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NASA’s newly-appointed chief technology officer spoke on May 5 at the Open Government & Innovations 2010 conference about NASA‘s open source strategy.
“We’re actually creating a new Open Source Office,” NASA’s Chief Technology Officer Chris Kemp said.
Federal Computer Week’s Sean Gallagher reported that Kemp said, “We’re taking this seriously, and we’ve never had this sort of visibility and interest from headquarters before.”
The advantages of embracing open source, Kemp said, are that it helps the government have influence over developing standards and to “push commercial software providers into supporting features that benefit the government,” Gallagher reported.
“Open-source development allows the federal government to adopt emerging standards,” Kemp said, “and to create a reference platform from standards work that’s going on at NIST and various other standards bodies that are being coordinated by NIST.”
