Several open-source software companies and many other organisations have formed a consortium called Open Source for America to persuade the US government to use more of the collaboratively developed software, to participate in its development, and to help its practitioners work better with the government.
The group includes more than 70 companies, academic institutions, businesses and individuals. Among them are Linux sellers Red Hat, Novell and Canonical; software vendors Sun, Oracle, Mozilla, SugarCRM, Alfresco Software, Pentaho, Revolution Computing, Zmanda, EnterpriseDB and Yahoo's Zimbra; and open-source allies, including AMD and Google.
The group's ambitions are as broad as its membership.
"Open Source for America is bringing together some of the industry's brightest minds, who will work together with policymakers and the public so that technologies enabled by the software freedoms can help make government IT deployment more secure, more cost-effective, faster to deploy with greater privacy, and the ability to help eliminate vendor lock-in," said David Thomas, a principal with government lobbying firm Mehlman Vogel and the organisation's spokesman, in a statement.
"Open-source software may not be a cure-all, but it could save billions of dollars, help foster innovation and empower our government to work smarter."
The announcement was made in conjunction with the Oscon 2009 open-source conference.
Talkback
Not only could it save money, but it offers better security than anything coming out of Redmond. This is true for any government on the planet.