Open Source Lobbying Group Emerges

A lobbying group has been launched by more than 70 companies, academic institutions, and communities, to promote open source software as a "transparent and cost-effective option" for U.S. government agencies. "Open Source for America" counts AMD, Canonical, Google, Novell, Oracle, and Red Hat among its members.

With the U.S. government looking to spend big bucks on healthcare and clean energy to add to its stimulus spending on infrastructure, it is also under greater pressure to cut costs. All that spending also means that lobbyists are increasingly outnumbering bureaucrats and lawmakers in D.C. these days, and open source vendors apparently decided it was high time to belly up to the bar. If not shovel-ready, open source projects are at least keyboard-ready, and open source developers cannot live on Red Bull alone.

As Open Source for America puts it, its mission is to "serve as a centralized advocate and to encourage broader U.S. Federal Government support of and participation in free and open source software." The organization also says it hopes to help change policies and practices to allow the Feds to better utilize open source technologies. In addition, the group will help coordinate open source communities to collaborate with government on technology requirements, and raise awareness among lawmakers about the technology that is increasingly behind much of the Internets, which is, of course, a series of tubes that was invented by Al Gore.

The lobbying group quotes Gartner as estimating that by 2011 more than 25 percent of government vertical, domain-specific applications will either be open source, contain open source application components, or be developed as community source.

The Board of Advisors of Open Source for America is comprised of a number of open source luminaries including Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly), Mark Shuttleworth (Canonical), and Jim Zemlin (the Linux Foundation).