Red Hat's CEO, in a blog post on Monday, is endorsing the Obama Administration's call for openness and participation in government by likening the President's statement to the open source software movement.

The historic U.S. Presidential election has come to an end with Barack Obama emerging victorious against John McCain. Obama will become the forty-fourth President of the United States and the first African-American to be elected for the highest office.

A group of prominent open source software vendors have written an open letter to the Obama administration encouraging broader adoption of open source software.

President Obama came to office with the promise of change. His administration has pledged to create an environment of openness and participation. Some have already called him the “open source president” such as consultant and CNN contributor Alex Castellanos. There’s no better time than now. Transparency builds trust. Participation solves problems.

Open source software in government was the topic on the Linux blogs this week, particularly President Obama's request that Sun Microsystems' Scott McNealy prepare a paper on how the U.S. government can use open source technologies.

Sometimes The VAR Guy is a little slow. Red Hat has achieved two important company milestones, according to CEO Jim Whitehurst (pictured), that The VAR Guy nearly overlooked. It took some time for our resident blogger to realize the significance of Whitehurst’s statement. Take a look for yourself.

Open Source for America (OSFA) has announced a report card scoring the openness of federal agencies and departments! Today marks the six-month anniversary of the Obama Administration's Open Government Directive, a big step towards greater transparency, collaboration, and participation in government.

There are number of factors coming together that lead me to believe that open source's moment is right now, today, this year.

"Back in March the UK’s Conservative Party vowed to encourage the adoption of open source adoption if elected at the next General Election.* Today the Labour Party did its bit by releasing the code behind its new carbon footprint calculator under the general public license."