Navy Now Mandated To Consider FOSS As an Option

lisah writes "In a memorandum handed down from Department of the Navy CIO John Carey this week, the Navy is now mandated to consider open source solutions when making new software acquisitions. According John Weathersby, executive director of the Open Source Software Institute, this is the first in a series of documents that will also address 'development and distribution issues regarding open source within Navy IT environments.'"

Cool!!

[phrostie]

but i'm sure that one of M$'s lobby groups will pay to try and have that changed shortly.

Strategy for getting M$ price concessions

[Silver Sloth]

If you're a large enough organisation there's no better way of getting your M$ licensing costs down than 'investigating FOSS solutions'. Mind you, with the US navy's long history of cost effective purchasing maybe this isn't a factor here!

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[account_deleted]

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Great! This is what you have to do

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

When I worked for the Army I had to unilaterally implement FOSS solutions because the people who controlled the purse strings knew nothing about technology. They were dazzled by Oracle, M$ and every other vendor. One young green suiter from the front office put it to me this way: "Just say that this great open source solution will cost you X million dollars and take two years to implement. That's the only thing we understand".

Net result: very little.

[Frosty Piss]

In a memorandum handed down from Department of the Navy CIO John Carey this week, the Navy is now mandated to consider open source solutions when making new software acquisitions...

Judging based on my knowledge of DoD networks and computer applications, I don't believe this will have much of an effect on IT decisions in the Navy. (at the Air Force base I work at, we have some BSD, but it's running on specialized devices on a very small scale). It reminds me of how my father did equipment purchasing at the university he worked at (and I'll bet most Navy IT sections will do the same): The university had a set of requirements for big computer purchases that favored specific venders and things like low bit. By dad simply wrote the specs for what he wanted so strictly that only one product would satisfy the requirements.

Also, keep in mind that great scads of DoD IT is standardized on Microsoft networks and applications that would be difficult to integrate with OSS for a variety of reasons. And, there will always be FUD based "security" reasons that military networks will want to avoid OSS.

Net result: very little.

Re:Inconceivable!

[fitten]

This has pretty much nothing to do with saving money except to only the most casual of (misinformed) glances. I'm sure it was used as a bullet point (although false) in trying to sell it to Congress.

The Navy is NOT going to just download crap, have a monkey install it, and hope for the best. At the minimum, they will need to buy support contracts. Additionally, they will most likely hire some support staff of their own. There will likely be little cost savings in actual dollar amounts.

The OTHER advantages of FOSS are what it's all about (open formats, source code overview if desired, source code escrow, etc.)

Re:Is the tide turning?

[russ1337]

they will have to endure the cost of installation, training, etc. No way can they do that efficiently!

Having been on the receiving end of a few military software acquisition projects in a past life, I can say that OSS reduces the possibility of being held by the balls by the vendors for ongoing support. Talk about tapping into a major artery when you sell Defense software and they want changes.

Also, commercial licensing usually doesn't fit the military all that well. You may want some software for a certain project and that is fine. Once it has proven itself you usually find other area's / forces (or even friendly nations) wanting it, yet the cost/product/licensing/configuration s have changed and you're not free to share. With OSS you may be free to simply roll it out across the service / other nations.

There are many inter-service & inter-country programs that actually work very well with sharing tools and software, and often the proprietary models are just not accommodating. I don't mind fulfilling and complying with commercial licenses (of course), but often, we need the flexibility to change the actual hardware and don't have the time to 're-activate' the product via some crazy product key tied to the hardware (one example [boeing.com] of a product with a ridiculous 'DRM' scheme, tied to hardware, no backups) Also, some licenses have actually prohibited us from making a Ghosted backup - if all turns to hell, then we actually need the ability to trace our footsteps by seeing if we can re-create the behavior that caused the proprietary software to go T.I.

At least forcing some in acquisitions to at least acknowledge OSS is a start. A good start.

It's all about the benjamins

[ACMENEWSLLC]

*Considering* open source software often generates substation savings from Microsoft. How many articles on /. have we seen where some government or huge company says they are switching away from Microsoft, only to have Microsoft come back with huge savings?

It's a great negotiating advantage to be "forced" to consider open source.

Re:Cool!!

[mrsteveman1]

As before, the scope of who gets the source exactly matches the scope of who uses the program. Redistribution from there is another problem. If they use GPL code, modifications would remain GPL. But if someone leaks the code, is it then legal to distribute? Or would that be a massive breach of some other classified status not specified by the GPL?

I would hope that a situation could be worked out so that the code can be protected as classified in certain cases, and I would say there is a partial conflict at the moment. Regardless of my support of the GPL, this is a situation where I would say protecting government systems is more important.