I work for the DoD (Civil Servant NOT contractor) security is a big deal. Which is why many free software apps go unused. While MS may be the great evil fact is it is the most secure and MS is responsive to our needs. Now...if we are talking about in general the USG (United States Government) should ALWAY purchase the IP Rights then I agree....BUT...that comes at an exspense.

This is at best a foolhardy crusade and at worst a spectacular waste of government funds.

The government has serious challenges ahead of it in the next term. How can anyone honestly take this expensive, philosophical jihad seriously?

Industry outsiders often forget that software acquisition is only a fraction of its cost. Retraining gov't employees is not cheap.

cant completey agree with this one, some programs are specialty items and do not need to be freely available, but I think it should be mandatory that if an open source of free is available use it, windows vista $399, Ubuntu free, tech support - feds ussually have there own for security reasons, use linux need a program bid it out and have it written

@RichardBronosky If i was an engineer? I work on brain implants, am a tech founder, and have been hacking my whole life. Don't assume that--"if you were an engineer" is one of the worst insults you could give someone technical.

By "secure" I meant in capability. That we're able to do things, or the methods we employ, themselves are secret. The NSA could have broken RSA for all we know.

i think a grant foundation that funds full time developers to work on, and moderate open source projects would be the best, this coupled with a new policy that Open Source Products are evaluated and considered as well as the commercial products. Fair and Even opportunity for open source to be put to use SHOULD it be better than its commercial cousins.

Commercial software and "free" software are only different business models of which free software in my opinion provides less reliability and accountability. By free, it means paying random people with random level of expertise for random quality and accountability. Security is a cat and mouse game. The many eyes on code to make the software more secure is an absurd theory and dead argument.

I disagree. The government, just like any business or institution, needs to be able to use whatever software best suits their needs - whether that is open source or not. I am a Linux user and OSS advocate, but forcing them to use a specific type of software could create more problems if that software does not deliver the needed features.

This is not possible. The government has special processes that are required by law that cannot be served by open source. There are so many laws and rules that the government has to follow, going all open source is not feasible. HOWEVER, I do think the government should use open source when it can!

The "premise" that software is licensed just to distribute its R&D costs is fundamentally flawed. Corporations are not designed to "support themselves", they are designed to maximize shareholder value and seek to grow profits. This idea is a pipe dream of the socialist free software movement.

The DLA manages over 5 million items and over $30 billion in sales / year using SAP, which is developed by a *German* company, and GOTS (Goverment Off The Shelf software) - http://www.dla.mil/facts.aspx. I challange you to name a free ERP solution that can handle that level of throughput with identical reliablity, or describe how you could convince a German company to release is source.

@frisco, no need to move 100s of 1000s of machines to OSS. [P1] This only applies to new expenditures.

[P2] OSS is more secure. If you were an engineer you'd understand that you do not have to keep source private to use the app privately.

[P3] OpenOffice has all the functionality needed by most. Adding what it lacks could be funded with what we spend in 1 yr for commercial licenses.

@jdarius It may not be a logically necessary conclusion, but it's how many feel: any software developed with public money should become a public asset. Partly for practical reasons — so various government agencies don't have to pay for the same software over and over — and partly for idealistic reasons: I think it's cool that countries can benefit from sharing software.

Ultimately all software will be produced on OSS model. This is inevitable. Lack of information on available alternatives prevent the adoption of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in several government departments and agencies.

The resposnsibility of a competent CTO includes carrying out ongoing audit of available OSS alternatives to every software in use in govt.

@frisco, Open source software is usually far more secure due to the millions of people around the world constantly providing feedback to it, in which it constantly gets updates to fix holes and problems. Closed source software will only have a severe flaw revealed when someone eventually does hack into it, and it's already too late by that time.

Agreed that the government should use OSS (although Free software sounds too much like Stallman's crusade, and I really do hate his extremism on the matter). In addition to that, the government should use only open standards for A/V (AAC and H.264) and documents (ODF or OOXML and PDF).

sll

Two more points: what about Windows? you're kidding yourself if you think you're going to move literally hundreds of thousands of machines away from Microsoft platforms in the near future, if ever; it would require a complete reengineering of the entire gov IT infrastructure. Also, the vast majority of _custom_ software is going to be secure--and the CIA and DOD would _never_ give that away.

This is totally unrealistic. The government would be left with knockoff clones like OpenOffice, and no company will develop software that they'll be compelled to give away. MAYBE you can require that software _developed_ for government (like what?) is released OS, but trying to require that the proprietary software they use gets OS'd is madness.

@sebourne, I don't honestly expect the corporation who makes the current dominant software to make a reasonable offer until the inevitable loss of their market share happens. If you think that open source software is products no one wants, you have been mislead. Novel bought Suse. Sun bought MySQL. Yahoo! bought Zimbra. The RedHat project became a major corp. Google, Yahoo!, etc. run on all OSS.

Socialized software development? Nobody will want to sell to the government because they can make more money the way it is now, and government will get stuck having to use software nobody else wanted to buy.

@frisco, any organization or individual would be welcome to place a bid for offering their software under an acceptable license. This very well could result is current (or special off-shoot) versions of well known commercial office suites and operating systems becoming open source software.

As a boon school children would no longer have to use outdated software due to licensing/budget issues.