<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Ravi,<div><br></div><div>This is quite true. In the US various government agencies are planning on budget cuts for next year. There still remains an enormous amount of inertia in using proprietary solutions - especially on ongoing systems acquisitions, but there is a very significant change in adopting OSS for new functionality and as alternatives to expensive proprietary solutions. Internal analysis by some of the agencies has shown that a large percentage of the operations and maintenance (O&M) budget is consumed in commercial licenses and support of proprietary stacks. Major trends are to push the IT infrastructure into the cloud and outsourcing many areas. NSA, NGA, DoD, DARPA all have significant projects currently funded to bring open source software and its practices into those agencies.</div><div><br></div><div>For the first time we had a panel on OSS at the Geoint conference:</div><div><br></div><div><a href="http://geointv.com/archive/geoint-2011-breakout-demonstration-of-military-relevant-open-source-geospatial-software/">http://geointv.com/archive/geoint-2011-breakout-demonstration-of-military-relevant-open-source-geospatial-software/</a></div><div><br></div><div>A group that is focused on this is <a href="http://mil-oss.org/">mil-oss.org/</a></div><div><br></div><div>Hope that helps.</div><div><br></div><div>Mark</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><div><div>On Nov 18, 2011, at 6:10 AM, Ravi Kumar wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div><div style="color:#000; background-color:#fff; font-family:times new roman, new york, times, serif;font-size:12pt"><div>Hi,</div><div>recently I have with interest , read that, in the USA there is new focus on GIS alternatves 'FOSS4G tools' with serious budget cuts.</div><div>Lost the mail with links which I wanted to forward to a Prof of GIS in the US.!! Googled in vain too.</div><div>Pl, anyone.. send links </div><div>Ravi</div></div></div>_______________________________________________<br>Discuss mailing list<br><a href="mailto:Discuss@lists.osgeo.org">Discuss@lists.osgeo.org</a><br><a href="http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss">http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss</a><br></blockquote></div><br></div></body></html>