SPARKS had been quite active for many years, and they were known for scoring major Hollywood releases before other groups. This year alone they did Onward and 1917, and I could go through hundreds of titles they released over the past 10 years. If you were really aware of Blu-Ray scene groups, you knew who they were and how much they released. (Also, EVO is not a scene group.)

I've been working as a software developer in a military research lab for about 7 years. My primary area of work is development of middleware to allow interoperability between DoD systems that otherwise have no such capability. I'm a big proponent of using general open source solutions as well as the military having their own "open source" for situations that might not be appropriate for public distribution, but are very relevant across the entire DoD.

The resistance always comes in people guarding their products, ultimately to protect jobs and/or profit. The contracting companies have their stovepipe systems, and typically they want to be the sole source of development/maintenance. Even government entities keep things closed off from one another; I've had many instances where I've been told to either partially distribute or not distribute DoD-owned software (including source) when requested by another element of the DoD. Too many people are worried about their intellectual property, which makes it very difficult to tear down these political barriers. This ultimately results in the exact same functionality being developed many times over, which I've seen all too often. We're making some progress, but it's going to take significant buy-in from someone high up (read: with star(s) on their shoulder) to push the agenda. Otherwise, it continues to be a large amount of talk without much in the way of results.

Speaking of large amount of talk, I recently met with one of the key speakers at the aforementioned conference (Major James D. Neushul). This individual is a risk to adoption of open source principles...not because he opposes them, but because his mouth exceeds his knowledge. He speaks largely in buzzwords and jumps between concepts as soon as you corner him on the technical inaccuracies of his claims, but he does so with fervent insistence of his correctness. At one point in our discussion, he actually stated that the ideal solution right now is for every computer, down to the individual warfighter level, to be running an instance of a web server and use web applications. He also wrote the "specification" for an XML version of a widely-used bit-oriented messaging format (VMF), except he didn't write schemas, but rather a description of how one should make the schemas. It's a pretty scary stance to assume that a set of tag-naming rules is going to result in compatibility of all the independently developed schemas. It's unfortunate that this individual is probably going to alienate many skilled and otherwise open-supporting engineers....such as myself and my entire engineering team, all of whom are on-board with opening up DoD capabilities...yet none of us can tolerate his sloppy, bravado-laden approach.