Red Hat's CEO, in a blog post on Monday, is endorsing the Obama Administration's call for openness and participation in government by likening the President's statement to the open source software movement.

Open source is answering the call at government agencies on all levels as they look for opportunities to carve out costs and improve security, transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Why?

Open Source for America (OSFA) has announced a report card scoring the openness of federal agencies and departments! Today marks the six-month anniversary of the Obama Administration's Open Government Directive, a big step towards greater transparency, collaboration, and participation in government.

Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst has issued a statement praising President Obama for bringing a culture of inclusion and transparency to the United States government. Whitehurst also takes the opportunity to encourage broader open source adoption.

Open source software in government was the topic on the Linux blogs this week, particularly President Obama's request that Sun Microsystems' Scott McNealy prepare a paper on how the U.S. government can use open source technologies.

There are number of factors coming together that lead me to believe that open source's moment is right now, today, this year.

Before he's even sworn in, Barack Obama enters office with the tag, "open source president," thanks to a CNN commentator. Can he bring more citizen involvement to government? His transition team already is laying the groundwork, and other projects are trying to do the same

Much noise has been made in the past week or so about President-elect Barack Obama's creation of a governmental chief tech officer position. My question is: What will be their stance on open source? Will they lean towards it, mandate it, forbid it ... or ignore it entirely? I looked into it, and came away feeling we had much bigger problems looming.

Which of these doesn't belong: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Red Hat. If you said Red Hat, the company's CEO would beg to differ.

"These are all about the power of participation and collaboration and Red Hat is the open source version," said Jim Whitehurst, President and CEO of Red Hat