Open Source continues to grow in Washington
November 9th, 2009
In my last post, I discussed how the White House is using open source (drupal) to build the whitehouse.gov website. This is a gread validation point for the US Government and open source and if that wasn’t enough to signal open source growth in Washington we get this guidance on open source from the DOD. This topic is getting quite a bit of press around the web from Matt Asay, Jay Lyman (451 Group) and it is welcomed news to see this guidance for open source at the DOD. One can only agree the US Government is no laggard here and is definately leading the charge.
Last week I was at GOSCON and had the opportunity to hear David Wennergren, Dep Asst SEc of Defense for Information Managmeent and Technology/ Deputy Chief Information Officer speak. Mr. Wennergren was the author for the DOD memorandum and he talked about the advantages of open source.
It was great to hear someone in the federal space talk about open source and I wanted to share some of his thoughts around on open source:
- By sharing information openly, teams are able to work more efficeintly and effectively. Ideas build on other ideas and so goes the trend.
- Quick and inexpensive means to deploy your application and assess your progress in real time.
- Future must look like iphone apps – Where users can quickly find what they need or develop it themselves. Must be easy to plug into.
- Secure Information Sharing – These two things must be managed together.
- Power of the Cloud – ‘Server huggers’ must move past control and trust. The world doesn’t work in silos anymore.
These ideas aren’t new to the open source world but to hear them spoken and accepted in such a forum was great news. The time is right for open source and it looks like the US Government is helping lead the way.
/deb
