and open source software movement to come together," Phipps concludes. "It's time to set aside the urge to fight over semantic differences and recognize how far we have come and see how much we can achieve when we pull together."

More Information

Open Source for America Website

Sun Joins US Government Open Source Coalition

America Needs Open Source - Phipps' blog entry [...read more...]

		fullsource
Print Email Current Profile Archive Blog Generate newsletter