This is a big win for the OSS community. Navy CIO Robert J. Carey signed and distributed a memo today requiring Open Source Software to be considered as an option for all software acquisitions and that OSS Software.
This new development actually came about from 's agreements with the Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command's Naval Oceanographic Office. Department of Redundancy Department anyone?
While this is a good business decision by the Navy, you have to wonder what the long term affect will be both internally to the Navy and externally in the IT business world. Mass migration to Linux based servers, OpenOffice, or even something like MySQL would have a significant impact on revenue streams for some big companies and would cause some serious paradigm shifts.
The Coast Guard is also analyzing the possibility of migrating their web platform to Apache from IIS. Irony at it's finest.
Navy Mandated to Consider OSS Interaction
