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DoD Study Urges OSS Adoption
Krishna Dagli writes to mention an Ars Technica article about the Open Technology Development road map, a report for the U.S. government advising the DoD on ways to integrate OSS into DoD policies. From the article: "The report argues that the standard practices associated with purchasing of physical goods are not adequate or fully applicable to software. According to the report, the DoD is 'limiting and restricting the ability of the market to compete for the provision of new and innovative solutions and capabilities' by 'treating DoD-developed software code as a physical good.' The report also points out that utilizing open source technology will force the commercial software industry to respond with greater agility and competitiveness."
The Gov't agreed that the solution was more secure, easier to manage and would save a few million $USD (in additional management, security and helpdesk costs) but they instead chose to go with Windows Server 2003 because of "look and feel." Remember, the users never saw the underlying OS!
To me this said that they weren't really open to any other options, their minds were already made up and that OSS is still largely untrusted by the neck-tie community. I still have the minutes from the meeting as a souvenir.
"Omnis tuus capsa sunt inesse nos"
The government has "spoken" before about technology. Does it really make any difference?
Seems a long time ago the government wanted to require one standard practice of application development by stipulating Ada as the language-du-ans for coding. How many applications can you name that the government owns and are written in Ada? (rhetorical).
The government also set forth to require all computers and operating systems to be POSIX compliant in the mid to late 80's. The big hint was the government wanted to standardize and take advantage of the similarity and portability of Unix-like systems (SunOS, Solaris, ATT Unix, AIM, etc.).
Microsoft neatly sidestepped that issue in the early 90's by rolling out NT, basically a rebuilt true-preemptive OS for Windows and included a pared-down essentially brain-dead POSIX subsystem to assuage the government fiat. Microsoft had no intention of supporting it (I know, I directly asked Larry Kroger when I worked there -- his exact response was, "Tell them we don't support it"), and thumbed their nose at the notion of standard and interoperable computing -- it was counter to their business mission of monopolizing the industry.
It's great to think the government wants more emphasis on Open Source (as well as that can be defined), but if history serves, this is another tiny blip on the radar screen. Open Source can't compete in marketing with deep-pocketed vendors and chummy outings on the golf course.
But, we can hope. Come to think of it, maybe there's an "aha" here... could the foot-in-the-door for OSS be more effective marketing? Where could that investment originate? Or, what about pledging support via some write-in campaign to Senators and Representatives?
It depends on the area that you work in. There are parts of it which, and parts that are not. It's a Department, not an agency! You are talking about the largest part of the federal government, one that spans well over a million employees, in fact probably several million employees between all of the agencies and military branches. You can just chalk your experience up, perhaps, to having a less informed client. Many others are very eager to get technical solutions that just work and care more about that than the "look and feel."
What if other projects adopt "no military" clauses like we've seen lately?
Then the government responds by mandating that all open source projects receiving government funding (not necessarily military related), or to be used in government projects, use a completely open license (as in no strings) like BSD, MIT, etc. This would dry up a lot of the money subsidizing GPL based projects.
Although I do not like this, I have a hard time saying it is wrong. I also recall (in the 90s, maybe they still do it) a NASA publication with pages of "ads" listing software projects that were freely available to anyone (individual or business) since they were NASA funded to some degree. I can't help but think this was how the government should work.
Now slowly the next generation of IT managers with more experience are coming up. Now a days software costs lot more than hardware. Hardware prices have been dropping like a stone for decades and the software costs have stopped dropping after Microsoft consolidated its market lead and vendor lock in. In 1994 I paid 2700$ for a 90 MHz Pentium with 570 KB disk and 2X CD-ROM. MS Word was already above a 100$ then. In 1990 MS-Word was selling for 50$.
I keep returning to my favourite examples of light bulbs and car tires. Would anyone buy a car that can accept only Goodyear tires or build a home that can only accept GE bulbs? Car tire standards are set by SAE not GM or Toyota. It is just a matter of time before we have full interoperability to standards defined by a body like IEEE. Heck, if the Fortune 500 companies chip in a million bucks each to set up an "Institute for Sofware Ineroperability Standards" to work with IEEE and ACM to make experts define interoperability they will recoup the investments in no time.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
For the same reason, I doubt the US would open up their F-16 software. Any bugs (remember that all software contains them) that could be exploited by another government simply by scrutinizing the source code create a tactical disadvantage.
Refusing to release the code used for control systems is one of the reasons why NATO agreements for a common platform have started to exclude the US. The US basically said, "hey it will be easier if we can share munitions and if you guys build your fighters on the same designs we do. Also, you can just buy the parts from American companies and it will make them cheaper for everyone. Then, they refused to share the code they use to run the hardware, making the whole thing unfeasible and making it cheaper for them to design their own systems, which most of Europe can share but we can't.
Which is exactly what 's being done right now.
Actually, countries are sharing, just not with the US or vice versus.
Open sourcing the F-16 software would give no advantage to any government, not even the one buying the F-16. They'll most likely just be more interested in the technical manual of the systems onboard and hand those to an engineer, than they would be in the source code itself.
This is certainly not true. As I understand, it was the deal breaker that prevented a common NATO fighter plane platform from being adopted by the US and Europe.
Fortunately, you are wrong on this. The majority of the work that my company does is OSS work for the military and research institutions. Much of the work is sharable between those worlds, and increasingly, commercial entities. One such example is a command and control system for autonomous underwater vehicles. Not only useful to the military, but also to the many different marine research institutes, both privately and publically funded.
We have many other applications that have started in one side of the field or the other as research projects, then with a bit of munging to be useful as a "commericial" application, have ended up being usable by other parties. Another example is a world builder and behavioural analysis program. Build the world from real models, apply agent-based behaviours, then toss it at a large grid computing backend to provided monte-carlo-style analysis of the results. That basic infrastructure has all sorts of uses both commercial and private. Most of them have been originally funded by military development, with the explicit contract provisions that it be made open sourced (typically with no specific license required, but the preference for GPL or LGPL depending on where the code sits in the application stack).
While this sort of business model was a struggle even 2 years ago, things are radically different now. Almost everywhere we go the military types are specifically looking for either open source or open standards. The big change we noticed in that was at I/ITSEC last year. Siggraph this year was also very much along that way. Way too many in the government side of military contract have been bitten by proprietary data and now are actively seeking to free themselves of it.
Life is complete only for brief intervals in between toys or projects -- John Dalton
I agree with your statement that there are lots of insightful and intelligent people (on both sides of the aisle, so to speak) in the U.S. government. I also agree that the "insane" ones get a lot of press time. However, I don't think that is the whole picture.
Regardless of the large-scale bureaucracy, whether it is a government or a corporation, it seems that at a certain size-point there comes a time that the bureaucracy as a whole begins to exhibit various forms of emergent behavior that can't be explained by examining the individual parts. No more than one can recognize the concepts of sentience and reason the human mind brings forth, by examining a single neuron, we should not be surprised that a bureaucracy works in the same manner, and that we can't surmise how it will act by singling out individual employee contributions to the organization.
Inevitably, in most large bureaucracies this emergent behavior tends toward baser outputs, what we humans perceive as harmful, beligerent, corrupted, insane, and in some cases, "evil" behavior. The greater the size of the bureaucracy, the more likely this is to be the case. Interestingly, we seem to see this behavior mainly in bureaucracies where the accumulation of wealth is a goal of the organization. In instances where that goal is not the prime motivator for the organization (say, for instance, a non-profit), these emergent behaviors tend not to manifest themselves (I will admit this is baseless conjecture on my part - I have not seen any study regarding this idea - but anecdotal evidence seems to bear this out).
For governments, it would seem that to prevent this from occurring, the proper thing to do would be to limit the government's ability to accumulate wealth (whether through taxes or warfare). Ideally, it should be able to function optimally without such accumulation, however, for most of the developed world, the economic engine driving the society is capitalism, which is at odds with this idea. Furthermore, large corporate bureaucracies have their hands in the development and guidance of the government - something that was warned against after WW2 as the rise of the "military-industrial complex".
I tend to wonder if these emergent behaviors we see aren't actually intelligent (if not necessarily rational), and that this manipulation isn't actually purposeful, perhaps to ultimately eliminate or marginalize humans? If so, is there anything we can do to detect it, or even stop it? Can a neuron ever know about the mind? Furthermore, if such a neuron did, what would the mind do if it found out?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon