As a U.S. Treasury employee this is my take. First off, the U.S. federal government is beyond huge. Though it's frequently referred to as a single unit, day to day it doesn't operate like that. Each branch has a number of agencies and each agency has bureaus. There are numerous mandated rules and laws that agencies are suppose to adhere to, such as FISMA security standards and Section 508 accessibility rules. But there are different levels of freedoms within each bureau. Each organization is free to operate within these laws. Now, what President Obama did earlier this year was establish the Open Government Initiative (http://www.whitehouse.gov/Open/). This is not to be confused with "open source", but it's origins appear to be rooted in the same spirit of freedom and open source is, at a minimum, becoming more talked about and accepted. At it's core, Open Government is an attempt to make U.S. government operations transparent. This means that massive amounts of data are becoming publicly available for consumption by the general public (http://data.gov). I suspect that creative minds could build some applications on top of this data and end up collaborating with agencies, similar to an open source model. This is also trickling down to the state level, too, and there are some app writing contests available - one for the state of N.Y., I believe. Note that folks like Google and Adobe are all interested in Open Government which means helping agencies achieve the goal set forth by the president. This may (or may not) involve open source. But, my personal opinion is that the spirit of open government, sharing, and transparency, does speak to open source software.
The main concern today is still security. If your product is handling anything other than public information, it will need to pass some rigorous tests, usually at the expense of the vendor, but that's to the vendor's advantage. best, bill On Oct 27, 12:50 pm, Sean Corfield <[email protected]> wrote: > Some US government departments have recently been given / adopted a > mandate to move to open source. At CFUnited, a govt employee came up > to the Railo booth, very excited after hearing Joe Rinehart mention > Railo as open source... he was currently writing a proposal to > cross-train his CF team to PHP and rewrite all of their CFML apps in > PHP because of his department's mandate. Having seen Railo in action, > he realized he could keep his CF dev team and code and still go open > source. > > So, yes, there are moves afoot in (some) US govt departments to adopt > open source so both OpenBD and Railo could gain market share within > the govt based on that! > > Many govt departments worldwide seem to be moving to open source (at > Railo we see it in Europe and APAC as well as within the US). > > Sean > > On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 9:49 AM, Vince Bonfanti <[email protected]> wrote: > > I thought this was interesting, not because it's PHP/Drupal, but > > because it's a high-profile use of open source within the federal > > government: > > > http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-10382893-264.html?tag=newsEditorsPi... > > > I know there's a lot of ColdFusion (and other CFML engines) within the > > federal government--maybe if there's a big push towards open source > > this creates an opportunity for OpenBD? > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Open BlueDragon Public Mailing List http://groups.google.com/group/openbd?hl=en official site @ http://www.openbluedragon.org/ !! save a network - trim replies before posting !! -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
