Google is a founding member and on the steering committe of Open Source for America group
Google is one of the more than 50 companies that have banded together to pressure the U.S. government to buy more open source software. The coalition calls itself Open Source for America and its motives are seen as specifically targeting government no-bid renewals of Microsoft products.
For years, Microsoft had no significant competitors in the desktop operating system and Office markets (after it wiped out ’80s icon products like WordPerfect and Lotus 123). The bummer of being a monopoly is that the government wants to micro-manage you. The upside is that the government was allowed to renew contracts without sending them out to bid. But open source companies … with Red Hat as their cheerleader … say no more. Microsoft may still be a monopoly because of the market share it controls, but that doesn’t mean competitors don’t exist and should be excluded from getting a piece of the billions that governments spend on software.
In May Red Hat sued Switzerland for awarding Microsoft a no-bid contract, and won. Earlier this month, New Zealand decided that it would try and opt out of Microsoft products when it could. This decision was reportedly made when it grew fed up with price negotiations with Microsoft on a renewal contract.
The open source community has been soliciting various governments to standardize on open source for what seems like forever but haven’t gotten all that far. Few CIOs have wanted to stick their necks out since, way back in 2006, Louis Gutierrez, CIO from Massachusetts recommended that the state save money by standardizing on Open Document Format documents (rather than Microsoft Word). He was named to Network World’s 2006 list of Most Powerful People for trying. But we didn’t save him. He was soon fired. And the feds have done little but hemmed and hawed and investigated. In January, Scott McNealy was asked to prepare a paper on the subject of secure and cost-effective government through open source.
While Red Hat may be leading the charge, Google is also a power player. The company is a founding member of this organization, as is to be expected. But the steering committee also includes Zaheda Bhorat, Open Standards Programs Manager for Google.
Microsoft is, not surprisingly, not a member of the group, and word is, that no one asked it to join. Oracle, another proprietary software icon, is another story. It is a founding member. It has wormed its way into the open source community buy buying Java and MySQL with its pending acquisition of Sun.
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