Companies, academics form coalition to promote open-source software

Leaders of the open-source movement announced on Wednesday that they have formed a coalition to promote support of and adoption by federal agencies of the nonproprietary computer software.

More than 50 companies, academic institutions, communities and individuals formed Open Source for America to promote its use in the federal government. Open source generally refers to software code that is provided to the public to modify and download for free. Its supporters argue the method lowers the cost of software development and can provide better applications because an unlimited number of programmers are free to improve the underlying code.

"This is the right time, with the administration and the economy and the direction that open source is moving" all supporting greater adoption, said John Scott III, director of open-source software and open integration at federal consulting firm Mercury Federal. "If you read between the lines and look at what the White House is doing, they're leading by doing. The sole purpose of this organization is to answer the president's call for technologies that help government be more participatory, more collaborative and more transparent."

The coalition, which counts Red Hat, Google, Sun Microsystems, Novell and Oracle among its members, will form working groups to focus on specific areas, such as health care, cybersecurity and defense.

Open source is not new to federal government. In 2004, the Office of Management and Budget issued a memorandum reminding agencies "open-source software's source code is widely available so it may be used, copied, modified and redistributed."

Since then, agencies have taken advantage of open-source applications. Intellipedia, which allows intelligence analysts to share information through a classified intranet, was built on open-source software, and Whitehouse.gov and Recovery.gov run on Drupal, an open-source content management system. Research firm Gartner recently estimated that by 2011 more than 25 percent of government applications either would be open source or contain open-source components. About 224 members of GovLoop, the social network Web site for federal employees, belong to a group focused on open-source adoption.

"There is all sorts of activity going on, but no single source to disseminate information about open source and advocate for greater freedoms in use of open source in federal government," said Paul Smith, general manager of government operations at Red Hat. "This is not only about awareness, but getting into areas of policy and legislation so that the adoption can go even further."

Among the main messages the organization hopes to communicate to agencies is that open source is not about products, but rather a community-focused development strategy, Smith said. The National Security Agency, for example, considered Linux as an open-source operating system, but decided it needed a more secure environment to protect sensitive information on computer systems. Information technology developers at NSA collaborated with the open-source community to develop its own Linux version, which was later released as Security-Enhanced Linux.

"This is about free and fair and open competition -- making people aware that there are viable solutions out there that can help you," Scott said.