WASHINGTON, DC – Today, a broad cross-section of more than 70 companies, academic institutions, communities, related groups and individuals joined together to announce the formation of Open Source for America, an organization that will serve as a unified voice for the promotion of open source software in the U.S. Federal Government arena.
With the U.S. Federal Government increasingly focused on utilizing and adopting technologies to better serve citizens, there is growing recognition of the freedoms that open source software and open technology solutions can provide – an open, transparent and cost-effective option – for government agencies.
Gartner recently estimated 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.
“Open source software can help deliver improved government service – plain and simple – and the Administration recognizes this more than any in our nation’s history,” said David Thomas, principal with Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti and spokesman for the Open Source for America campaign.
The mission of Open Source for America 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.
Founding members of Open Source for America include: Acquia; Alfresco Software; Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.; Jono Bacon; Black Duck Software, Inc.; Josh Berkus; Ean Schuessler, BrainFood; Canonical; CodeWeavers; CollabNet; Colosa, Inc.; Continuent; Danese Cooper; Crucial Point LLC; Josh Davis; Debian; Democracy in Action; Electronic Frontier Foundation; EnterpriseDB; Bdale Garbee; GNOME Foundation; Google; JC Herz; ibiblio.org; Ingres Corporation; Jaspersoft; Mitch Kapor, Kapor Capital; KnowledgeTree; Marv Langston; The Linux Foundation; Linux Fund, Inc.; Lucid Imagination; Geir Magnusson, Jr.; Medsphere; Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti; Mercury Federal Systems; Monty Widenius, Monty Program AB; Mozilla; North Carolina State University Center for Open Software Engineering; Novell; Open Solutions Alliance; Open Source Initiative; Open Source Institute; Oracle; O’Reilly Publishing; Oregon State University Open Source Lab; Open Source Software Institute; Pentaho; RadiantBlue; Red Hat; Relative Computing Environments LLC.; REvolution Computing; Walt Scacchi, Institute for Software Research at UC Irvine; Software Freedom Law Center; SpikeSource; SugarCRM; Sunlight Labs; Sun Microsystems; School of Engineering, University of California, Merced; University of Southern Mississippi; Andy Updegrove, Gesmer Updegrove LLP; Tony Wasserman, Center for Open Source Investigation, Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley; Zenoss, Inc.; Zimbra; and Zmanda.
To register or learn more about the coalition, visit www.opensourceforamerica.org.
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