Open Source for America

Open Source for America, OSA is the American organization which helps the government of the country with use of open source software. OSA included more than 70 forming members — the companies, scientific institutions and the organizations. Among them: Canonical Debian GNOME Foundation Jaspersoft Ingres Linux Foundation Mozilla Novell Open Source Initiative Oracle Red Hat Sun Microsystems Google University of California AMD, Electronic Frontier Foundation and many others. The steering committee of the organization included 6 people. 5 more people create committee on the solution of technology questions.

Purposes of alliance

• change of structure of federal agencies which will help to pass to free open source software and to get all advantages which it offers;
• the help in coordination of communities and the government for adaptation of the software for needs of the state;
• promotion of Open Source among officials thanks to what they will be able to get acquainted better with the open source software and to understand what pluses it has.

The purpose of OSA is not replacement of the paid proprietary software by open providing completely, its participants emphasize. But the integrated companies intend to force the government to pay to the open source software attention on an equal basis with proprietary.

Advantages of Open Source in a public sector according to OSA

According to information on the official site of OSA, Open Source has four main advantages: more wide choice (the code does not belong to someone specifically, thus, anyone can write a ready-made product, no obstacles exist), reliability (the bigger number of people takes part in product development and its testing), security (anyone can execute search of vulnerabilities) and fast deployment — users do not need to wait for many years before complete product introduction, the test stage can be carried out even before its acquisition.

According to participants of alliance, the open source software can provide "more transparent and effective" country government and better care of her citizens. "The software with open initial in general is capable to increase efficiency of the state, - the official representative of Open Source for America David Thomas says. - Our organization will allow to integrate the best minds in the industry which will work together with the state. As a result the government will be able to reduce costs and to become less inert. Perhaps, Open Source is also not a panacea, but will allow to cut down expenses and to accelerate innovations". "In our state almost nobody uses open source software", - the vice president of Red Hat Tom Rabon comments, however his use would allow to save billions of dollars.

Links

Oracle, Google, Red Hat and Sun will help to pass the USA to Open Source