De amerikaanse overheid zoekt naar mogelijkheden om open source software toe te passen. Reden hiervoor is bezorgdheid over beveiligingsproblemen en grote afhankelijkheid van Microsoft produkten:
The National Security Council soon will create a new office to assess the ways federal agencies could make greater use of open-source, or nonproprietary, software that is freely available to anyone and has codes that are not secret."One of the areas we are very interested in looking at is open-source code," a senior White House official told Federal Times.
The effort ultimately could affect the types of software the government purchases for network servers and desktop applications.
[...] The new office will assess the costs and benefits of using open-source software to operate many government computers. Also to be determined are the cost and technical obstacles to communication between systems using open-source and the proprietary software now in use.
The White House official declined to say how extensive is the administration's plan to diversify its reliance on operating systems software. A chief reason for the effort, according to advocates, is to address concerns that Microsoft operating systems are vulnerable to malicious computer viruses and hacker attacks. This is partly because the Microsoft software is proprietary and security vulnerabilities are more difficult to find and correct, said Przemek Klosowski, a NIST physicist and leader of the Washington, D.C., Linux User's Group.
Het complete verhaaltje lees je in dit artikel van Federal Times Online.
