talked with a former federal employee and an IT specialist about the role open-source software in government, and why there isn’t more of it. Spoiler: governments are bureaucracies!

Nesbitt’s interviewees will be holding a session on this same topic at O’Reilly’s OSCON next month.

Open source software seems like a perfect fit for government IT projects. Developers can take advantage of existing code bases and, it’s hoped, mold that code to their needs quickly and at less cost than developing code from scratch. Over the last few years, governments in the U.S. and abroad have been more closely embracing open source. However, agencies at all levels of U.S. government are still wary of open source and can be reluctant to adopt it. It’s still not easy for government projects to use open source or for developers employed in the public sector to contribute their work to open source project.

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