A New Voice for Open Source in Government

"The new organization is called Open Source for America (OSA), and you can find its Web site here. Tim O'Reilly will officially announce OAS at OSCON later today, and you can find the launch press release here, as well as pasted in at the end of this blog post for archival purposes. I'm sure that you'll also see quite a few articles blossom across the Web today relating to its announcement, but having been in on the planning, here's what it's all about.

"The immediate goal of the organization will be to raise awareness about free and open source software in government. Or, as stated in the lede to the press release, to provide, "a unified voice for the promotion of open source software in the U.S. Federal Government arena." The full version of the OAS mission can be found in the Charter document, and reads as follow:

"The mission of OSA is to educate decision makers in the U.S. 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 U.S. Federal government on behalf of the open source software community, private industry, academia, and other non-profits."

Complete Story

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