A very rare instance where the USA government is taking the initiative, in positive way, rather than just bombing and droning people to death on a daily basis. Russia legislated to "preference domestic software" in comparison. As most around here know, free-libre open source software, when even marginally funded, has an almost certain chance to dominate its sector or niche over any and all proprietary alternatives, at least over the medium term. This means that the USA government, and any companies building on government-funded libre source code, are likely to have a competitive edge over those companies and governments that do not build such a community ecosystem. It's a simple matter of the mathematical and human dynamics in play with libre software. On the libre front, Red Hat is unimpeachable, absolutely impeccable record for sticking to libre principles, and they maintain a very enviable position in the software services market. Yes Red Hat had a first mover advantage (Cygnus), but the point is, they can never be unfairly challenged on their fundamental competitive edge - libre software; at most competitors can compete and target particular sectors and offer "better" service to potential customers, but no one can ever be more competitive on the fundamental software front, since libre open source software IS a level playing field. The Russian PostgreSQL services company thread we saw here a few months ago is a great example - they are building a lead in Russia which will become unassailable in the way that Red Hat is unassailable. And in both cases, rightly so, and righteously so! (I even tried to use RedHat for a few weeks some years back, to see if it would be appealing to me, but alas my Debian muscle memory wracked my soul in an irrevocable death grip of libre file locations and command sequences...) There are other examples <AHEMCAUGH>tor<GRRMHPH> too - it is difficult to challenge hegemony, much more so a libre community-oriented "fully open source, man" hegemony :/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ https://lwn.net/Articles/696843/ The People’s Code (White House blog) [Announcements] Posted Aug 9, 2016 18:56 UTC (Tue) by ris US Chief Information Officer Tony Scott introduces[1] the Federal Source Code Policy[2], on the White House blog. "By making source code available for sharing and re-use across Federal agencies, we can avoid duplicative custom software purchases and promote innovation and collaboration across Federal agencies. By opening more of our code to the brightest minds inside and outside of government, we can enable them to work together to ensure that the code is reliable and effective in furthering our national objectives. And we can do all of this while remaining consistent with the Federal Government’s long-standing policy of technology neutrality, through which we seek to ensure that Federal investments in IT are merit-based, improve the performance of our government, and create value for the American people." (Thanks to David A. Wheeler) [1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2016/08/08/peoples-code [2] https://sourcecode.cio.gov/