GSA makes the case for open source, Apr 19, 2008

Casey Coleman, the chief information officer of the General Services Administration, spoke at a Federal Open Source Alliance Web seminar held earlier today.

Trusted Computer Solutions has upgraded its Security Blanket security compliance software so that it can make Red Hat Enterprise Linux compliant with the settings defined in the Defense Information Systems Agency’s Security Technical Implementation Guide for that operating system.

In order to fully take advantage of open-source software, Defense Department agencies may need to rethink how they do procurement, said Fritz Schulz, who works in the chief technology office of the Defense Information Systems Agency.

“This is a question of sovereignty of information,” said Bob Sutor, manager of standards at IBM. “To what degree should a government give control of their information to a vendor? And my answer would be, none.”

Free software is not about the price of software or even about the quality or practicality of it, according to Stallman. It is much more important than that. “This is about ethics,” he said. “That is, good and evil.”

With a Windows Vista upgrade looming, agencies may want to see which Linux flavors are up to the task

Next week, Mr. Smith goes to Washington—again. Paul Smith, head of Red Hat Inc.’s new government division, that is.

A new version of the open source programming language called Python will be faster and help ease system administration tasks, advocates claim.

Dispelling the perception that Linux is cobbled together by a large cadre of lone hackers working in isolation, the individual in charge of managing the Linux kernel said that most Linux improvements now come from corporations.

“People’s stereotype [of the typical Linux developer] is of a male computer geek working in his basement writing code in his spare time, purely for the love of his craft. Such people were a significant force up until about five years ago,” said Andrew Morton, whose role is maintaining the Linux kernel in its stable form.

Morton said contributions from such enthusiasts, “is waning.” Instead, most code is generated by programmers punching the corporate time clock.

Opponents of open-source software applauded a recent memorandum from the Office of Management and Budget that they claim puts proprietary software on competitive footing with open-source software in federal procurements.

“We think it’s a great memo,” said Bill Guidera, policy counsel for Microsoft Corp. of Redmond, Wash., referring to a letter issued to agency CIOs and senior procurement officials by OMB IT and e-government administrator Karen Evans

The OMB memo stressed that agencies making procurements must be “technology and vendor neutral,” when making procurement decisions, as per guidelines set in OMB Circulars A-11 and A-130 and the Federal Acquisition Regulation policies.

Despite urging from competitors and open source advocates, Sun Microsystems Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif., will not open the source to its Java programming language anytime soon, said Sun CEO Scott McNealy during a news conference at the 2004 FOSE conference.

“We’re trying to understand what problem does it solve that is not already solved,” McNealy said.

Last month Eric Raymond, noted open source programmer and president of the Open Source Initiative advocacy group, posted an open letter to McNealy calling for Sun to make Java open source. “Sun’s insistence on continuing tight control of the Java code has damaged Sun's long-term interests by throttling acceptance of the language in the open-source community, ceding the field (and probably the future) to scripting-language competitors like Python and Perl,” Raymond wrote.

Agencies can now get free advice from the new Government Open Source Advisory Committee, which includes some of open-source software’s most influential leaders.

Miguel de Icaza, for instance, heads up development of the Gnome desktop interface found in nearly all Linux distributions. Roy T. Fielding is a co-founder of the Apache Software Foundation, which developed the Web server freeware running on about 67 percent of Internet servers, according to estimates by Netcraft Ltd. of Bath, England.

“They basically agreed to be available to talk with agency program managers, guide them and answer whatever questions they may have,” said Tony Stanco, head of the Center of Open Source and Government and associate director of the Cyber Security Policy and Research Institute at George Washington University in Washington.

IBM Corp. researchers are bringing text-to-speech capabilities to the Linux desktop.

Previously, production versions of IBM’s text-to-speech engine had been available only for the Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh platforms, said Rich Schwerdtfeger, an IBM software group accessibility strategist and chairman of IBM’s Accessibility Architecture Review Board.

In Version 1 of the TRM, OMB included only Java 2 Enterprise Edition, Java 2 Micro Edition, Microsoft .Net and Windows 2000, and wireless and mobile technologies as supporting platforms, which are the underlying technologies to make systems interoperable. But the program office added Linux and Mac OS X, as more and more agencies use these technologies.