Open Source Unites for US Government Dollars

Gavin Clarke | The Register | July 22, 2009

Billions of dollars and people hours are spent each year to lobby US politicians over legislation and lucrative government contracts.

Telcos, hardware, and closed-source software companies are not strangers to this game.

Now Linux and open-source are getting their act together. Seventy open-source companies and organizations have established Open Source for America.

Among its goals, OSA lists helping "effect change in the US Federal government policies and practices to allow the federal government to better utilize free and open source software."

OSA said it would coordinate collaboration among the various open-source communities with the federal government on technology requirements, and also attempt to raise the awareness of open-source in the US executive and legislative branches of government.

The group's membership is a shopping list of open-source communities and companies trading on open-source, from Google to Debian. Strangely, the one vendor that arguably did most to drive Linux in the early days, IBM, is not a member, while Sun Microsystems - which resisted Linux, came late to open-source, and is soon to become an ex-company when it's acquired by Oracle, which is an OSA member - has made the organization's list.

OSA board members include Ubuntu creator Mark Shuttleworth, GPL legal eagle Eben Moglen, Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin, and Red Hat's vice-president of open-source affairs Michael Tiemann.