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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."
.. that the U.S. Government can be both very insightful and astonishingly full of crap at the same time. How do these insightful people get their jobs? Or, perhaps a better question: How do they manage to keep them? They must have will-power on par with the likes of Superman himself to exist in that kind of environment.
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
What if other projects adopt "no military" clauses like we've seen lately? This certainly has to be in the list of risks that the DoD will face.
Anyway, other than toolkits and general systems (a Linux based workstation to compile code on, use OpenOffice to write documents, and such) there's not going to be a lot of OSS that will be reusable for the developers since they will be writing software for missile guidance systems and interfacing to hardware not generally available to the public. Some GUI toolkits, maybe, and GCC, of course.
Plus, how will GPL's clauses about not having to release code for things you do on-site relate to the contractor/subcontractor relationships that are present in DoD projects and if parts are sold to other countries (like selling an F-16 to Israel, for example)?
I'm obviously not talking much about office productivity and listening to mp3s and stuff because I'm pretty sure that's not what the DoD is talking about here.
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 DoD study made one critical error. They failed to take special interests* into account. Clearly this needs amending.**
* Proprietary Software Industry leaders and House, Senate and Predidential campaign donors.
** According to same special interests.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
What do you mean by "new"?
seriously, I work for a DoD contractor, and the new regulations that are being put in place and that we have to follow states that the Army doesn't like freeware because "it is unsupported"(ie some General has lots of Microsoft stock, what am I being too cynical) So we have to put Red Hat Enterprise on all of our fully functioning Linux boxes(for my little group its about 35 servers or so) at about $600 a pop just because of this stupid regulation.....
If this job didn't pay well at an awesome location then I would quit tomorrow, but it turns out I am just a cheap whore...
The biggest problem with free and open source software in the DOD (and government in general) is the prevailing culture of "if it's free (gratis) is must be worthless." Imagine that a request is made for a system to allow collaboration for something. Two proposals come in. One is for a system using SharePoint/MSSQL/Oracle/tons of similar high priced software. The other is for Trac/Postgres/tons of free software. As a result of spending so little on licenses, the second comes in at half the price of the first. The second will be rejected almost out of hand and looked upon with suspicion, as free stuf can't possibly do the job as well as expensive stuff.
Look for this to be retracted by tomorrow when someone at the DoD says "Sorry, we thought that 'OSS' referred to the agency that was the predecessor to the CIA".
Where were you when the voynix came?
TFA boils down to a single premise:
1) Any individual struck by munitions powered by OSS is entitled to whatever rights are licensed to users of said software. For instance, if the missile was GPLed, any victims would be entitled to be cremated with a full copy of the source code and any encryption keys necessary to run said code on any homebrew missiles.
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."
As we have see recently, and if history is a teacher we can count on the US Government to consider itself above the law. Do we really think that the Military will give a rats ass what us hippies think? GPL clause or not; they will use whatever the hell they want to.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
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
...yes yes yes, But I dont see how them only now adopting the Open Sound System will help. Most people now use ALSA for their sound needs. This is yet again the government wasting taxpayers money on outdated technology.
Clearly, militaries in law-abiding countries would abide by the terms of the licence, at least as much as any private company would. The army or navy are not above the law and you can sue them just like anyone else for copyright violation. But as you say you couldn't expect Hezbollah or North Korea to have any such qualms. In principle, if you write software that might have military uses, trying to exclude that in the licence is supporting one side against the other.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
DOD requirements, standards, and testing before acceptance, suck up time and money. Porting (Major Requirement) a C program was almost a show-stopper on a personnel records program in the late eighties (Same OS (UNIX) on different hardware).
The only thing new in this world is the history that you don't know.[Harry Truman]
Want to back that up? Or are you just a FUD-monger? Last I checked the DoD ran a pretty tight ship and actually bothered investigating their hardware and software purchases more thoroughly than most Fortune-500 types do.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
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
I used to work for a defense dept contractor and while I was there I realised that the goal was to sell the "customer" (ie. the DOD / pentagon) a product at the highest markup possable.) Why does the DOD pay, for example, 1600 dollars for a 256MB compact flash card (two years ago, when a comporable product was $29 at a local Circuit City)?
Because:A: The DOD largely has no idea what they are purchasing, yet have unlimited funds. The brass just want shiny new (functionality optional) things that go beep and have lots of blinking lights. So why do they purchase these things that they do not necessarily want or need:
B: Because when the brass at the pentagon retire, they go into the private sector and sell this equipment to all their old buddies who are more than willing to get ripped off knowing that they will get their turn when they retire. Some of the stuff just rots in warehouses for years as surplus, after which many techs "inherit" old equipment the customer no longer "needs" and has never used. We are not talking dinkie little pieces of equipment. Some examples: Cisco 6509e's in racks, fully loaded with gigabit, fiber, and ws-sup720 management blades.
This brings me to Microsoft: people in the DOD who i have dealt with generally do not trust free things, they equate price with quality. The general theory seems to be that if enough money is thrown at a problem, it will be solved eventually. The idea of open source irks their paranoid, secretive sensibility and they are not the most flexible of people. Microsoft also gives contractors lots of support opportunities, for example, the small contractor i worked for market their "secured" version of windows running on their servers, the differences were very very superficial but the "custom software work" allowed them to charge significantly more, at the same time giving the "customer" a sense of exclusivity. Keep in mind the customer was ultimately billed for the OEM copy of windows as well since the PCs were bought and sold several times under different customer names. I cannot emphazize the incompetance present in the creation of the "products" for the "customer", yet quality is not an issue here, selling points and price are. With the amount of windows licences sold with the hundreds of computers "upgraded"
What i am trying to point out is that there is a circular system of government - contractor back rubbing where money is dumped by the millions into frivilous, useless shit, while the troops in iraq go without body armor. Meanwhilst, the top brass whine to congress that they need more money. Where is the oversight? Congressmen don't want to piss off their constituents since large contractors are smart enough to build defense industry plants in their key districts. If the congressmen pulled the funding to the DOD, thier supporters would lose jobs, and re-election would be greatly complicated. Defense is a very large industry.