The federal government is still lagging behind in technology from the common world but recently it has announced its love for open source software- or what it considers to be open source software.
FEDERAL GOVERNMENT LOVES OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE:
On March 10, a blog post was published by the White House editorial team which revealed that a new campaign is about to go live which is expected to result in the federal government using open source software more. A policy document for the source code was also uploaded which, by the way, is available on GitHub.
This is aimed at trying to save resources and avoid “reinventing the wheel” as is said in the IT world. The blog post said, “We can save taxpayer dollars by avoiding duplicative custom software purchases and promote innovation and collaboration across Federal agencies,”
The open source community has contained the talking points that the blog post highlighted for quite some time now; it’s just that the government has shone light on them a lot later. Well, better late than never.
There are some catches and some limitations worth mentioning. For starters, the term “open source” is not defined in a vivid way by the blog post. All it says is that the government intends to make a part of the federal source code public to the developers and other interested people. Microsoft introduced a similar program by the name of Shared Source Program back in the early 2000s; through this program, Microsoft released selective source codes to the public that weren’t elaborative enough to cause any danger.
While the blog post has brought smiles on many faces and it does open doors to all sorts of research and input, there are some security concerns associated with it as well if the whole program is not handled with increased care.
