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Navy Now Mandated To Consider FOSS As an Option
lisah writes "In a memorandum handed down from Department of the Navy CIO John Carey this week, the Navy is now mandated to consider open source solutions when making new software acquisitions. According John Weathersby, executive director of the Open Source Software Institute, this is the first in a series of documents that will also address 'development and distribution issues regarding open source within Navy IT environments.'"
When I worked for the Army I had to unilaterally implement FOSS solutions because the people who controlled the purse strings knew nothing about technology. They were dazzled by Oracle, M$ and every other vendor. One young green suiter from the front office put it to me this way: "Just say that this great open source solution will cost you X million dollars and take two years to implement. That's the only thing we understand".
Judging based on my knowledge of DoD networks and computer applications, I don't believe this will have much of an effect on IT decisions in the Navy. (at the Air Force base I work at, we have some BSD, but it's running on specialized devices on a very small scale). It reminds me of how my father did equipment purchasing at the university he worked at (and I'll bet most Navy IT sections will do the same): The university had a set of requirements for big computer purchases that favored specific venders and things like low bit. By dad simply wrote the specs for what he wanted so strictly that only one product would satisfy the requirements.
Also, keep in mind that great scads of DoD IT is standardized on Microsoft networks and applications that would be difficult to integrate with OSS for a variety of reasons. And, there will always be FUD based "security" reasons that military networks will want to avoid OSS.
Net result: very little.
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