If you want local and state government officials to take a serious look at open source software, then take the open source software to the local and state government officials.

That's the idea behind the New York City Open Source Solutions Lab, which is debuting tomorrow to show how open source software can help local and state government agencies in New York state cope with tightening budgets and a difficult economic outlook.

The new facility is being announced today as a collaborative project of Linux vendor Red Hat Inc., the City University of New York (CUNY) and Intel Corp. where government IT staffers will be able to test code and applications on a variety of next-generation Intel multi-core hardware. The new lab is located in Manhattan at CUNY's Institute for Software Design and Development.

"Tough economic times are one of the reasons for this," as local, state and national government agencies are looking for ways to save money as their budgets are cut, said Paul Smith, vice president of government sales operations at Red Hat.

The lab project was launched in New York because the state often takes leadership roles at times like this, Smith said.

For government IT departments across the state, the lab will be an oasis where IT workers can test code to see if open source applications can fill their needs while saving money and reducing complexity, he said.

"This is being done to help speed up adoption of open source software," Smith said. "With all the budget pressures that are on state and local governments across the country, they can show how they can do this. I think the thing that's lacking is a nice, secure lab where they can get access to help and support... as they look at open source applications."

Intel is contributing hardware for the lab, while Red Hat is contributing operating system and application software. CUNY is contributing staff and the facility itself.

Included in the lab will be a wide variety of software for testing and development, including Red Hat Linux, JBoss service-oriented architecture (SOA) applications and clustering, global file systems and virtualization systems.

Paul J. Cosgrave, CIO for the City of New York and commissioner of the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, said in a statement called the "lab an ideal proving ground for testing the value proponent of open source and leveraging those cost savings for our agencies."

The lab is believed to be the first such state effort involving Red Hat, but similar open source lab projects have been successfully deployed in the past. IBM created an enterprise open source testing and discovery lab in New York City several years ago where enterprise IT workers could try out applications on various hardware platforms. The former Open Source Development Labs, which is now part of The Linux Foundation, also began with the idea of creating a place where companies would come and test open source applications and code on a wide variety of hardware systems.