There are 3 categories:

• Individual Contribution
• Open Source Project
• Open Source Government Deployment

Rules and guidelines here, but the main point is that nominees should support OFSA’s mission:

• to effectuate changes in U.S. Federal government policies and practices so that all the government may more fully benefit from and utilize free and open source software;

• to help coordinate these communities to collaborate with the Federal government on technology requirements;

• to raise awareness and create understanding among federal government leaders in the executive and legislative branches about the values and implications of open source software. OSFA may also participate in standards development and other activities that may support its open source mission.

I’m liking the White House on Drupal in either of the last two categories actually.

I’m actually fairly excited  about the OSFA and their mission, because I think the argument for Open Source and non-Proprietary standards is even stronger for public records than it is in the private sector (and I think it’s pretty damn strong in the private sector to start off with!)

The US Gov’t could close Bug #1 virtually overnight if it standardized on an Open Source platform. I know that won’t happen, but the American government is so influential, it is a very effective target for Free Software and Open Source promotion.

One of the strongest arguments against proprietary formats is public use, such as goverment records. It seems ridiculous that one must pay a corporate 3rd party to do government business, but that’s how things are done in far too many cases.

I can’t say if OSFA will make a difference in this area or not, but they have recently called for comments on their Proposed Guidelines for Open Government Plans. I encourage you to read the draft.

Of course I have some thoughts

Here’s the thing about OSFA and similar organizations focusing on promoting “Open Source” to the US Government (and to a lesser degree other governments):

“Open Source” was supposed to be a synonym for “Free Software”, the whole trick was to make it more acceptable to commercial interests. It is easy to see how a company might be skeptical of anything “Free” being good business.

But, consider this situation now: Government is not a commercial interest and the concept of “Free as in Freedom” should be quite attractive to the government of a country that likes to pride itself on being “Land of the Free” and all that!

So the strange thing here is that proponents of the “Open Source” label have so lost sight of the the core aspect of “Free Software” – Freedom – that they can’t even bring it up when it is applicable! They talk about “open standards” and “royalty or patent encumbered formats” without talking about individual freedom.

That is what is important! Why so much focus on the how, and so little on the why?!

We see a similar failing of “Open Source” when someone brings up the argument that “users don’t care about seeing the source code”. This may be true, but it is a problem of focusing on the development model. It’s harder to argue that “users don’t care about freedom from vendor lock-in, 3rd party control, outrageous licensing agreements, unwillling upgrade cycles, the inability to access their own work as they see fit, etc.“.

It’s much harder to argue that “users don’t care about Freedom”, because they most certainly do!