Thus far, September has become a true coming out party for open source software in the U.S. Federal Government. The benefits we have been touting for years, including lower cost to entry, lower barriers to exit and the ability to better customize, have caught the attention of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Just recently, the House released The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2009 (H.R. 5658) which includes language that calls for all DoD agencies to consider open source software when procuring manned or unmanned aerial vehicles. Including such language is a milestone for the open source movement and just the beginning!
Joab Jackson of Government Computer News wrote this in his blog, “The Defense Department has traditionally been somewhat wary of OSS, at least for official duties. So some feel the language could pave the way for greater acceptance within the Defense community.”
And that's not all. This week, come by and visit the 24th meeting of the American Health Information Community where you can see other open source projects in action. Sun Fed will show how electronic patient records can be shared across four key government agencies seamlessly and securely…all because of open source.
Also, the Navy and the OSJTF have been pushing their Modular Open Systems Approach, that not only includes open source software, but also open systems hardware.
More and more we are seeing the federal government move towards open source due to its increased security, reduced procurement times, large scalability (hey if eBay, Yahoo, Google, Army, and Navy can run on it, that is true scale), reduced cost to the tax payers, and escape from vendor lock in.
Open source will just continue to grow as the world moves to open storage (low cost hardware with open source storage management software that makes it perform as well as high cost proprietary storage devices), open network (low cost hardware with open source VoIP, routing, and switching software that make it perform as well as high cost proprietary network devices) and open source virtualization (xVM and Xen cloud computing with out the cost of proprietary virtualization and management software). All of these will bring open source into the enterprise as part of a solution, so it will be there even if people don't know they are deploying it.
So it's good to see the federal government start to recognize that open source is already thriving in their environments (including downloads of Open Solaris, MySQL, Glassfish and Open Office), and they are already seeing the benefits of it. Like the growth of the Internet in the 90's within the federal government, it's much better to embrace it and understand its value than ignore its growth.
