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Jul. 23, 2009

A new open source lobbying group has been launched by about seventy companies, academic institutions and various communities in an effort to better promote FOSS (free and open source software) as a transparent and cost-effective option for U.S. government agencies.

The group was formed about two weeks ago and is called "Open Source for America" and counts AMD, Canonical, Google, Novell, Oracle and Red Hat among some of its many members.

With the United States government looking to invest new money on healthcare and clean energy to add to the Obama's stimulus spending program on infrastructure, it is also under greater pressure to cut costs. All that spending also means that lobbyists are increasingly outnumbering bureaucrats and lawmakers in D.C. these days, and open source vendors apparently decided it was high time to belly up to the bar.

Overall, open source projects have now come here to stay and won't go away, even if Microsoft would like them to.

Open Source for America's mission is to serve as a centralized advocate and to encourage broader U.S. Federal Government initiatives and to participate even more in free and open source software." The organization also says it hopes to help change policies and practices to allow the Feds to better utilize open source technologies.

Additionally, the group will help coordinate open source projects in the Linux community to collaborate with government on technology requirements, and raise awareness among lawmakers about the technology that is increasingly behind much of the Internet.

The Board of Advisors of Open Source for America is comprised of a number of open source luminaries including Tim O'Reilly, CEO of O'Reilly Books, Mark Shuttleworth of Canonical and Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation.

The lobbying group quotes Gartner as estimating that 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, and that the great majority will run on Linux.

The group's website offers a number of case studies. One of them covers the Veteran Administration's open source clinical database and health information technology software, which is available in a Linux-compatible version called OpenVista.

In the last few weeks, Forbes ran a story about Midland Memorial Hospital in Midland, Tex., which is using the technology for its clinical and administrative systems. According to the story, the technology costs less than 35 percent of what a commercial clinical system would, and the hospital has made considerable savings in paper storage costs, as well as improved patient safety and overall hospital efficiency.

Stated by David Thomas, spokesman for the Open Source for America campaign, "Open source software can help deliver improved government service and the Administration recognizes this more than any in our nation's history. 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, while reducing overall costs in many segments of the Administration."

Source: Open Source for America.

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