Open Source for America (OSFA) an organization of technology industry leaders, non-government associations and academic and research institutions that aims at boosting the use of open source software in the U.S.

Open Source for America (OSFA) was announced as a coalition to encourage U.S. federal government support of, and participation in, open source projects and technologies. If that sounds like a broad-reaching goal, it is. Nearly three months after the group's debut, I was interested to learn what progress OSFA has made toward this goal.

Jaspersoft, provider of the world's most widely used business intelligence (BI) software, today announced that it is joining the Open Source Software Institute (OSSI) to support its
mission of extending the benefits of open source software to government agencies and academic organizations.

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) will be hosting a "small open source license clinic" at the Library of Congress, Washington DC, in May. The event is designed to bring together individuals, organizations and government agencies to help all better understand the nature of open source licenses.

Over the past decade open source software has become popular with technology users in India. The benefits of open source - affordability, availability of source code and freedom of choice - have made open source a preferred platform for many innovative Indian organizations and individuals who want to harness the power of high quality software which can be freely adapted to their own requirements.

The Icelandic government has released a policy on free and open source software. In short, the policy states that when buying software free and open source software should be considered on an equal footing with proprietary software, that software based on open standards shall be chosen, that lock-ins to specific vendors should be avoided (choosing free software is one means to achieve this), that bespoke or customized software shall be reusable (and free and open source software achieves this), and finally that students of Icelandic educational institutes shall have the opportunity to learn about and use free and open source software on a par with proprietary software.

This policy applies to all state institutions and organizations operated with public funds.

Ingres Corporation and the Government of Jordan announced today that they have joined forces to establish the first ever agreement between an international company and a government to promote and drive open source adoption.

A group of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology organizations today announced their support for the open-source development of EPCglobal-compliant Low-Level Reader Protocol (LLRP) software libraries, which enable EPCglobal UHF Gen 2 communications via the LLRP universal reader-to-network interface.

Last summer, a new organization was announced with the goal of promoting the uptake of open source software by the U.S. federal government. Now that organization has completed its first quite successful year of operations.