Convincing the Military to Embrace Open Source 164
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.'"
maybe they just need to look around (Score:5, Interesting)
there are lots of projects. for example, http://brlcad.org/ [brlcad.org]
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
whoops (used a "less than" symbol) (Score:2, Interesting)
My Linux knowledge is practically nil, and I'm the "expert" in my unit.
Depends on the Branch of Service (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:No thanks (Score:4, Interesting)
NMCI not a great example (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a waste of time pitching the Navy anything. NMCI outsourced their entire network infrastructure to EDS. A monumental cesspool of pork barrel contracting that puts Haliburton's Iraq contracts to shame. There are hurdles and endless reviews for getting any piece of software approved for use on Navy or Marine networks. And between SPAWAR and EDS they're busy trying to squeeze out what little internal development is left in the Navy and move everything to the giant hosted service architecture. The very people most likely to use and promote any type of open source software or a project built on open standards are the ones jumping ship and going elsewhere.
You can waste your time trying to educate DoD if you want but it's maddeningly frustrating. They'll listen and understand, then go off and do something entirely different. Which is a shame because the military is an organization that would benefit the most from an open, flexible infrastructure. One that could scale on demand, integrate disparate information sources and is reliable on legacy hardware. You would think with the massive paperwork hassles of buying anything through the government, the military would pounce on technology that let them side-step the entire procurement process and load it when you need it.
It would all be funny if it wasn't billions of your tax dollars going down the crapper.