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

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

[Peter Mork]

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.

Unfortunately, it's not as simple as auditing the source code. You also need to have complete control over the compiler, as implemented in machine code. For example, see Ken Thompson's comments on how to imbed self-replicating code into a compiler so that every program has a back door.

They've been using OSS for years

[LWGLIN]

Granted, I'm not talking about Command and Control systems, but the DoD has been using OS Software for years now. I know because they are using iText to produce billions of PDF documents. I have been mailing with DoD developers regularly in the past (and neither I, nor my product is American). It's not as if they have changed their mind about OSS overnight. The remarkable thing is that they are now coming out with a policy about OSS, and that they are considering to use it on a larger scale. (Yes, we're talking about Operating Systems now!)

We use open source in NM state gov.

[spun]

I work for the Child, Youth and Family Development department. We use Windows on the desktop, Novell as our file server and SuSE Linux for everything else. Currently we are transitioning away from HPUX to an IBM BladeCenter environment running VMWare and SuSE. We have one major application and several minor ones. The major app, a client tracking system, was developed in house and runs Sybase as a back end. Eventually we plan on porting it to use Postgres and releasing it as open source so that anyone in need of a client tracking system can use it.

This is the real beauty of open source in government, not leveraging the work of others by running open source systems, but leveraging the large development force that most governments have to share in house apps wit less of the usual inter-agency squabbling. An agency that might be wary of using a non open source application developed by a rival agency will be less wary of using an open source app that just happens to be developed by said rival. Instead of reinventing the wheel, in house development staff can cooperate with other staff in other agencies.

That the DoD would recommend open source is exciting, because it really is a good fit for government agencies. Believe it or not, our little state government IT department is better run and more on the ball than most IT departments that I have worked for in big corporations. Moving to Linux hosted on blades running VMWare has freed up a lot of resources to plan for the future that used to be used in just putting out fires.

Re:"Always remember...

[liliafan]

I will believe it when I see it, I just got told in no uncertain terms by our site IT security officer that:

"Nessus is unapproved software, we only allow xxxxxx(closed source) security scans to lock down your UNIX servers"

Yes I work for the DoD.