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MITRE Corp. Report On Open Source In Government

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the who's-using-what-where-why dept.

Jeremy Allison (of the Samba team) writes "Very interesting paper just published by MITRE corporation. (In PDF - they've learned not to use Microsoft Word. :-). Highlights: 'The main conclusion of the article was that FOSS software plays a more critical role in the DoD than has generally been recognised.'; 'Create a "Generally Recognised as Safe" FOSS list ... including Linux, OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD, Samba, Apache, Perl, GCC, GNAT, XFree86, OpenSSH, bind, and sendmail.' 'FOSS' stands for 'Free and Open-Source Software.' Looks like these people 'get it.'"

2 of 279 comments (clear)

  1. PDF? by GoatPigSheep · · Score: 0, Troll

    In PDF - they've learned not to use Microsoft Word

    and it's a darn shame...
    I hate it when documents are in a format that requires me to download a 10 meg viewer program to view in windows, while you can open up any old word file in wordpad (which comes with windows). It's nice to inconvenience 90% of computer users. PDF files also tend to be huge compared to .doc file, so it's slower to download too!

    --
    GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
  2. Open source, eh? by SexyKellyOsbourne · · Score: 1, Troll

    So, do you distribute that hacked-to-hell "open source" code, if you're so confident in its abilities?

    Imagine if an Al-Qaeda hacker -- trust me, some computer science programs and IRC channels in this country and especially in Europe are not unlike those flight schools for them -- got ahold of some of that open-source code, browsed through it, and immediately found a really nasty root exploit due to some quickly-hacked up code.

    Do you think he would be altruistic enough to report it, or would he try everything he could to cause havoc -- perhaps give out wrong intelligence to troops so they could cause another Afghan Wedding Party massacre or Chinese Embassy bombing, or steal some valuable intelligence and use it to plan terror attacks?

    While open source is good, the DoD should be a bit more careful about being so open.