Open source in the national interest

"There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come." Victor Hugo.

So states a report from the Department of Defense's Advanced Systems and Concepts Office, which recommends that the DoD move to a roadmap to adopt open source and open standards, maintaining that such a move is not only in the US national interest, but in the interests of US national security.

The 79-page report proposes that the DoD adopt what it calls "open technology development," which incorporates open source methodologies and open standards, but also takes into account the fact that the DoD has systems that it would rather keep secret.

"It is important, in the context of this report and resulting policy discussions, to distinguish between OSS and OTD, since the latter may include code whose distribution may be limited to DoD, and indeed may only be accessible on classified networks," states the report, before maintaining that OTD does also not "impinge on the legal states" of commercially-developed software.

What it does do is recommend the use of open source software, open standards, and open source development methodologies within the DoD. According to the report, this is in the national interest, as it holds the potential to reduce software purchasing and development costs.

"Currently within DoD, there is no internal distribution policy or mechanism for DoD developed and paid for software code. By not enabling internal distribution, DoD creates an arbitrary scarcity of its own software code, which increases the development and maintenance costs of information technology across the Department," it states.

"Other negative consequences include lock-in to obsolete proprietary technologies, the inability to extend existing capabilities in months vs. years, and snarls of interoperability that stem from the opacity and stove-piping of information systems."