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A cross-section of more than 70 companies, academic institutions, communities, related groups, and individuals joined together to form of Open Source for America, an organization that will serve as a unified voice for the promotion of open source software in the U.S. Federal Government arena.

The mission of Open Source for America is to serve as a centralized advocate and to encourage broader U.S. Federal Government support of and participation in free and open source software. Specifically, Open Source for America will: help effect change in policies and practices to allow the Federal Government to better utilize these technologies; help coordinate these communities to collaborate with the federal government on technology requirements; and raise awareness and create understanding among federal government leaders about the values and implications of open source software. According to Gartner, by 2011 more than 25 percent of government vertical, domain-specific applications will either be open source, contain open source application components, or be developed as community source.

"Open source software can help deliver improved government service -- plain and simple -- and the Administration recognizes this more than any in our nation's history," said David Thomas, principal with Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti and spokesman for the Open Source for America campaign.

The Board of Advisors of Open Source for America includes Roger Burkhardt, Rishab Ghosh, Marv Langston, Chris Lundburg, Dawn Meyerriecks, Eben Moglen, Arthur L. Money, Tim O'Reilly, Stormy Peters, Simon Phipps, Mark Shuttleworth, Paul Smith, Dr. Doug Stone, Michael Tiemann, Andy Updegrove, Bill Vass, Tony Wasserman and Jim Zemlin.

Founding members of Open Source for America include: Acquia; Alfresco Software; Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.; Jono Bacon; Black Duck Software, Inc.; Josh Berkus; Ean Schuessler, BrainFood; Canonical; CodeWeavers; CollabNet; Colosa, Inc.; Continuent; Danese Cooper; Crucial Point LLC; Josh Davis; Debian; Democracy in Action; Electronic Frontier Foundation; EnterpriseDB; Bdale Garbee; GNOME Foundation; Google; JC Herz; ibiblio.org; Ingres Corporation; Jaspersoft; Mitch Kapor, Kapor Capital; KnowledgeTree; Marv Langston; The Linux Foundation; Linux Fund, Inc.; Lucid Imagination; Geir Magnusson, Jr.; Medsphere; Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti; Mercury Federal Systems; Monty Widenius, Monty Program AB; Mozilla; North Carolina State University Center for Open Software Engineering; Novell; Open Solutions Alliance; Open Source Initiative; Open Source Institute; Oracle; O'Reilly Publishing; Oregon State University Open Source Lab; Open Source Software Institute; Pentaho; RadiantBlue; Red Hat; Relative Computing Environments LLC.; REvolution Computing; Walt Scacchi, Institute for Software Research at UC Irvine; Software Freedom Law Center; SpikeSource; SugarCRM; Sunlight Labs; Sun Microsystems; School of Engineering, University of California, Merced; University of Southern Mississippi; Andy Updegrove, Gesmer Updegrove LLP; Tony Wasserman, Center for Open Source Investigation, Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley; Zenoss, Inc.; Zimbra; and Zmanda.

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