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From grassroots to government: Looking for a FOSS friendly national CTO

Will the first national CTO embrace open source? Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales hopes so.
Written by Joe Brockmeier, Contributor

Will the first national CTO embrace open source? Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales hopes so. In a piece on CNN's Web site, Wales and Andrea Weckerle argue that the first national CTO needs to commit to open source and open standards:

For the same reason that all government publications are automatically placed in the public domain, the federal government should make a very strong commitment to using only open-source software and open standards. The era of handing implicit subsidies to politically favored companies by adopting their closed proprietary software must end.

Couldn't agree with this more. Governments have embraced open source at various levels, but it's about time that the national government embrace open source more enthusiastically. Maybe some of that stimulus money could be put into funding open source development. The New Deal put money into building national infrastructure, maybe the next New Deal could invest in an open software infrastructure.

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