Leaders of the open-source movement announced on Wednesday that they have formed a coalition to promote support of and adoption by federal agencies of the nonproprietary computer software.  More than 50 companies, academic institutions, communities and individuals formed Open Source for America to promote its use in the federal government.

Open source software, freely available program code that the public can download and modify, which many agencies avoid because they view it as a security risk, is often more secure than the alternatives that are commercially developed, a top Defense Department official said on Thursday.

Drug-resistant malaria could spread from southeast Asia to Africa within months, putting millions of children's lives at risk, a leading expert warned on Wednesday. Nicholas White, professor of tropical medicine at Mahidol University in Bangkok, called for a war before it is too late on the malaria strain resistant to the drug artemisinin that first emerged along the Thai-Cambodian border in 2007.

  Read More »

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs announced last week that it's adopting a new model of care for its patients and the VA medical facility in East Orange, New Jersey, will be one of four locations where regional implementation teams will be deployed.  Read More »

A blue-chip information technology industry recommended the Veterans Affairs Department reengineer its decade-old electronic health record system based on open source models and offered as the international standard for hospitals.  The recommendations have implications for the Obama administration's push for a national network for health records, which faces a roadblock of incompatible systems nationwide. Open source theoretically could provide a solution. Read More »

A group of open source code practitioners has written a letter to President Barack Obama urging him to require wider adoption of open source code throughout the government. "We urge you to make it mandatory to consider the source of an application solution (open or closed) as part of the government's technology acquisition process, just as considering accessibility by the handicapped is required," wrote 15 leaders of open source projects and companies." Read More »

White House officials on Friday sent agency chief information officers and senior procurement executives a memo directing them to weigh open source options when buying technology.

Open source refers to technology based on nonproprietary parts, which allow third-party developers to improve and modify the product without having to pay the technology's maker. Advocates have said a move toward open source in the government could save taxpayer dollars and bolster security.

To gather additional perspective on the future of Obama's open government effort, Nextgov interviewed Don Tapscott, co-author of the new book Macrowikinomics (Portfolio, 2010), a sequel to the 2006 best-seller Wikinomics. Macrowikinomics examines the way networked communities are transforming the way governments operate.  Here is Tapscott's take on what the Obama administration should do next.

Motivated both by the severity of the threat Novell's patents potentially represent in the hands of CPTN and by reports that the European competition authorities did not understand the anti-competitive potention of this acquisition, OSI has collaborated with the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the first time and crafted a joint request to the US Department of Justice to investigate the re-filed application for approval of the acquisition.

The new administration must broaden the scope of its counterterrorism activities, including a focus on collection of domestic and open source intelligence as well as traditional foreign intelligence, the Defense Science Board said in a report outlining the key priorities for incoming leaders. Read More »