In November a team at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center finished the transition of the NASA Acquisition Internet Service (NAIS) from Oracle to MySQL. NAIS sends e-mail notifications to users based on specified interests and enables users to query the Web site (nais.nasa.gov) for updated opportunities.

Dwight Clark, project leader of NAIS, claims to have noticed an increase in speed of performance without experiencing any problems.

The switch to Open Source software was primarily driven by costs, and MySQL was found to be the most robust product available. The President's Information Technology Advisory Committee recommended in September that the federal government encourage open-source software as an alternative for software development for high-end computing and allow open-source development efforts to compete on a "level playing field" with proprietary solutions in government procurements.