Military Enlists Open Source Community 131
jmwci1 writes "The US Defense Department is enlisting an open source approach to software development — an about-face for such a historically top-down organization. In recent weeks, the military has launched a collaborative platform called Forge.mil for its developers to share software, systems components and network services. The agency also signed an agreement with the Open Source Software Institute to allow 50 internally developed workforce management applications to be licensed to other government agencies, universities and companies."
Repost anyone? (Score:5, Informative)
Military Eggheads did not think put the domain up. (Score:2, Informative)
Project "forge.mil" is only to be found at the url http://www.disa.mil/forge/ [disa.mil]
The address forge.mil is unavailable as of now.
Either does not exist, or has been taken over by the Chinese/Russians, or it has been slashdotted, or it runs on Windows.
Any of the above, is not a good sign.
Kids (Score:5, Informative)
an about-face for such a historically top-down organization
See the guy in the photo [wikipedia.org] using BRL-CAD to optimize the M1 Abrams battle tank for crushing innocent Iraqi children? He wrote ping, contributed to BIND and other stuff. Go read some RFCs, early ones in particular, and note the number of .mil domains credited and try to imagine how many millions of lines of code made it from those reference implementations into BSD.
The DOD, particularly through DARPA, has been giving away code longer than most of you have been alive. Please, for the love of fuck, stow your naive preconceptions. You don't know what the hell you're talking about.
Wish this was there 3 years ago (Score:5, Informative)
I wish they had this three years ago. I worked on the ULLS-G system, which is a software system for unit-level logistics. It was written in ADA and ran in DOS. It was a horribly non-intuitive system. Trying to do anything with it took ages. There wasn't any sort of batch feature to batch up commands or reports.
The software used the SAGE database format and I was able to find an ODBC driver for it. Using that, I was able to write Perl scripts that could read and write to the database and do things a whole lot faster. I mean, things that took 2 hours to do (manually), took less than a second now. I was also able to tie things into Excel for extremely accurate and fast reporting. Something that none of the units there were able to do.
I was actually supposed to do any of this, because only authorized personnel are allowed to modify the software (reason being they didn't want anyone to mess things up). However, my commander and the BMO (Battalion Maintenance Officer) kinda let me do what I wanted to do because I was providing results.
Now they have a new system in place that's a whole lot better. Something with an Oracle backend. Not sure what the front-end is actually built on. Looks like access, but might not be it.
Anytay, at the time I really wanted to provide the scripts and software that I had written to other people in the military - either people who had my MOS or at the very least, the developers, so that they could improve the software.
I haven't had that much of an opportunity to work with the new software. Also, I'm getting done with my contract in December (end to 9 years of service). But I think there are a bunch of nerds and geeks like me hiding out in the military and I'm sure they have some pretty good suggestions to improve the software that the military uses.
Re:How dare they? (Score:2, Informative)
Don't you love how Washington thinks?
Re:How dare they? (Score:2, Informative)
However, the Defense Contractor that hired him for $80,000 is getting $120,000 for doing so (and providing his health insurance and, well, that's about it.)
Do Programmers HAVE to sign and swear in order to program? no.
However, considering the quality of some of the software that the military has to use, it would be VERY useful to have trained programmers rotating into and out of positions where they are using it in the field, and than updating and maintaining the software. We are presently forced to maintain a piece of Search and Rescue software for tracking downed (civilian) pilots that, if every piece of network infrastructure works perfectly, manages to stay stable and usable less than 90% of the time. In an industry where four 9s is considered standard, a piece of lifesaving software with only one is unacceptable - and they can't even open bidding for it's replacement for another year.
And as a Air Force Network Administrator who continually has to struggle to pass his Physical Readiness Test, I have no pity about your preference for coding in your shorts and flip-flops
Re:How dare they? (Score:4, Informative)
I knew one person I considered evil while I was in the Marine Corps.
He got the big chicken dinner.
Turns out, he's from my home town and I've managed to bump into him entirely too many times over the last 8 years.
I knew a fair number of dicks, epen flexers, power trippers, hazers, and douche bags. But every one of them was absolutely dedicated to country and corps and would put it all on the line for a Marine in trouble.
-Rick
Re:It might work (Score:3, Informative)
sudo apt-get autoremove takes no arguments.
Re:Kids (Score:3, Informative)
Think again: works prepared by employees of the U.S. government are uncopyrightable. [wikipedia.org] And that's how it should be. You don't want to give billions of taxpayer money to a military organization and have nothing to show for it.
Even if they wanted to, the military would have to open source their code and published documents, unless they can figure out a sneaky way to bypass the letter of the law, which happens way too much anyway.