Forcing would be bad. Software choice shouldn't be a political decision, whether you're Stallman pushing open source, or GE pushing closed source. Buying software according to quality, security and functional criteria regardless of the development model would be good. Why government standardizes on the worst, slowest browser on the market is beyond me when the open source Firefox is free and much better, and the code can be freely examined for security purposes.
such as the Beowulf clustering software NASA developed and released under an open source license years ago which is now used free of charge by everyone in the world who wants their own supercomputer
From the original Beowulf documentation:
Beowulf also uses commodity software like the Linux operating system, Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) and Message Passing Interface (MPI). ... Beowulf is not a special software package, new network topology or the latest kernel hack. Beowulf is a technology of clustering Linux computers to form a parallel, virtual supercomputer. Although there are many software packages such as kernel modifications, PVM and MPI libraries, and configuration tools which make the Beowulf architecture faster, easier to configure, and much more usable, one can build a Beowulf class machine using standard Linux distribution without any additional software. If you have two networked Linux computers which share at least the /home file system via NFS, and trust each other to execute remote shells (rsh), then it could be argued that you have a simple, two node Beowulf machine.Beowulf was built off the contributions of foreigners, and has since then been much improved by foreigners. Also don't forget that the core of large Beowulf installations, PVM and MPI, were written mostly by universities, which tend to publish and share their research anyway. One of the founders of the reference implementation of MPI, Open MPI, is a German university.
Exactly, unfortunately many democrats (and a few republicans) have already tried to legislate a requirement to use open source, just like they've done in China, Russia, Cuba, Vietnam, etc. Obama and his new wonderboy will soon be doing it through official internal government policy, this kid has not only been selected as the first official CIO of the US government, according to other articles I've seen he's got another title set aside for him over at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) where huge sweeping decisions are often made.