New Coalition To Promote OSS To Feds

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.'"

No support

[mc1138]

Title of this reply refers to what an old boss said, not any reality of truth. I worked for a public entity at one point, and the CIO was 110% against any sort of linux or "free" software, based on his notion that these free solutions could offer no support in times of trouble. Despite trying to explain that many larger distro's had enterprise editions that you could in fact get support for, plus a very large community of users that also could help support it, none of this would sway him away from his notion that if you weren't paying through the nose the product just wouldn't be up to standards. What a joke!

Re:I'd like to see some OSS hurdles addressed...

[gblackwo]

Omnicare, one of our nations largest pharmacies which deals with personal information like medical history, billing information, and insurance records uses Bitlocker to secure their laptops.

Re:Think of this as a concert

[nsteinme]

I don't follow. All of these member groups have one or more reasons to promote FOSS. For most of them (e.g. the EFF), it is because they support the core principles of free software. Others (e.g. Google and Redhat) have additional business incentives, such as watching FOSS kill Microsoft (this can't come soon enough for me personally) or Fedora. But the FSF has the same goals as this coalition, and so I was surprised to learn that not only were they not spearheading it, but that they weren't listed as a member at all.

Support?

[Anonymous Coward]

Management needs to reconsider the concept of requiring traditional "support". I have seen more than a few problems that elude the offshore/outsourced world of vendor support. In this brave new world where the cheap are led by the stupid, we are technologically "on our own" more often than anyone wants to admit.

But it sure doesn't look that way. One thing that management really likes about Windows is the perception that it can be run by a bunch of newbies backstopped by MS support. Therefore, the IT dept. can be treated like a bunch of newbies. If they quit, they can be replaced with fresh newbies. Management wants to believe that all the money paid for vendor support means that the vendor is doing most of the thinking and the IT staff is doing most of the typing. The mandate for vendor support is not nearly as important as the mandate to keep IT "dumb and cheap".

The perception is that Linux requires smarter people. Those people cost more and mistreating them will have consequences. Even worse, the vendor-centric strategy is shattered. Management is seldom willing to let go of a fantasy.