The DoD Supports OSS!
After years of uncertainty, a memo has been released by the US Department of Defense (DoD) that makes it official: Open Source Software (OSS) is just fine and dandy in critical applications, and should not be discounted in officially supported solutions developed by or for the government. Despite continued criticism by Microsoft and other companies — who often have a lot to lose if their overpriced commercial solutions lose market share in the lucrative government market — there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with OSS.
The memo says it clearly, i.e. that “In almost all cases, OSS meets the definition of ‘commercial computer software’ and shall be given appropriate statutory preference…”
The “commercial software” part is key. If something is considered non-commercial, it requires special approval that, in many cases, probably makes its use in a government project far more difficult and time consuming. I suspect many agencies were probably avoiding the use or consideration of Open Source solutions because of this very conundrum. But now the rules are clear, with Open Source classified as “commercial” like anything off-the-shelf from a traditional vendor.
The other bit of confusion that should be cleared up by this new memo is in regard to warranties and “support” for particular applications. Previous rulings said that “if you use a binary program, you must either have a warranty or the source code for a program.” That, as David points out in his article, is perfectly sensible…but many departments apparently just read the “warranty” part and didn’t realize or understand that, with Open Source solutions, they already had full access to the source code by default.
This is really good news for Open Source developers, and for the movement in general. A lot of Linux applications are Open Source. So are many well-known languages (at least Perl, Python, and the Ruby on Rails web development environment, not to mention the venerable Gnu suite like gcc and g++). It’s probably sure to annoy commercial vendors, who have obvious skin in the game of keeping Open Source software on the back burner while they rake in big bucks. But them’s the breaks in the industry — any viable solution should have an equal chance of adoption if it meets a given need. Big-dollar vendors shouldn’t own this market. Competition is a good thing.