Government Votes For Open Source

With growing support from policy-makers and adoption by the Department of Defense (DoD), Linux has rapidly moved beyond the curious alternative to become the platform of choice for many government agencies.

Now, with open-source adoption moving beyond the infrastructure and up to the application, solution providers that can see beyond the concept of "free" software will be in high demand.

Initially, the federal government adopted open source--mainly at the back end, with Linux being used to run critical applications. But that's changing as more agencies recognize the potential cost savings and flexibility associated with a completely open environment.

"[We] recognized the opportunity for open source early, partnering with Red Hat, MySQL and JBoss as product lines," says Craig Abod, president of Carahsoft Technology. "We're trying to build a public-sector distribution practice focused on [that market], which is more than a cool technology paradigm."

The National Security Agency went beyond adoption, in fact, playing a central role in the development of SE Linux, driving stronger security mechanisms and better safeguards against damage from malicious or flawed applications. And in April, with consulting services from the Open Source Software Institute, the DoD developed a road map that encourages the adoption of an open-technology model for software procurement and distribution.

"[Open source] used to be an unknown, and with the unknown came fear," says Mike Byrd, director of government channel sales at Red Hat. "That's changed. Now government is getting used to [Linux] and looking for ways to introduce new technologies...I don't necessarily see government developing applications [from scratch with open-source code] as much as taking advantage of all that's commercially available."

The union of Red Hat and JBoss in April provides agencies with the opportunity to take open source to that level, with JBoss now available on the Scientific and Engineering Workstation Procurement III (SEWP III) and Electronic Commodity Store contracting vehicles. Byrd also expects JBoss to be added to the GSA Schedule by the end of the year. The Navy and Army currently run knowledge portals on top of the JBoss application server.

This month, Red Hat released the Red Hat Application Stack subscription, which includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the JBoss Application server, Hibernate for object- relational mapping and support for the MySQL and PostgreSQL open-source databases. Carahsoft will act as a distributor of JBoss subscriptions for the government market.

"It's a different business model that requires some new ways of thinking," Abod says.

For agencies, working with an open-source development platform means the ability to reuse applications because of the vendor-neutral, standards-based platform. If an agency writes an application using the enterprise service bus, for example, other applications in the IT environment will be able to share the associated data.

"Government is looking to share data now more than ever," Abod says. "The standards-based approach in open-source computing will enable government to share data through applications better than ever. Government will be able to drive innovation."

For solution providers, many of whom are still stumped about how to make money on "free" software, open source requires an understanding of the long-term opportunity.

"Today's VAR community is still learning how to make money selling open source and subscriptions," Abod says. "The beauty of subscriptions for the VAR community is the annuity nature of a deal. The margin you make on one deal continues as long as the renewal does, but the contract work is different than when you are selling a perpetual license or a piece of hardware. Carahsoft knows how to construct contracts that are friendly to open source, making that a major differentiator for us."