U.S. Open Source for Open Government
In December the U.S. White House set guidelines for an open and transparent administration. The Open Source for America (OSFA) organization is now following up with tips for a governmental move to free software.
The Open Source for America organization is the largest lobbying group for free software in the U.S. Its members include Canonical, the Debian project, the GNOME Foundation, Google, KDE e.V., Novell, and Red Hat. Subsequent to the White House guidelines, the OSFA has set its own to help the individual governmental bodies in their move to free software by April 2010.
The relatively short and easy-to-understand document divides its recommendations into the categories Participation, Collaboration, and Transparency. In particular, "Agency procurement rules should explicitly reject preferences for particular products or development models" and instead "agencies should provide a means to receive unsolicited suggestions for free and open source software tools." They should also use platform-independent online tools as much as possible and provide free licensing for internally developed applications to "facilitate sharing" across agencies.
The complete Proposed Guidelines for Open Government Plans are on the OSFA homepage. President Obama had already set a good example in October 2009 by converting the White House portal to Drupal.
Comments
comments powered by DisqusSubscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
Armbian 24.11 Released with Expanded Hardware Support
If you've been waiting for Armbian to support OrangePi 5 Max and Radxa ROCK 5B+, the wait is over.
-
SUSE Renames Several Products for Better Name Recognition
SUSE has been a very powerful player in the European market, but it knows it must branch out to gain serious traction. Will a name change do the trick?
-
ESET Discovers New Linux Malware
WolfsBane is an all-in-one malware that has hit the Linux operating system and includes a dropper, a launcher, and a backdoor.
-
New Linux Kernel Patch Allows Forcing a CPU Mitigation
Even when CPU mitigations can consume precious CPU cycles, it might not be a bad idea to allow users to enable them, even if your machine isn't vulnerable.
-
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.5 Released
Notify your friends, loved ones, and colleagues that the latest version of RHEL is available with plenty of enhancements.
-
Linux Sees Massive Performance Increase from a Single Line of Code
With one line of code, Intel was able to increase the performance of the Linux kernel by 4,000 percent.
-
Fedora KDE Approved as an Official Spin
If you prefer the Plasma desktop environment and the Fedora distribution, you're in luck because there's now an official spin that is listed on the same level as the Fedora Workstation edition.
-
New Steam Client Ups the Ante for Linux
The latest release from Steam has some pretty cool tricks up its sleeve.
-
Gnome OS Transitioning Toward a General-Purpose Distro
If you're looking for the perfectly vanilla take on the Gnome desktop, Gnome OS might be for you.
-
Fedora 41 Released with New Features
If you're a Fedora fan or just looking for a Linux distribution to help you migrate from Windows, Fedora 41 might be just the ticket.
Open Source for America - Proposed Guidelines