Government and Open Source
I recently gave a demo for a special library and they wanted to know what open source was being used by the government in order to convince their IT staff that open source was a viable option. This request upsets me on so many levels - the fact that professional information technology employees need to follow the government’s IT instead of just reading and learning that open source is a secure and viable option. But, that’s not the point of my post. I wanted to share a bit of governmental open source news with you.
A while back I wrote about the GSA choosing open source because of it’s transparency. Today I can tell you that our new president is interested in researching open source as an option for government systems.
Could the federal government be going open source? The BBC reports that President Obama has asked former Sun CEO Scott McNealy to report on the relative benefits of open source software. Imagine that: a president who has heard of open source software.
Also, and a bit more impressive to me is the fact that the Defense Department has set up a repository for their open source initiatives:
The dam holding back U.S. federal adoption of open source just burst with the introduction of the Defense Department’s Forge.mil.
Forge.mil is an open-source project repository built in the image of SourceForge.net, Federal Computer Week reported Friday.
Despite being based on SourceForge’s technology, Forge.mil has one significant difference: security. As David Mihelcic, chief technology officer for the Defense Information Systems Agency, told Federal Computer Week, the Department of Defense’s code repository has been “upgraded to meet DOD security requirements,” with smart cards used to provide log-in credentials.
There are only three open-source projects hosted at Forge.mil so far, and it’s initially restricted to the Defense Department’s technology community, but I suspect this number will soon increase as various federal agencies discover it and ask to collaborate on code through it.
All very promising news on the open source front!!