The Government Open Systems Interconnection Profile (GOSIP) is a specification that profiles networking products for procurement by the Federal Government of the United States. The specification was first published as FIPS 146-1 in 1990, and required OSI protocols be used. The requirement for vendors to demonstrate their support for this profile led to the growth of formal interoperability and conformance testing for networking products.

In 1995, FIPS 146-2 was published, which removed the procurement requirement for the GOSIP OSI protocols, by permitting acquired products to implement ISO, ITU-T or IETF standards. Interest in OSI implementations declined, and subsequent civilian government agency deployments of networking services are predominately based on the Internet protocol suite. The Defense Messaging System continued to be based on the OSI protocols X.400 and X.500, due to their integrated security capabilities.

See Also

• FIPS 146-2 announcement
• OSI model
• ISODE