Today it’s common knowledge that there are many benefits to utilizing open source software. This is why we're building Nebula with open source components and will (eventually, once the paperwork is complete) release Nebula back to the open source community. Hopefully we can provide a good example of a successful large-scale open source project in the Government and pave the way for similar projects in other agencies.

In addition, the Nebula platform itself will help facilitate the adoption of open source software across the Government. Because of the ease of spinning up virtual machines and having a library of pre-made machine images, almost anybody (whether in IT or not) can set themselves up with an environment in which to test open source solutions in just a few minutes. This lowers the barrier to entry for trying new software, eliminating the downloading, installing and configuring, and providing a temporary test bed for experimentation and evaluation. 

Nebula also reduces duplication of effort, making it easy to share the result of setting up a server-based solution. Once a department or group has a working solution, they can easily make an image of that working server that others can immediately spin up for themselves. Finally, the productivity-enhancing power of computing has been applied to computing itself!

The ease of being able to pluck computing power out of the cloud will make a lot of new technologies more accessible. Free and open source software will hopefully be a big part of an efficient, transparent and cloud-empowered Government.