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Convincing the Military to Embrace Open Source

Posted by Zonk on from the talking-to-a-brick-wall dept.

drewmoney writes "Misconceptions about what 'open source software' means has made elements of the US Defense Department reluctant to deploy in a live environment. DoD proponents of shared-source projects are now working to reverse this trend by educating IT decision-makers and demonstrating OSS usefulness. 'The cost of cleaning up a "network spill" that introduces classified material on an unclassified network is running about US$11,000 per incident on the Navy/Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI), so the free Secure Save tool could produce monetary savings for the Navy. Additionally, it would cover more file formats than the costly commercial redaction product currently available on the NMCI.'"

3 of 164 comments (clear)

  1. maybe they just need to look around by phrostie · · Score: 5, Interesting

    maybe they just need to look around and open their eyes.
    there are lots of projects. for example, http://brlcad.org/

  2. Open source is hardly excluded by MikeRT · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Open source software is the only type of software that is often mostly made by foreigners that the DoD will use. Proprietary software that is owned by a foreign company cannot be used without extraordinary extenuating circumstances. Even if the whole development is done in America, the legal ownership by foreign nationals takes the proprietary software automatically off the approved software lists.

  3. Depends on the Branch of Service by stewbacca · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The Air Force is hell bent on lining the pockets of Dell and Microsoft, with their stupid, COTS (commercial-off-the-shelf) procurement requirements.

    The Army and Marines use a lot of Linux. My company sells software to mostly the Army, and we have lots of Linux developers for a couple of Linux only intel software apps.

    The NSA (and all the branches of service that work in/for it) uses a heavy mix of UNIX and Windows (and the largest chunk of Mac OS X of any gov't agency I know of).

    Bascially, each branch operates in a fishbowl, separate from each other, so it is hard to generalize the Department of Defense's computer uses.