U.S. government seeks the open road

2004 may be the year for open source software to catch on in a big way in government agencies. For years, federal, state, and local agencies have been using open source software - some in the open, some on the sly - but the extent of open source's proliferation in public agencies remains unknown, as few hard numbers are available.

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Government agencies have implemented open source solutions that range from Linux-running, data-collection computers on Naval Oceanographic Office survey ships to a Web-based tool that allows the  U.S. Agency for International Development(USAID) to quickly process the visas of foreign workers scheduled to train in the United States. USAID’s Web-based Visa Compliance System, which went live in January, was developed using the open source Python programming language and runs on the Linux operating system, the PostgreSQL database, and the Apache Web server, says Peter Gallagher, president of IT contractor DevIS.

Open source may have flown under the radar at many government agencies, but that could soon change, says Tony Stanco, organizer of the Open Source in Government conference series at the Center for Open Source and Government at George Washington University. Stanco anticipates major discussions among government agencies about large-scale open source implementations at the conference this week in Washington. Public agencies have long used Linux and Apache to power Web servers, and he foresees announcements of more open source usage in the coming months. Stanco also expects open source Web services tools, such as Zope, and content management systems to catch on.

"Nobody in government wants to be the first," Stanco says. "I think that's where [many government agencies] are: talking about implementation right now."

According to Stanco and other open source advocates, this change in attitude toward open source software may be attributed to agencies’ need to reel in software spending and their IT staffs’ desire to tinker with code. With open source, agencies wouldn’t be tied to the whims of one software vendor; instead, a community of developers would control an open source project.

Open source software may also attract government users because the code can be exchanged between agencies, which are all watching their budgets. Agencies, which often develop their own specialized applications, view open source not only as a means to slash development costs but also as a vehicle for sharing their projects without worrying about licensing fees.

DevIS’s Gallagher agrees that government attitudes about open source software are shifting. “There’s been a major change within the last year,” he says. Gallagher’s software development company has assisted several federal agencies, including the Labor Department and the State Department, with open source software projects.

One of Gallagher’s clients, the Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), is using a custom open source application called Workforce Connections, which DevIS helped develop using its open source EZ Reusable Objects content management tool. OSHA uses the Web-publishing tool — running on Linux, Apache, and the Zope database — to create Web training programs.

Workforce Connections, in place at OSHA for the past year, allows content managers to publish training courses and other Web content without the help of programmers or even HTML knowledge. The application has cut the time to develop a Web training course from more than nine months to two and a half months, explains Michael Gerwitz, director of distance learning at OSHA. The cost per hour of developing Web training programs decreased from more than $30,000 to approximately $5,000, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars per course, he adds.

Still No Free Lunches

Other agencies, including the Department of Defense, are exploring open source as well, although some users aren’t as excited about the potential advantages. In May 2003, for example, the Defense Department’s office of the CIO issued a policy statement on open source software, clarifying the licensing issues of the GNU General Public License. The memo insisted that open source deployments within the department comply with both software licenses and Defense Department security regulations.

According to a report by nonprofit research group Mitre, the Defense Department had 155 open source applications in place in October 2002. The report, commissioned by the Defense Department to study its use of open source software, concluded that the department has been making open source products a “critical component” of its technical initiatives.

The public version of the 160-page Mitre report doesn’t list where open source applications were used in the Defense Department, but it does cite the applications in use at the time of the report. These ranged from Linux firewalls to the Emacs text editor, from the Majordomo e-mail list management tool to the GnuPG encryption tool. The Mitre report remains the best measure of open source use in the agency, says Defense Department spokesman Bob Gorrie. Although the agency continues to run open source software, Defense Department IT workers have noted that open source and free software don’t automatically equal cost-free. Using open source software can mean additional development costs for agencies wanting to tweak the code.