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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.'"

6 of 99 comments (clear)

  1. Careful. by John+Hasler · · Score: 5, Funny

    If you get the government too enthused about Free Software they may decide to "help" it.

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    Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
    1. Re:Careful. by characterZer0 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The Republicans do not think the markets were not free enough to prevent collapse.

      They think that they can get more power and money for themselves by promising a freer market.

      Just like the Democrats think they can get more power and money for themselves by promising more regulation.

      They divided the population neatly in two parts and picked their positions to get more power and money.

      Voters must be the dumbest motherfuckers on Earth to think that the major parties have the interests of the people in mind.

      --
      Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
  2. I'd like to see some OSS hurdles addressed... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Find an OSS replacement that can do what Active Directory, BitLocker, and Exchange can do, and a lot of companies would jump to it.

    Bitlocker != loopback mounted encryption or TrueCrypt. BitLocker has two advantages over standard FDE systems. First, since it uses a TPM chip, it requires no passwords or supervised access at boot time (unless configured explictly to do so). This allows people to log onto a machine as a user, but have no access to other user's items, even if they pull out a recovery CD and reboot the machine. The second BitLocker advantage is that it detects tampering. With existing FDE systems, one can replace binaries with keyloggers, and nobody would notice. BitLocker, the TPM would notice a different value and not return a decryption key.

    And TrouSers or tboot is a nice proof of concept, but nowhere near a workable solution that can be used.

    Exchange forces companies to use AD, and once a company has an AD infrastructure, there is no point in using OpenLDAP or another directory structure.

    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.

  3. Non-Profits? by somersault · · Score: 4, Funny

    1. Create open source software
    2. Promote it to money grubbing politicians
    3. ????
    4. Non-profit!

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    which is totally what she said
  4. FOSS will have to change to be more competitive by MikeRT · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The federal government has no bias against using open source software. There are two major factors that affect it:

    1) Someone has to pay to get FOSS put through an evaluation process to be verified for suitability and safety (commercial vendors often pay this or coordinate with a contracting firm). This fee can be hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it applies to every component that has not been previously approved. If you bring in 5 Java FOSS libraries that haven't been used before, you could be looking at as much as a $3M cost to get them certified.

    2) Versions have to be done more carefully. To most federal agencies, KDE 3.0, 3.5, 4.0 and 4.1 would be distinct versions each requiring evaluation. Microsoft has an advantage over desktop Linux in that respect since it releases Windows updates every few years, and service packs can be evaluated at everyone's convenience.