From Dallam County, Texas, to Hawaii and Rhode Island, government IT agencies and departments are putting open source software applications to greater use.
"To me, it's like this wave you see way out in the ocean, and you just watch it come in," said Tony Stanco, associate director of the Center of Open Source & Government, an organization that brings together government agencies, open source vendors and integrators. "You see that it's moving, that it's inevitable, but it hasn't hit the shore yet."
Due to unprecedented budget pressures, more government agencies are testing the waters. An emerging group of jurisdictions see free open source applications as means to strengthen their IT capabilities, even when they have little money to spend on software.
Open source started gaining credibility in the business world a few years ago.
In 1999, the PC industry's heavy hitters -- Compaq, Dell, HP, IBM and others -- realized there was value in making sure Linux worked on their computers and started devoting resources to that end.
In 2000, Linux guru Bruce Perens was hired at HP to help the company develop a better understanding of Linux and the world of open source in general. A few days later, IBM chief executive Louis Gerstner announced that IBM would spend $1 billion on Linux during 2001.
Oracle was ahead of the curve, however. In mid-1998, the company said it would port its Oracle8 database and applications package to Linux, and later that year the company announced partnerships with four Linux vendors.
Even back then, government jurisdictions were beginning to experiment with open source. Dallam County, Texas, used Linux and Apache to create a Web presence without buying software (see Open Sesame!, Government Technology, December 1999).
BusinessWeek magazine's recent special report, The Linux Uprising, provided the latest shot in the arm for open source software and applications. And the Center of Open Source & Government, which is affiliated with George Washington University's Cyber Security Policy & Research Institute, held a conference in March that drew some 750 attendees.
The meeting -- Open Standards/Open Source for National and Local eGovernment Programs in the United States and European Union -- included representatives from the U.S. federal government, Japan, Mexico, the European Commission, France, South Korea and three U.S. states -- Iowa, Utah and Rhode Island.
"We run conferences at which we bring in government people from around the world. We bring in vendors from around the world. We bring in project representatives from around the world. And they all get together and talk and listen," Stanco said. "There's a lot of miscommunication and misunderstanding about open source, and getting everybody together and allowing the dialog to happen eliminates that."
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Open source has long had a rabid community of followers who defend the concept's viability -- namely, that opening the source code of applications and programs to programmers and developers is the best way to improve software.
"When programmers can read, redistribute and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves," according to the Open Source Initiative's Web site. "People improve it. People adapt it. People fix bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing."
Perhaps nowhere does the adage "you get what you pay for" dominate perception of a product more than in the software industry.
Though open source software is free, it's not exactly freeware. Freeware is "software distributed without charge. Ownership is retained by the developer who has control over its redistribution, including the ability to change the next release of the freeware to payware," according to the Computer Desktop Encyclopedia.
Open source software isn't exactly shareware, either, which is "software on the honor system -- if you use it regularly, you're required to register and pay for it, for which you will receive technical support and perhaps additional documentation or the next upgrade. Paid licenses are required for commercial distribution," as also defined by the Computer Desktop Encyclopedia.
Open source software can be thought of as a hybrid of freeware and shareware. Though open source applications, products or operating systems can be downloaded free of charge by anybody, companies such as IBM, HP and Red Hat commercialize certain aspects -- they sell their services and support to users. Enterprises with staff that can provide the programming muscle to integrate open source software into the existing software environment don't necessarily have to contract with a vendor -- they can simply download whatever application they're interested in and work with it.
"As short as a year ago, to bring up an open source product, people would definitely shrug those off as being 'freeware' type applications," said Jim Willis, director of electronic government services for Rhode Island's Office of the Secretary of State.
"Now I think if we were sitting down in a meeting with a bunch of state technology people, and somebody were to shrug those products off as freeware, people would know to question that person's level of being informed," Willis said. "It shows a certain amount of either tunnel vision or naivet
