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Open Source: Company Consortium Promotes Open Source in Government
Open Source for America (OSA) is a consortium of more than 70 technology companies, academic institutions, and associations that are promoting the adoption of Open Source software across federal, state and local governments. Prominent members of OSA include Google, Red Hat, Black Duck, SugarCRM, Novell, Mozilla, Oracle and Sun.
Members of the OSA board include Tom O’Reilly, Ubuntu creator Mark Shuttleworth, Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin, and Red Hat’s vice-president of open-source affairs Michael Tiemann.
OSA states one of its goals as helping to “effect change in the US Federal government policies and practices to allow the federal government to better utilize free and open source software.” Further, the OSA charter includes the goal to “raise awareness and create understanding among federal government leaders in the executive and legislative branches about the values and implications of open source software”. In effect, the OSA is to act as an advisor to government on how to evaluate and make intelligent decisions around open source.
OSA grew out of research like that of Gartner’s that suggests that by 2011 more than 25 percent of government applications will be 100% open source, contain open source components, or be developed as community source.
The OSA press release says that “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.”
