Governments globally are embracing open source policies. The White House moved its Web platform to open source this past fall with the goal of reducing costs and improving security. Bill Vass, president and chief operating officer of Sun Microsystems Federal, Inc., shares his views on why governments are embracing open source solutions, relaying six key reasons, and offers some guidelines on evaluating open source products.

• 1. Security. Open source is statistically shown to increase security in most implementations. This is particularly relevant for intelligence agencies that focus on security.

• 2. Procurement time. Government procurements can take up to three years. By moving to open source, agencies can download and deploy software immediately and then go through procurement for support rather than acquisition.

• 3. No vendor lock-in or lock-out. Because open source is in the public domain, support is available from multiple vendors. For Solaris, users can get support from HP, Dell, IBM, Sun, Intel, AMD, and a host of others. The same goes for Linux and other open source environments. Additionally, because the APIs are open sourced, they're easier to reverse-engineer to avoid lockout.

• 4. Reduced cost. Open source support contracts are usually significantly less expensive than proprietary contracts because there is competition. That's not the case when the code isn't publicly available. We often say that open source gives 90% of the functionality at 10% of the cost. This results in billions of dollars of savings for governments.

• 5. Increased quality. There are fewer patch releases with open source, in part because open source code goes through more reviews. During the release process, the code is reviewed by the community, which can be ruthless in its scrutiny. The code then goes through integration review, indemnification review if supported by a vendor, and quality control. That adds up to three times more quality controls than most proprietary products.

• 6. Collaborative environment. By engaging with open source, governments can inject unique requirements into the community without having to go through a vendor. This is a huge boon for governments because in the past, vendors often couldn't justify doing unique requirements for a limited number of government seats.

According to Vass, approximately 87% of governments and businesses globally have adopted open source solutions for large-scale mission critical applications. Vass states that Brazil is clearly a leader. China, India and the U.K. also have strong open source policies. Additionally, the Netherlands, Germany and Russia are moving heavily toward open source. He states that the United States has lagged somewhat behind, similarly as it did with adoption of wireless and mobile communications; however, it's becoming much more prevalent in the U.S. government under the Obama administration.

Sun has worked closely with the administrative and congressional levels of the Obama administration to get policies in place to allow organizations to adopt and manage open source.

Vass advises governments and enterprises interested in evaluating open source solutions to look for ones with an active community, a vendor or multiple commercial vendors who stand behind their product, and vendors who provide indemnification so that, from an intellectual property perspective, there won't be any risk.

Licensing is another area that needs to be understood. Vass states that all open source products have to be under an Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved license, and interested parties should check out the OSI Website where there are about 40 different licenses. "Make sure you understand the three different families of licenses and how they affect how you resell or redistribute what you build in open source," he notes.

Drivers is another area to check. Vass points out that often proprietary vendors will pay hardware manufacturers to initiate drivers as the product comes out, whereas the open source community generally lags on drivers. He states that it is important to understand what is available with regard to time frames.

More Information

Open Source Breakthroughs in Government - Vass's views in Sun Inner Circle newsletter

OSI Website

White Paper Surveys Sun Solutions in Light of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act

US Choosing Open Source To Open Government

NSA Offers Security Guidelines for Sun, Apple and Red Hat

Efficiencies in Cost, Performance, Production Improve Government Services [...read more...]

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Other articles in the Government section of Volume 143, Issue 3: Why Open Source Solutions are Good for Government (this article) See all archived articles in the Government section.

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