I did some consulting once for a government lab. FIPS is idiotic. It's primarily protectionism for commercial software vendors from OSS competition, and it does not improve security. If anything it hurts-- it mandates closed-source options that cannot easily be audited, and it slows down the upgrade cycle thus preventing bugs that emerge from being quickly patched.
This. It's also protectionism for government IA managers. And it stymies the hell out of anyone trying to do research on a budget, which often depends on open source (for both review, quality and cost reasons).
