TheOpenAnalyst

Technology — both in application and message — was a big part of the Barack Obama presidential campaign. Now that President Obama has been sworn in, technology appears to still be front and center. Case in point: Co-founder and former CEO of SunMicrosystems, Scott McNealy revealed to the BBC this week that he had been tapped by the Obama administration to write a paper on the benefits to the government of using open source.

There have been no shortage of nods toward the new President’s stance on openness: Blogs especially have been quick to point out his weekly YouTube videos, www.whitehouse.gov’s creative commons license, or the site’s metaphor-rich robot.txt file. But this request of Mr. McNealy sounds like something that could be used to develop a substantial plan of action for government-funded technology. Certainly a more open approach to US technology would be a good thing. To quote Mr. McNealy:

“The government ought to mandate open source products based on open source reference implementations to improve security, get higher quality software, lower costs, higher reliability — all the benefits that come with open software.”

President Obama: Good for Open Source? | Linux Magazine

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