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Defense Dept. Memo Explains Open Source Policy
TonyStanco writes "Big news. DoD issued a policy statement leveling the playing field for Open Source. We have the memo on the Center of Open Source & Government site." The requirements listed in this memo make me think of a company policy along the lines of "You can bring your baby or toddler to work, so long as it can talk, feed itself and stick effortlessly to the ceiling like a spider." See this PDF for more information about National Security Telecommunications and Information Systems Security Policy (NSTISSP) number 11.
Oh, how I love NMCI. We (a couple of consultants) won a gig with the Navy, developing a web application on Linux, MySQL & Apache. Got the go-ahead and started developing...Then, the big bad NMCI came along. In order to be NMCI compliant, we were forced to switch from MySQL to Oracle (to be fair, we were given the choice to use SQL Server....bah!). Ok, I can deal with that. I now get paid to learn Oracle. Cool. Then, after three months of development..."uh...we need you to switch to Windows. It's a NMCI thingy". Not a happy day. Anyway...to make a long story short, in order to be NMCI compliant (and not having the requirements up front), we have this monstrosity of a web application running on Win2000 with Perl, PHP, Oracle and Apache. Needless to say, there aren't too many people in that boat (whoa...a funny...navy..boat...oh nevermind).
There really is no point to this posting, so mod me down. I'm just ranting and wanted to share an example of your tax dollars at work.