US govt. urged to use open source

BBC Technology reports that Scott McNealy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, is preparing a paper on the use of open source software for the new US administration.

“It’s intuitively obvious open source is more cost effective and productive than proprietary software,” he said, adding, “Open source does not require you to pay a penny to Microsoft or IBM or Oracle or any proprietary vendor any money.”

On the quality and other aspects of open source, McNealy continues: “The government ought to mandate open source products based on open source reference implementations to improve security, get higher quality software, lower costs, higher reliability – all the benefits that come with open software.”

Regarding proprietary software use by government, OSI President Michael Tiemann states, “It’s an accident of history that proprietary standards became so entrenched so early and it’s been a colossal expense for government.”

This sounds promising: could we really see penguin-powered computing (news passim) in the Oval Office?

You can read the full story here.