The open source community is by no means a secret anymore, but its place in the broader technology ecosystem could gain a new round of accolades under the U.S. President Joe Biden administration.

While Biden obviously has a lot on his plate, it was notable that one of the early positions filled in his cabinet was that of David Recordon as director of technology in the White House’s Office of Management and Administration. Recordon has a long history as a developer in the open source community, most recently serving as an engineering director at Facebook and a VP for infrastructure and security at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

Recordon was also named the “best strategist” as part of the 2007 Google-O'Reilly Open Source Award program, and was the youngest recipient at the time for the award. He has also worked on a number of open source projects like the OAuth security authorization open standards and the OpenID security authentication platform.

Recordon noted that security focus in a LinkedIn post about his appointment.

“The pandemic and ongoing cybersecurity attacks present new challenges for the entire Executive Office of the President, but ones I know that these teams can conquer in a safe and secure manner together,” he wrote.

Since his inauguration, Biden’s tapped several cybersecurity veterans with both public and private sector experience to fill posts that had been eliminated under the Trump administration, and earmarked about $10 billion dollars for various cybersecurity initiatives.

“My administration will make cybersecurity a top priority at every level of government,” Biden said in a statement following the recent SolarWinds hack that hit upwards of 250 government agencies and major tech companies. The government has already been in contact with the Linux Foundation to find out ways that the open source ecosystem can serve the security needs of the federal government.

Recordon’s appointment is actually his second go around in the government as he served in a similar capacity for two years within the Obama administration.

Recordon’s appointment has been praised by many in the open source space as further proof of the importance of that ecosystem.

"It's encouraging to see someone with a well-known commitment to open source have a role in setting national technology policy, because open source technologies are the foundation of today's most promising innovations, from AI and hybrid cloud to quantum computing,” wrote Todd Moore, VP for open technology at IBM, in a statement to SDxCentral.

Open source software has become a core base for innovation across the public sector. A recent survey of 3,400 developers conducted by O’Reilly Media found that open source software was rated equal to or better than proprietary software by 94% of respondents.

Recordon's appointment also follows on what has been an increased focus by parts of the government on the open source space. A review of government spending found that it shelled out around $6 billion per year on software, which is 7% of the IT budget of the Chief Financial Officers Act agencies.

One of the most prominent has been the push by Nicolas Chaillan, chief software officer for the U.S. Air Force. Chaillan noted at last year’s Cloud Native Virtual Summit featuring Kubernetes event that the Department of Defense (DoD) is relying heavily on the open source community to avoid any vendor lock-in issues and so that it knows it’s using projects that have broad support.

This has led to his group mandating that all of the DoD DevSecOps teams base their work on open source.

“We see a lot of different training hubs coming out from given companies, but often they’ll be aligned to their products and so that’s not something we were interested in because we don’t want to be locked into a single product, whether it’s VMware, or Red Hat, or anybody else, I don’t care,” Chaillan said. “The danger often is some of these companies refuse to work on products that are not directly aligned to their … company’s products, and so like a Red Hat consulting service person would not be comfortable working on Rancher where Rancher would be just fine working on OpenShift … so we have that kind of issue.”

The government has also been working to share the software code it has developed with the broader ecosystem. This includes the launch of its Code.gov site where it shares source code from across federal agencies.

“The Code.gov mission of promoting open source software can help connect people both here in the United States and around the world and build communities to help provide solutions to the problems we currently face through new and innovative uses of open source software,” the site explains.

And the Biden administration is actively seeking to attract more coders to join its open source efforts. In fact, Reuters reported that as part of a recent redesign of the whitehouse.gov site there was some hidden html code that was an invitation to join the U.S. Digital Service, which is a technology division within the White House. It was created in 2013 in the wake of the Healthcare.gov site crashing as it was unable to keep pace with public requests.

The government’s use of open source software has typically trailed the private sector by several years. But early indications from the Biden administration are that the gap could shrink over the next several years as it looks to take advantage of the dynamic open source ecosystem.