Just ten years ago, no one could have predicted that a black man would be elected to the office of President of the United States. Perhaps not coincidentally, no one would have predicted that another minority would also reach the highest office in the land, but it has.

I’m speaking of course, about open source software. Barack Obama’s CIO, Vivek Kundra is raising the profile of open source software throughout the federal government in a move that can only be seen as positive for commercial open source vendors.

Although some doubt remains that federal agencies and their purchasing agents will embrace open source, it’s clear to me that many already have. For example, KnowledgeTree, a commercial open source document management system, is already in use in US federal, state and local governments as well as numerous international government bodies, including the General Services Administration (GSA), Federal Aviation Administration, Georgia Department of Audits, Colorado Department of Corrections, Cuyahoga County Veterans Service Commission, Texas Public Defenders Office, New Zealand Customs Service, TNO Defence (Security and Safety) Netherlands, Government of St. Lucia, Ministry of Legal Affairs (Trinidad and Tobago), New South Wales Treasury (Australia), and the United Nations Environment Programme (Kenya) (to name a few!).

While it is evident that there is still much work to be done to encourage the use of open source software in the public sector, government in the US, Europe and even as far afield as Africa are themselves pioneering the use of open source.

I’m gratified that the article’s author, Brian Robinson, points out that open source does not mean unstructured or unsupervised or undisciplined. In fact, commercial open source companies combine the best aspects of open source software (participation, collaboration and community) with the best aspects of commercial software (product vision, support and domain expertise) to yield products that effectively solve a wide range of business problems across public and private sectors.

As Barack Obama has made clear, that the person with the best qualifications can become President, its also becoming obvious that open source software that gets the job done will also rise to the top.

Follow me on twitter: @danielchalef

Update - 10:45am

The Federal Computer Week article link appears to be down. View another report on the same story: US CIO Vivek Kundra Advocates Open Source Software, Open Source Initiative.