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A New Appeal to Obama to Support FOSS

Andy Updegrove from ConsortiumInfo.org, who is also deeply involved with the Open Source for America initiative, has a manifesto post up that calls for President Obama to to come out in favor of open source. This isn't the first time that open letters to Obama on this topic have been penned, even though the Obama administration has stated its support for open source. Updegrove's post places urgency on even more administration support.

He writes:

"Increasingly, the best software tool for a given job is likely to be the FOSS alternative. Moreover, choosing a FOSS product — and especially one that fully implements open standards — will better protect the procuring agency from vendor lock-in. It will also facilitate an ongoing high degree of competitive bidding for supporting services throughout the useful lifetime of a product, and provide government IT managers with real-time time access to security and other bug fixes as well."

I agree with most of Updegrove's comments, but I think that what would really spur accelerated open source adoption in government would be identification of solutions to perceived open source problems. Notice that I say "perceived" there. Support has been improving for many open source projects for years now, but I'm not positive that government IT administrators at large clearly see that it has--and their perceptions matter. 

I'm also not sure that government IT administrators are aware of the commercial open source efforts that now offer very high-quality support and training. In some cases, startup companies such as Cloudera and Acquia are focusing on that goal for specific open source projects. In other cases, third-party players such as Credativ are offering support for most major open source software offerings. Part of the answer to getting the government to adopt more open source software, is to address the perceived problems.

• obama
• government
• open source for america

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