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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.'"

3 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.
  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.

  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