Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

New Coalition To Promote OSS To Feds

Posted by Soulskill on from the unite-and-conquer dept.

LinuxScribe writes "Red Hat, Mozilla, Novell, Oracle, and Sun are among the 50-plus member Open Source for America coalition that will be officially announced today by Tim O'Reilly at OSCON. The OSA will be a strong advocate for free and open source software, and plans to boost US Federal government support and adoption of FOSS. From their website: 'The mission of OSA is to educate decision makers in the US Federal government about the advantages of using free and open source software; to encourage the Federal agencies to give equal priority to procuring free and open source software in all of their procurement decisions; and generally provide an effective voice to the US Federal government on behalf of the open source software community, private industry, academia, and other non-profits.'"

1 of 99 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I'd like to see some OSS hurdles addressed... by Richard_at_work · · Score: 3, Informative

    Samba 4 is still alpha software - not something someone is going to commit an entire organisation to using.

    OpenChange, according to their website, doesn't seem to be an actual solution but more of an implementation of the MAPI protocols in library format. And they also are alpha, with a production class release 'to be announced'.

    Alfresco looks good, but lacks integration with any office product (OpenOffice.Org or Microsoft Office), and as such requires a lot of manual work when collaborating on documents held in it.

    I'm not touting Microsoft here, but people need to stop googling for alternatives and then proudly holding them as alternatives to proven products in the market place. It decreases credibility when two out of three responses are not even touting *themselves* as production standard.