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US Government Studies Open Source Quality

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the prefer-just-to-stay-off-of-dhs-radar dept.

anadgouda writes "US Department of Homeland Security has released a report on open source quality in an effort to study the security of open source. 31 popular open source packages were studied as part of this effort. From the article: 'Coverity's report, Stacking up the LAMP stack: a study of open source quality, was produced as part of a $1.24m, three-year DHS Science and Technology Directorate effort to evaluate and improve the security of open source.'"

5 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. So, by Eightyford · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So, does anyone have the numbers as to how much of the government uses open source? Is it mostly an applications thing (OpenOffice) right now, or are Linux and the BSDs much in use?

    --
    Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
    1. Re:So, by egypt_jimbob · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Speaking as a student about to graduate and go into Federal Civil Service as a penetration tester, I can tell you that all of the agencies with which I have interviewed use mostly Linux. Well, all of the agencies that are actually good at what I want to do.

      So far it's been mostly gentoo from what i've seen, but there are some places that have to use RedHat because their management said it has to have 'support.'

      Bear in mind, however, that the places i'm interviewing are hardcore hacker groups, so this may be (and probably is) completely off the norm.

      --
      I am a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
  2. So they submitted Bugs, Right? by BigBuckHunter · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This study would be extremely valuable if they had submitted BZilla bugs for each and every defect they encountered. It's hard to tell from the article whether they did or not. One thing that I have learned from running ~arch in Gentoo is that if you don't submit bugs, things aren't going to get fixed.

    BBH

  3. Yes by jascat · · Score: 5, Interesting

    While not used on every desktop, I know of a lot of F/OSS being used everyday in the military. It would be stupid to not use it. Why would companies like Redhat and Novell spend money on getting their software certified to run on classified systems if it wasn't going to get used? While we may be selling out to Microsoft a lot, there are times when those of us who know better manage to convince the decision makers of the right tool for the job. In some cases, it's a MS product, in others, it's something else.

  4. Navy Replaced Sun with Yellow Dog Linux ... by AHumbleOpinion · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The US Navy replaced Sun with Yellow Dog Linux, originally on Apple hardware and now on some other PowerPC based hardware, for sonar processing on subs.