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DoD Study Urges OSS Adoption
Posted by
Zonk
on Mon Aug 21, 2006 10:23 AM
from the adopt-a-penguin dept.
from the adopt-a-penguin dept.
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."
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I find it amazing.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I find it amazing.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I find it amazing.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think there's also the issue of insight being filtered through far too many layers and far too many minds. Take Slashdot as an example. There are actually some insightful people here (no, really, it's true). On the other hand consider what filters out as the so called Slashdot Groupthink: not especially insightful. Spread a well thought out insight thin enough through a whole bunch of people who simply latch on to the end result without doing any of the thinking to get there and you often end up with something that isn't especially insightful anymore.
Emergent behavior... (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
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Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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I doubt that the hypothetical Israel would be sending patches back to the US government. If you created software that gave you a military tactical advantage ove
Re:Well... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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GPL at risk due "no military" clauses (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
The military does a lot more than drop bombs and shoot missiles.
Think of all the meteorology and oceanography that they do.
The military does accounting, logistics, and simulation work all the time.
They prepare graphics, presentations, send email, and run websites.
The build schools, roads, and phone systems.
They run hospitals and provide disaster relief.
During Katrina the Navy, Coast Guard, Army, and Air Force along with the national guard saved a lot of people.
During the aftermath of the Indonesian Tsunami the US Navy provided a lot of humanitarian relief.
There are many areas that could generate useful OSS code.
The countries that have some civilian oversight like the US, Germany, Japan, UK, and Australia will not benefit while countries like North Korea, Iran, China, and Syria will not care about any clause. As I said stupid and harmful.
I guess for them it is a case of Free as in only if you agree with me.
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It could be argued that restricting the software to non-military uses might also be protect
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Funny but when people talk about things like kiddie porn or terrorists as reasons that they don't like freenet or unlimited us
How enforceable are "no military" clauses, anyway? (Score:2)
A clause in the license saying "you can use this
Re:How enforceable are "no military" clauses, anyw (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
I doubt it, as that's not a clause of the standard GPL, and a pretty stupid clause to boot. If people want to complain that their screwdriver was eventually used to attach two pieces of a bomb, they should be protesting the decisions that require bombs to be made and used, not refusing to allow their screwdriver to be used in military applications since it's simply untennable. If war is to be waged, war machines will be made, using your code or no. Eliminate the root cause, not innefectually stymie the effect just to have a slightly clearer conscience.
Frankly I think it's dumb. Look at what the NSA has done for open source; the DoD could theoretically provide similar benefits. The DoD will continue to exist. Having the OSS community benefit from DoD development would be a good way for us to directly benefit from their continued existence.
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.
The DoD does a lot more than write code for missles. They crunch masses of data on commercially available parts, and OSS will be very useful for them in that regard. Also, I doubt that the embedded systems for missles are really that exotic -- they may be using hardened versions of microcontrollers, but I doubt they'll be using some completely esoteric ISA that would be difficult to port an OSS real-time OS to.
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)?
If they sell it to other countries or give it to contractors, then it's no longer on-site as you've distributed it. In which case, distributing the source would be appropriate. By the same logic that you chose OSS in the first place, your customers, e.g. Israel, would want to be able to view the source code for validation and maintenence purposes.
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Then they are not free software. They are shareware 'but you can look at the source code' or something like that. You'd class them together with all the other trial versions, 'eval
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Re:Well... (Score:4, Insightful)
To me your statement just illustrates why the RMS concept of free software is more meaningful than OSS. The GPL and the Debian Free Software Guidleines specifically state that these type of exclusionary clauses are not Free Software. OSS just muddies the water here. Originally created to be more "business friendly" OSS licenses that aren't really Free, like other finely worded clauses, laws and other semantic trickery, just ends up being abused.
Perhaps the DOD should rethink their report and use/recommend Free as in Freedom software. Hell it even irked me a little when Fyodor told SCO they couldn't distribute nmap anymore. And I hate those bastards!
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No military clauses (Score:2)
FWIW, the offending terms were:
"The Program and
The DoD culture is very anti-OSS (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Not true (Score:3, Interesting)
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The Problem Here... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Too bad the Army doesn't trust "freeware" (Score:3, Insightful)
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...
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The biggest problem (Score:5, Insightful)
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Unfor
Retraction (Score:2, Funny)
This is rather elegant, actually (Score:5, Funny)
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.
government speaks, anybody listening? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Not the DoD's biggest problem... (Score:3, Insightful)
Above the Law? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Thank god that hippies have not made any inroads. Here they were busy pushing such weird ideas as Organic Food [wholefoodsmarket.com], Alternative energy [doe.gov], cleaner environment (they blew up so much [epa.gov]
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Costs of vendor lock in beginning to sink in! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Back in the late 80s and early 90s my mom was packing me PB
It's not about OSS support, but getting ... (Score:2)
Scary (Score:2)
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OSS is NOT cheaper! (Score:2)
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
Already happening (Score:2)
It's great that the folks running that particular government project had both
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What do you mean by "new"?
Re:Somehow appropriate this time (Score:4, Funny)