Red Hat’s Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen on Open Source in Gov’t

Open source technology is slowly finding its way into the public sector as governments seek to build infrastructures based on those tools, says Red Hat’s Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, senior vice president and general manager for the Asia-Pacific region.

Part of the appeal is that the open source model promotes transparency and collaboration, and can be used as one way to achieve reliable, agile, secure and scalability systems, he writes in a guest column for FutureGov published Jan. 16.

Security, privacy and compliance concerns will drive the direction of open source in 2014 as more enterprises both public and private migrate to cloud-based systems, he says, quoting Radhesh Balakrishnan, Red Hat general manager for virtualization and OpenStack.

“Open source has become mainstream and it is where innovation is stemming from,” van Leeuwen writes.

“From industries, organizations, partners to customers, they are bridging the innovation gap using open source standards, resulting in open development processes, interoperability, sharable resources, portable services and unified management,” he added.