Nonprofit Helps Government Expand Open Source Software Usage

The U.S. government is still very much a Windows world, but a group dedicated to bringing open source software into public agencies says it is seeing progress on several fronts.

The Open Source Software Institute (OSSI) has worked with government agencies on numerous projects over the past 10 years. AJ Jaghori, a recently appointed member of the nonprofit's advisory council, and chief technology officer of the STRATIS Emerging Technologies Practice at defense contractor L-3 Communications, says the move toward mobile and cloud computing is accelerating the trend of government using open source software, despite the sector's traditional reluctance.

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"I don't think the government is going to be where the commercial industry is in terms of utilizing open source software," Jaghori says, and "the higher you go in sensitivity of data, the longer it takes to adopt open source."