A new U.S. president was inaugurated yesterday, elected on a platform of change. One intriguing change that could come in the tech realm is hinted at by a request put to Sun co-founder Scott McNealy: the Obama administration has asked him to prepare a paper on open source software for the US government. McNealy’s initial comments on the subject are clearly aimed at a cash-strapped federal government: “It is intuitively obvious that open source is more cost effective and productive than proprietary software.” That may be so, but it isn’t intuitively obvious how you make money off of free software; the inevitable charges for accompanying services might leave purchasers angry at a bait and switch. What’s always been a better pitch on open source, in my view, is McNealy’s next statement, which is that he doesn’t want the government to be locked in to a particular vendor. This is both a good move in general, and is an especially important thing for government, which by law must often run open bids for contracts that vendor lock-in could complicate.Since Sun is now defining itself as an open source software company, this push can’t help but work with its move to sell things to the federal government.Java of course helps Sun brand itself as an open source company, but what concrete gains have come from said open sourcing? This InfoWorld retrospective can come up with few answers, more than two years after the fact. Open Source