Open Source In the National Interest

munchola writes "A new report from the Department of Defense's Advanced Systems and Concepts Office recommends that the DoD move to adopt open source software and methodologies as well as open standards in order to make the most efficient use of internal resources. According to CBR, the report states that a move to 'Open Technology Development' is not only in the U.S. national interest, but in the interests of U.S. national security. OTD incorporates open source methodologies and open standards, but also takes into account the fact that the DoD has systems that it would rather keep secret."

Comments

This all makes now but...

[Recovering Hater]

I foresee the DoD changing its tune after Microsoft drops a few million dollars in the right direction to make this go away. Remember the Open Doc file format drama that unfolded not too long ago? ...where did I put my tinfoil hat again...

Re:This all makes now but...

[Poppler]

I foresee the DoD changing its tune after Microsoft drops a few million dollars in the right direction

Except a few million is peanuts to the DoD. Their budget for 2006 was well over $400 Billion. I think they're going to make whatever decision will benefit them most, regardless of the cost.

NEWSFLASH

[P3NIS_CLEAVER]

Govt. IT is highly fragmented. It took 20 years for DOD to switch to all-diesel. How long to switch to open-source?

The anti-OSS people do have one point.

[LWATCDR]

The statement that people could introduce malicus code into Linux that then makes it's way into secure systems. Of course with companies outsourcing programming jobs to other countries the same thing could happen with a closed source system.
The solution for OSS is simple. Any OSS software that goes into a Command and Control system needs to have it's source code audited by an independent authority.
Of course the same thing should be done with any software that goes into a military, aerospace, or any other mission critical system. In this case OSS does have a clear advantage in that the end user can select any group to perform the code audit instead of depending on the vendor.
Of course if the military does a code audit on Linux they would have contribute back the patches so it is a win win situation.

Re:The anti-OSS people do have one point.

[ZachPruckowski]

Of course if the military does a code audit on Linux they would have contribute back the patches so it is a win win situation.

Only if they distribute it outside their organization, which in this case could be probably construed as the US government and the military and national guard.

Re:The anti-OSS people do have one point.

[wfberg]

The statement that people could introduce malicus code into Linux that then makes it's way into secure systems. Of course with companies outsourcing programming jobs to other countries the same thing could happen with a closed source system.
American programmers are just as capable of introducing (intentional) bugs as foreign programmers.


Of course the same thing should be done with any software that goes into a military, aerospace, or any other mission critical system. In this case OSS does have a clear advantage in that the end user can select any group to perform the code audit instead of depending on the vendor.

The US armed forces have enough spending power to convince even Microsoft to pony up the source code. And they do.

Of course if the military does a code audit on Linux they would have contribute back the patches so it is a win win situation.

Under the GPL, you only have to contribute patches if you distribute your modified code to third parties. The result of a code audit might also just be "don't use module X", in which case there's nothing to patch.

The way I read it the article is more about encouraging DoD programmers to be more like the open source community in sharing programs, ideas and sourcecode with each other, rather than continually reinventing the wheel.

Re:The anti-OSS people do have one point.

[jZnat]

No matter how many times that FUD is introduced here, people forget that GCC bootstrapped itself, and I'm sure it gives you directions somewhere on how to bootstrap it yourself as well. Writing a simple C compiler in Assembly and "compiling" the Assembly by hand is very possible if you need that degree of paranoia distinguished.

Re:The anti-OSS people do have one point.

[db32]

Go ask Cisco, or MS, or any of the other major vendors how many of their patches came from the DoD. DoD has found a great number of problems in a great number of products and has in turn work on a great number of patches that made it back into the consumer world.

Coarse...for the really paranoid type...I would like to point out that the DoD has played very large roles in quite a few other critical areas that I'm sure everyone holds near and dear...vehicles, aircraft, radar, computers, oh and that intarweb thingy...DARPAnet and all.

DoD has had a pretty good history of providing goodness to the populace as well as all the negative that people like to focus on. DoD doesn't start the fight...politicians do, remember that next time you see a service member. They bleed for the good causes, and the bad causes...its the leaders that determine what causes they are going to bleed for next.

Re:The anti-OSS people do have one point.

[jc42]

... hey would have contribute back the patches so it is a win win situation.

This is hardly anything new. Look into how the DoD funded the development of the Internet (aka ARPAnet).

Actually, in most cases they didn't even develop their own patches. Rather, they told their academic and industry fundees about the problems in the latest code, let the hackers work out a solution, took the code for their own uses, and left it in the public code base for further use and development.

Yeah, they probably did a bit of development on their own, but the evidence is that there hasn't been as much of this as you might expect. The military has found the academic hacker community to be a much better testbed for most of the code, and a lot cheaper than trying to debug changes in a military setting. As long as the crypto stuff is highly modular (and it is), it's a lot more effective to just leave the code development in the public sector, where there are lots of eyes and people happy to show off their expertise by doing the hacking that a strictly-managed power structure finds highly distateful.

For a feel of the US government's relationship with the linux part of the open-source community, google for "secure linux" and do a bit of reading. There's a lot going on there.

OSS has one solid advantage

[MikeRT]

It makes contract bidding cheaper. If you can use an OSS toolkit over a proprietary one, the cost that gets billed to the government is lower which makes it easier to win contracts. Other than that, bureaucratic inertia is the only major problem OSS faces. There is hardly any more bias against OSS than there is toward any regular commercial software.

The point everyone seems to have missed...

[jd]

...is that Closed Source vendors have opposed Open Source "in the national interest" and "for reasons of security" for some time now. Regardless of whether the DoD ever actually follows through on this, there is now an official statement by the US Government no less that these claims are false. Hey, we've all known that for some time, but ringing endorsements by the DoD don't come by on a weekly basis.

This is the time that Open Source activists and promoters need to run with the ball. Draw the attention of CEOs and business executives to the fact that the DoD advocates Open Source. Show them that we're not talking toy software. Show them that this isn't about not wanting to spend money. (Since when was the DoD afraid to spend money?) This is about an innately powerful method of developing high-grade - even military-grade - products that do what people actually need done.

We couldn't ask for better, but only if those outside of the IT industry actually hear of it. If only those who already accept the strengths of Open Source know that someone else has also decided it is a good solution, then that decision means nothing. Particularly as the DoD is very unlikely to do anything about it. It'll just be a decision. But if the business community got shown this... That would be a whole different ball-game.

"Always remember...

[Irvu]

...your rifle was made by the lowest bidder."

That's a relatively old joke in the Military, and a relatively sick one when you consider the problems of faulty weapons (e.g exploding in your hands). But it points to something pretty basic. When it comes to things the DOD is rewarded for going cheap. This doesn't mean that they won't but they are rewarded for trying. In this gig Microsoft is at a disadvantage as their competitors are a) Free, and b) can be taken under total control by the DOD. Remeber that in-house changes to GPL'd code need not be released. Microsoft on the other hand is likely to worry about in-house changes to their stuff (e.g. document security restrictions for Office).

While I doubt Stallman will be welcome any time soon keep in mind that Theo De Raadt and the other BSD people have been welcomed (and financed) by the DOD before now. Ditto things like SELinux. In many ways this is only surprising because it took so long for them to say openly.