Like many of you, I awoke Monday to read that whitehouse.gov was now running on open source products, including Drupal, Red Hat Linux, Apache web server, MySQL, and Apache Solr.
[ Also on InfoWorld: "What's new with Open Source for America?." | Stay up to speed with the open source community with InfoWorld's Technology: Open Source newsletter. ]
It goes without saying that this news has generated lots of excitement. I am, however, more interested in what this news means to Open Source for America (OSFA), a group advocating open source adoption by the U.S. federal government. I recently spoke to OSFA spokesman and Red Hat executive Tom Rabon and concluded:
Overall, it seems there is plenty of work ahead for OSFA, especially in the area of getting decision maker buy-in. Lucky for OSFA that its membership, and its members' willingness to help OSFA reach its goal, continue to grow as well.
In discussing the use of open source at whitehouse.gov, Tim O'Reilly, an adviser with OSFA, wrote, "While open source is already widespread throughout the government, its adoption by the White House will almost certainly give permission for much wider uptake."
I completely agree with Tim, as does OSFA's John Scott who had the following to say via e-mail:
This is great news not only for the use of open source software, but the validation of the open source development model. We look forward to collaborating with the Whitehouse as they interact and join with the wider open source community to potentially release source code back to society.
I was previously unsure how OSFA would get its findings in front of government decision makers. I was expecting to hear that OSFA had plans to schedule briefings on open source best practices for government decision makers. I assumed that these briefings would (further?) open the door to open source vendors securing contracts with government agencies. The OSFA could and likely still wants to take this approach. However, it's great to see open source vendors getting a stronger foothold in U.S. government accounts by themselves -- or at least through federally approved systems integrators endorsing open source.
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