There's now such a thing as Open Source for America.org (OSA), a consortium started by a large swat of open source commercializers to push their products on the federal government.

They figure they've got a free-spending friend in Washington living in the White House that they might as well use.

OSA says its mission is to lobby decision makers on the advantages of FOSS - it claims it's not lobbying although its members include lobbyists - and encourage federal agencies to give FOSS equal opportunity in the procurement race.

It wants to change federal policies and practices, coordinate with the government on requirements and participate in standards development.

FOSS is somehow supposed to improve government efficiency as well as save money.

Founders include Google, Sun, Red Hat, Novell, AMD, Canonical, Oracle, the Mozilla Foundation, the Linux Foundation, Debian, ibiblio and the Software Freedom Law Center as well as Alfresco, Black Duck, Codeweavers, Jaspersoft, EnterpriseDB, SugarCRM, Zmanda and Yahoo's Zimbra.

Some 70 companies, schools, organization and individuals are involved but not IBM.

Even without the effort, Gartner has already estimated that by 2011 more than 25% of government vertical, domain-specific application will be open source, contain open source components or be developed as community source.

Open source is already used by the US Navy, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Census Bureau and the Patent and Trademark Office among others.