| Open source lobbying group emerges |
Jul. 23, 2009
 A lobbying group has been launched by more than 70 companies, academic institutions, and communities, to promote open source software as a "transparent and cost-effective option" for U.S. government agencies. "Open Source for America" counts AMD, Canonical, Google, Novell, Oracle, and Red Hat among its members.
With the U.S. government looking to spend big bucks on healthcare and clean energy to add to its stimulus spending 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. If not shovel-ready, open source projects are at least keyboard-ready, and open source developers cannot live on Red Bull alone.
As Open Source for America puts it, its mission is to "serve as a centralized advocate and to encourage broader U.S. Federal Government support of and participation 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. In addition, the group will help coordinate open source communities to collaborate with government on technology requirements, and raise awareness among lawmakers about the technology that is increasingly behind much of the Internets, which is, of course, a series of tubes that was invented by Al Gore.
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.
The Board of Advisors of Open Source for America is comprised of a number of open source luminaries including Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly), Mark Shuttleworth (Canonical), and Jim Zemlin (the Linux Foundation). Its members include (just to name a few of 70 listed):- Alfresco Software
- Advanced Micro Devices
- Canonical
- CodeWeavers
- Debian
- Electronic Frontier Foundation
- GNOME Foundation
- Google
- Ingres Corporation
- Jaspersoft
- The Linux Foundation
- Medsphere
- Mozilla
- Novell
- Oracle
- Pentaho
- Red Hat
- Software Freedom Law Center
- Sun Microsystems
The group's website offers a number of case studies. One of them covers the Veteran Administration's open source VisTa clinical database and health information technology (HIT) software, which is available in a Linux-compatible version called OpenVista. Forbes recently 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 cost less than a third of what a commercial clinical system would run, and the hospital has seen considerable savings in paper storage costs, as well as improved patient safety.
Stated David Thomas, principal with Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti and spokesman for the Open Source for America campaign, "Open source software can help deliver improved government service -- plain and simple -- 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."
Availability
More information, including a full list of board members and members may be found here.
-- Eric Brown
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