A few brief items about the progress of open source software within the US Government:

• The US Postal Service just finished migrating its 1300 servers from Solaris to Linux. It's part of a wider effort to move its entire IT infrastructure to open source software.
• At least for the last year, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center has been hosting a repository of free code developed by its own engineers. There's a Java Astrodynamics Toolkit, a global precipitation monitor, and dozens more. Cool.
• The Defense Information Systems Agency is about to open source 50 programs they've developed for administrative tasks like time tracking. The decision came after other agencies asked them if they'd be willing to share their code.

Normally, if a bunch of agencies want software for a single task, each agency builds their own. Silly. The DISA and NASA projects show evidence that agencies are beginning to work around this problem by starting their own code sharing projects.