Obama Looking At Open Source?

An anonymous reader writes "'The secret to a more secure and cost effective government is through Open Source technologies and products.' The claim comes from one of Silicon Valley's most respected business leaders Scott McNealy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems. He revealed he has been asked to prepare a paper on the subject for the new administration."

Open source has been "looked at"

[daveschroeder]

In just the Intelligence Community alone, there is great support for open source software and open standards and protocols.

As part of Community-wide tools and services, the Intelligence Community takes advantage of:

- MediaWiki for Intellipedia [wikipedia.org]
- WordPress for blogs
- Jabber (XMPP) for instant messaging
- Zimbra for enterprise email
- Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP to support and provide many of these services
- LDAP backends for single signon and other authentication tasks
- RSS for blogs, social bookmarking, news feeds, realtime information, etc
- Open APIs and standards whenever possible

All of these services and tools are available via a suite called Intelink, and are available to all 16 Intelligence Community components, the military, federal government, and law enforcement and homeland security partners at the state and local levels. They are accredited for use for information anywhere from UNCLASSIFIED to TOP SECRET/SCI, and everything in between.

For the last few years, the Intelligence Community has not only "looked at" open source, but has embraced it with open arms. In fact, the information sharing supported by these tools was listed as one of the major achievements during the tenure of DNI Mike McConnell [dni.gov].

Open source works, and has allowed the Intelligence Community to rapidly provide a secure and robust suite of tools to its personnel, easily respond to changing requirements and requests, and all for far less money and far more flexibly than many commercial solutions. And the Intelligence Community isn't alone.

Re:Open source has been "looked at"

[oodaloop]

I also work in the intelligence community, and agree that things like Intellipedia and Jabber show a top-down push for open source. But then everywhere I've worked we have Windows machines with Office, MS servers, hell even CENTCOM is going to Vista for some reason. Many of the key programs we use for intelligence analysis are closed-source proprietary programs, like Analyst's Notebook and ArcGIS. Even where there's communal unclass machines, they run Windows XP and Office, despite it being the perfect place for Linux or at least Open Office. There's been some great strides moving towards open source, but we have such a long long way to go.

Re:Open source has been "looked at"

[Dun Malg]

If that's the case, then please send me all the source code to every Open Source program the "Intelligence Community" uses. I mean, it's truly Open, right?

Don't be daft. It's "open source" in that the client--- in this case the US gov't--- has complete access to the source code, not that every drooling twit with a web browser can download a tar.gz of it from the DOD. The "open" in "open source" has always been relative to the end user.

Re:Eh. It was about time

[multisync]

And it'll work about as well as the switch to metric, too.

The switch to metric worked just fine for the countries that did it. In fact, the only confusion that exists is a result of the fact that some countries have chosen to hold out.

Re:Eh. It was about time

[stuntpope]

The DoD put out several papers on using Open Source dating back several years. I believe one was mentioned on Slashdot at the time.

Here [osd.mil] is one from 2006.

I've been using almost all open source, both for architectural solutions and for custom software, in DoD since joining in 2005, and I know there are plenty of others doing the same.

Re:Open source has been "looked at"

[jonaskoelker]

If that's the case, then please send me all the source code to every Open Source program the "Intelligence Community" uses. I mean, it's truly Open, right?

When the Intelligence Community distributed to you software under the GNU GPL (v2), they gave you either

1. The source code;
2. A written offer to give anyone the source code (valid for at least three years); or
3. The instructions you need to get the source code [see the GPL for details].

If you want the source, you have the means. Use them, mm'kay? ;)

If the object code you got is under a non-copyleft license (such as the X11, MIT or BSD), no one is required to give you anything.

If you want to learn more, I can recommend http://www.gnu.org/philosophy [gnu.org], http://www.gnu.org/licenses [gnu.org], http://www.opensource.org/ [opensource.org] and http://www.debian.org/social_contract [debian.org] among others.

Open Source doesn't mean you can point at anyone who uses it and say "give me that code". It means that they, in some cases, can point at the people who gave it to them and say "give me the code for that".

I hope I've cleared things up a bit, and keep on lovin' the open code :)

Re:McNealy?

[jbolden]

You are a little out of data. Snow Leopard server has ZFS as the default. They have also indicated they intend to make this move on the client OS very soon which probably means 10.7.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Open source has been "looked at"

[PrescriptionWarning]

Having used a linux desktop for both work and at home now for everything I do for 3 years now (except gaming, in which Windows' painfully slow start up time constantly draws my ire), I have to say I'm pretty pleased with how fast day-to-day operations are, even in Gnome on Ubuntu. Programs open much faster, and with the help of the preload readahead daemon the subsequent times I open Firefox or even Lotus Notes are blazing fast. The fact is once you get the system set up the first time, hopefully with as little pain as possible when it comes to things that tend to not always work out of the box such as wireless and sound, there's nothing else in your way between you and your internet surfing, chatting, music listening, iPod syncinc, and about everything else most people need a desktop OS for. I think maybe some people expect more from Linux than what they expect to be able to do from Windows and perhaps that is what causes such misconceptions.

Re:Open source has been "looked at"

[Bob9113]

Don't be daft. It's "open source" in that the client--- in this case the US gov't--- has complete access to the source code, not that every drooling twit with a web browser can download a tar.gz of it from the DOD. The "open" in "open source" has always been relative to the end user.

And what's more, when they do make a solid enhancement, they have given back (at least once). Here's a damned fine contribution:

SELinux - From our NSA. [wikipedia.org]

Re:Open source has been "looked at"

[spvo]

I doubt that is an actual army policy. From my experience, even though the majority of the software was proprietary, open source software was allowed and frequently found on the computers.
I looked it up anyway and one part of AR 25-2 says:

Use of "open source" software (for example, Red Hat Linux) is permitted when the source code is available for examination of malicious content

Re:You make it sound like that's a problem

[nsteinme]

Proprietary software IS the problem. The ideology IS the driving force; it is what makes open source software the best tool for the job. While of great benefit, the cost savings are a secondary motivation. See the following Peru-Microsoft letter [theregister.co.uk] for guidance.

Re:McNealy?

[Joey Vegetables]

I will second that . . . . Postgres is very close to an enterprise-class RDBMS, lacking only a very few features such as out-of-the-box replication (almost all of which exist from third party sources). There are multiple companies that offer commercial support. It has always been fast, featureful, and most importantly robust, but until recently the Windows versions had a reputation for being difficult to set up and configure. This has become much easier (almost effortless) in recent years, especially if you use PGAdmin or one of the other available GUI tools. I can't think of any situation in which I'd prefer MSSQL over Postgres. If you haven't checked it out I'd highly recommend it.

Re:Open source has been "looked at"

[Anonymous Coward]

Why run cables when you don't have to?

a) cables are harder to tap/snoop/crack than wi-fi
b) cables use less power, have more bandwidth, and are less prone to interference
c) less unnecessary ambient EM radiation.