Congratulations to New Hampshire, whose newly passed HB418 now requires the consideration of open source software, and promotes open data standards. Great work!

Open Source for America applauds OMB’s effort to increase the efficiency of the Federal IT budget through the principles of commoditization, reuse, sharing, and collaboration described in the draft IT Shared Services Policy distributed on December 8th, 2011. These principles are also the hallmarks of open source software, and while there is no explicit mention [...]

As part of the Open Government Partnership, the US Government’s National Action Plan was released and the White House asked for input from the public on how citizen participation could be improved, facilitated, and measured. Here is OSFA’s response, which we submitted on January 3rd, 2012.

Open Source for America (OSFA) appreciates this opportunity to comment on the [...]

Open Source for America (OSFA) is excited to announce the winners of our second annual Open Source Awards program, recognizing individuals, projects and deployments for their role in advancing the adoption of free and open source software in federal government agencies. Winners were honored during FedTalks 2011, held in October in Washington, D.C. Open Source [...]

Our own John Scott of Radiant Blue explains the Open Technology Development: Lessons Learned paper from the Secretary of Defense.

Open Technology Development (OTD) on Vimeo.

BRL-CAD was developed by the US Army Research and Development Command, and released to the public in 2004. You can learn more about BRL-CAD, and their experience with releasing open source code in the presentation below.

Opticks is a image and video analysis tool that grew out of the USAF COMET program. It was created for the USAF by Ball Aerospace and subsequently released under the LGPLv2 license in 2007. You can learn more about how this project successfully started their community in this slide show:

NASA released World Wind, a Java SDK for Google Earth-style visualizations under the NASA Open Source Agreement (NOSA).

The VA released their venerable VistA electronic health record system under the Apache license.

OODT is “data middleware” that ties together distributed data sets for processing. It was created by NASA, and is now part of the Apache project.

The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) released the Corporate Management Information System (CMIS) under the Open Software License.

The National Security Agency (NSA) created Accumulo, a database based on the BigTable whitepaper. It is now part of the Apache project.

DeveloperView helps web developers collaboratively tag the pages on their website. The FCC released this project under the GPL.

OpenStack is a cloud infrastructure management tool that was co-developed by Rackspace and NASA. It is released under an Apache 2.0 license.

The Federal IT dashboard is a Drupal site that tracks spending and effectiveness of IT projects. It was created by OMB as part of the TechStat program, and released under the GPLv2 license. It powers the Federal IT dashboard, of course.

Vivek Kundra, the Federal CIO, is leaving government for academia, and today a  new Federal CIO was named . Below, you’ll find a letter from  Open Source for America wishing Mr. Kundra well. In about a week, we’ll have the opportunity to present him this letter in person. We’d love to have the OSFA membership and supporters co-sign [...]