Department of defense and Linux

The US Department of Defence has done a study on OpenSource software and prepared a document to give guidance. The document is giving guidance on how to approach opensource and by this making it valid for the military to use and consider opensource besides closedsource software.

For a long time the US military was unsure on how and if they could use opensource software. With this document which is released under name of  David M. Wennergren who is currently the CIO of the Department of Defense this uncertainty is removed for the most part.

The document is not stating that opensource is better or should be picked above closed source however it is a step in the right direction. As some people from within the military stated before “if we cannot hack it we do not pack it” which states that they want to have full control over it and have the option to change whatever is needed in their opinion to do what they need to do.

“A lot of people both within and around the Defense Department have been working on this for a long time. It’s very significant that this has been done,” said John Weathersby, the founder and executive director of the Open Source Software Institute, a non-profit institute dedicated to broadening the use of open source in government. “It is very significant in that it states — in writing— that open-source is a viable option and must be considered.”

I hope to see a lot more linux and opensource tools coming into to the military and them giving back some of the things they change. I recently was as a guest at the Dutch army and visited some communications divisions and found out also the Dutch armed forces are running a lot of windows based applications and communication tools. This is by the way in conjunction with the NATO so we can expect a lot more countries running windows based communication and not opensource communication tools.

I do agree with the US marine corps statement  before “if we cannot hack it we do not pack it”, who knows what might come from the .mil networks.

You can find more information about opensource and the US Department of Defense on their website and you can find this document also at gcn.com

Tags: Linux

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at 7:10 pm and is filed under UNIX Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.