NY Times: Presidential Commission Recommends Government Support for Open Source
The New York Times is reporting that a soon-to-be released report from the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee calls on the U.S. government to support the creation of Open Source software as one of the ways to address an expected shortfall in commercial quality applications.
According to the article, leaders of the Open Source movement say, "The point ... is not to destroy the profit motive that has helped
make software a $175 billion-a-year business worldwide. The goal
instead is to bring software development into the Internet era by sharing
knowledge widely, allowing programmers to build on each other's work
and accelerate the pace of software debugging and improvement. " (Note: Free registration is required to access content on nytimes.com.)
This article is excellent because it presents strong arguments for corporate and government support of the Open Source movement.
It also manages to include enough of the story of projects like Mozilla to explain that you cannot just slap the "Open Source" label on a software project, put the source on the Web Server, and expect your product to improve. There is often a time consuming process of redesign that needs to take place so that the source code is modular enough for Open Source programmers to comprehend.