Military Enlists Open Source Community

jmwci1 writes "The US Defense Department is enlisting an open source approach to software development — an about-face for such a historically top-down organization. In recent weeks, the military has launched a collaborative platform called Forge.mil for its developers to share software, systems components and network services. The agency also signed an agreement with the Open Source Software Institute to allow 50 internally developed workforce management applications to be licensed to other government agencies, universities and companies."

Comments

I Dunno

[MightyMartian]

This could end badly. Here's all these geeks working hard at coding, only to be interrupted by one of their own doing a mock-Python "Stop the skit! This is much too silly." and then everyone doing the "military fairy" song.

The Pentagon may not survive.

How dare they?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Bloody open-sores communists. Don't they know that military contractors have a god given right to profit?

Re:How dare they?

[RingDev]

No Joke. In 2001 the US Marine Corps disbanded the 4067 MOS. While we used to have Marines, in uniform, writing code for a wide assortment of tasks (from menial office apps to classified COM vaults and even some flight system work in ADA), we moved to consultants.

Replacing a $14,400/year Corporal with a $120,000 civilian. One who doesn't have to take an oath to support and defend the Constitution.

-Rick

Re:How dare they?

[Dielectric]

What does mil-spec code look like? Do you have to put //SIR! after every semicolon?

Re:How dare they?

[finity]

I get the impression that you think this is an awful shame. Do you think we need programmers that take an oath to support and defend the Constitution? Do you think programmers need to maintain the high standards of fitness required by the Marines? I guarantee you that wearing a uniform makes it harder to code (it's much easier in flip flops and shorts).

It's unlikely that those civilians are actually paid $120k, but you're right that they make more than $14k. I think that (in many cases) it's an awful shame to have folks working in an office who are willing and able to run out into a field in the middle of nowhere and setup comms.

Militaries are built to go out and accomplish a mission. Pay somebody else to stay home and accomplish it.

Re:How dare they?

[Ocker3]

I disagree. Having coders who have an afinity with and an understanding of the actual roles and duties of the people they're coding for can be very useful. And as to being oath-taking Marines, they are arguably quite motivated to make sure that no details are leaked and that systems are secure, as opposed to the vulnerable contractor systems that leaked that JSF data recently.

Re:How dare they?

[RingDev]

I knew one person I considered evil while I was in the Marine Corps.

He got the big chicken dinner.

Turns out, he's from my home town and I've managed to bump into him entirely too many times over the last 8 years.

I knew a fair number of dicks, epen flexers, power trippers, hazers, and douche bags. But every one of them was absolutely dedicated to country and corps and would put it all on the line for a Marine in trouble.

-Rick

Re:How dare they?

[Eil]

Replacing a $14,400/year Corporal with a $120,000 civilian. One who doesn't have to take an oath to support and defend the Constitution.

On one Air Force base that I was stationed, it was very common for a company (usually Lockheed Martin) to "convince" the military that a certain position would be better served by a civilian contractor. It was just mere coincidence that the military person currently occupying that job just happened to be within early retirement age and that, even more coincidentally, he would be the one hired by the contractor to fill the civilian position after the military position was closed.

Eventually, entire portions of the base were run by civilians (civil engineering, the supply chain, avionics shops, test equipment maintenance, and vehicle management and maintenance are only a few that I recall off the top of my head) and the only military members that were left were those that legally couldn't be replaced by a contractor because they would be needed if the unit were to deploy anywhere.

I don't think most Slashdotters realize how big/powerful/corrupt the entire defense contracting industry really is.

Repost anyone?

[saleenS281]

This story is almost as cool as it was when it was posted 2 months ago!

Re:Why does this story have a red header?

[moniker127]

Its red because its a new post, with no comments.
It WAS that is.

Until you de-redified it.

Kids

[Anonymous Coward]

an about-face for such a historically top-down organization

See the guy in the photo using BRL-CAD to optimize the M1 Abrams battle tank for crushing innocent Iraqi children? He wrote ping, contributed to BIND and other stuff. Go read some RFCs, early ones in particular, and note the number of .mil domains credited and try to imagine how many millions of lines of code made it from those reference implementations into BSD.

The DOD, particularly through DARPA, has been giving away code longer than most of you have been alive. Please, for the love of fuck, stow your naive preconceptions. You don't know what the hell you're talking about.

Re:Kids

[db32]

You! With the clue! You are to report for immediate groupthink reprogramming!

This goes WAY beyond source code. DoD and DARPA have been giving away technology of all varieties for ages. Radar, guidance systems, tons of computing and communications tech, medical technology. Bitch about the military all ya want...but be honest...stop using everything the military has played key role in building. For starters no computers, no internet, no weather reports, no flying, and certainly no trauma treatment in an ER anywhere...

It might work

[AnalPerfume]

sudo apt-get remove democratically-elected-but-troublesome-foreign-government
sudo apt-get install us-friendly-dictator
sudo apt-get autoremove reporters-who-ask-the-wrong-questions

Wish this was there 3 years ago

[vivin]

I wish they had this three years ago. I worked on the ULLS-G system, which is a software system for unit-level logistics. It was written in ADA and ran in DOS. It was a horribly non-intuitive system. Trying to do anything with it took ages. There wasn't any sort of batch feature to batch up commands or reports.

The software used the SAGE database format and I was able to find an ODBC driver for it. Using that, I was able to write Perl scripts that could read and write to the database and do things a whole lot faster. I mean, things that took 2 hours to do (manually), took less than a second now. I was also able to tie things into Excel for extremely accurate and fast reporting. Something that none of the units there were able to do.

I was actually supposed to do any of this, because only authorized personnel are allowed to modify the software (reason being they didn't want anyone to mess things up). However, my commander and the BMO (Battalion Maintenance Officer) kinda let me do what I wanted to do because I was providing results.

Now they have a new system in place that's a whole lot better. Something with an Oracle backend. Not sure what the front-end is actually built on. Looks like access, but might not be it.

Anytay, at the time I really wanted to provide the scripts and software that I had written to other people in the military - either people who had my MOS or at the very least, the developers, so that they could improve the software.

I haven't had that much of an opportunity to work with the new software. Also, I'm getting done with my contract in December (end to 9 years of service). But I think there are a bunch of nerds and geeks like me hiding out in the military and I'm sure they have some pretty good suggestions to improve the software that the military uses.

Bug #222896: App terminates with big explosion

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't supposed to happen until our personel have reached safe distance.

Bogus: This issue was fixed in SVN 2 months ago.

Navy has done this for years.

[jd]

Way back when, I would access the Naval Research Lab's websites for copies of OPIE (a one-time password suite), their IPSec code, their IPv6 code and their IPv4/IPv6 multiprotocol suite.

These days, they have some nice stuff in the areas of multicasting, wireless routing and network testing tools.

Even the DoD's Office of Information Security Research has done Open Source work before, publishing one of the early IPSec implementations publicly through MIT.

So other than the DoD finally putting onto a more official level a practice that has been commonplace for decades (the sharing of source under true open source licenses), what exactly is new here? That the politicians at the top of the food chain figured something out? That's just a freak event, a result of the statistical nature of quantum mechanics.