If it’s good enough for the Navy …

In a surprising move, the US Navy will stop buying proprietary hardware and software, and only buy open systems.

“The days of proprietary technology must come to an end,” he said. “We will no longer accept systems that couple hardware, software and data.”

Basically, it seems the motivation is that open systems allow them to upgrade their capabilities rapidly, and they need to be able to share data freely.

This could be a watershed moment. The process of governments in Europe starting to shift to open source software, and software that used open standards, rapidly increased the use of FOSS in Europe. It could happen here.