Red, White And Blue -- And Open

The group's name: Open Source for America. The group's mission: revolutionize the way we govern ourselves, from IT departments on outwards. Or at least just the IT departments.

OSA's newly minted, as of this week at OSCON, and their mission can be summed up in two sentences:

Open Source for America (OSA) is an effort to raise awareness in the U.S. Federal Government about the benefits of open source software. We hope to encourage the government's utilization of open source software participation in open source software projects, and incorporation of open source community dynamics to enable transparency.

The list of founders, advisors and board members is a who's-who of open source achievements. Industry leaders figure in prominently: Red Hat, Oracle and Sun, Debian, Black Duck, SugarCRM, Novell, Mozilla. So do strategic groups: the Open Source Initiative, the Linux Foundation, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

So do individuals: Monty Widenius, Andy Updegrove, Eben Moglen, Tim O'Reilly. (The gadfly in me wonders if Microsoft was not invited, even despite their recent spate of contributions, or was asked and declined to join...)