The Office of the Secretary of Defense CIO releases policy guidance promoting the use of Open Source Software throughout the DoD.
This is wonderful news, its great to see the DoD taking a leadership position with Open Source. It also puts in place guidance that encourages the evaluation of open source products as well as how they should be managed within the DoD. I believe that other agencies across the Federal Government should be pro-actively creating polices like this within their organizations.
Wednesday Oct 28, 2009
Wednesday Feb 18, 2009
For all of you in favor of improved security, increased procurement speed, improved quality and reduced cost to license and support, that light you see is the end of the proprietary tunnel. If you are in favor of vendor lock-ins, barriers to exit and massive integration projects and budget line items, I may not be able to help you.
From all that we have heard, read and seen, 2009 appears to be when our federal government will finally make open
source ready for primetime. And why not?
For some time, I have been touting the top six reasons for moving to open source:
1. Improved Security and Privacy over proprietary software
2. Increased procurement speed so agency's can get their programs deployed faster
3. No lock into one vendor, support can be provided by anyone since the code is in the public domain
4. Reduced cost of license and support, on average, open source products provide same functionality at a 80-90% lower cost to the taxpayers
5. Improved quality, normally, supported open source products go through three times more quality reviews than proprietary software as part of community review, indemnification review, and then productizing.
6. The Government can become part of the open source community and directly inject their specific requirements into the product.
I plan to create separate blogs on each of the six reasons for anyone still on the fence about moving to open source.
Open source has already proved itself allowing the National Health Information Network (NHIN) to develop a pilot solution that enables multiple federal agencies to securely link their existing systems to NHIN, allowing for the beginnings of a true electronic healthcare record. The pilot was developed with no need for long procurement cycles or massive costs since the entire software backbone is 100% open source.
We hope programs such as NHIN will lead the way to the day when government open source deployments will not be news anymore, they will be the norm.
Imagine a time when:
· The White House will be free from the shackles of proprietary systems and able to take advantage of both the transparency and the security of open source solutions.
· Agencies don’t need their IT solution criteria to focus on legacy and integration, and are able to seamlessly adopt new solutions based on cost and functionality.
· IT deployments are NOT antiquated before they are implemented.
Yes, that light at the end of the tunnel is approaching quickly and luckily, there isn’t a toll booth at the end.
Wednesday May 07, 2008
At Sun Fed, too often we have seen other industries bestow honors for excellence. From the Grammys to the Emmys to the Webbies to the Major League Baseball All-Star game, we have sat idly by as those on the front lines of government technology innovation sat quietly in the background, enabling our citizens to access critical services but never garnering the true acknowledgement that they 
deserve.
Well, I say that now is the time to say “No More.” No more anonymity for those working behind the scenes leveraging new and “old” technologies to keep those checks coming from the Social Security Administration or ensuring full access to all content at the Library of Congress or enabling the protection of a National Security infrastructure that secures our nation, just to name a few.
Victor Giordano,
Transportation Security Administration (TSA)
Giordano is the branch chief, enterprise applications and infrastructure and oversees the test, development and operations and management of all TSA applications as well as the UNIX infrastructure.
Catherine
Cesnik's eco responsibilities have been large and vast including leading the first pilot test of the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool in 2004. So far, Cesnik's efforts have helped to save the electricity equivalent of more than 400 household and prevent more than 19,000 metric tons of air emissions.
Stephen Smalley, National Security Agency
Smalley has been an open source steward within the intelligence community, developing and driving the deployment of both SE Linux and now the implementation of mandatory access controls into Open Solaris.
Andi Snow-Weaver, IBM
Snow-Weaver is the worldwide accessibility standards program manager for the IBM Human Ability and Accessibility Center. She has been responsible for bringing industry-specific expertise to the development of worldwide accessibility standards for information technology.
Security
Dr. Ryan Durante,
Durante is a program manager at the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory Information Directorate in
Stephen Smalley, National Security Agency
Smalley is as versatile as they come and we could not present a security award without acknowledging his tremendous contributions.
Excellence in Technology Award
Before we closed, we felt we needed to give one more special recognition. Those in the government IT industry have been able to innovate and succeed in large part due to the policies and programs implemented by elected government officials. At Sun, we believe no one has helped to facilitate the deployment of technologies to serve the public good more than Congressman Tom Davis (R-Va.). It was our honor to recognize the departing Congressman for his tremendous work.
So, there you have it, the true Hall of Famers of the government IT industry.
Next year, we are working on a Red Carpet Show on E! and a Sunday night broadcast on a major television network.
Friday Dec 21, 2007
Bob Gourley gets it! Everyone in DoD should take a look at his most recent blog...A proposal for government certification of open source software.
Wednesday Dec 19, 2007
Another way that SunFed is trying to advance open source within the U.S. Federal government is by posting the Government Software Contributors Agreement on the Sun.Com Open Source page. There is an FAQ for government employees with a link to download a Government Software Contributors Agreement.
Sunday Dec 09, 2007
Just a quick note, on Dec. 11, I will be keynoting at the 3rd Annual DoD Open Conference at the Sheradon Premiere in Tysons Corner, VA. I plan to discuss why Sun has opened our technologies and how it benefits the government, systems integrators and citizens, as well as Sun. The event is sponsored by the Association for Enterprise Integration (AFEI). Other industry and government leaders speaking include: Brigadier General Nickolas G. Justice, Program Executive Officer, Command Control and Communications Tactical (C3T), USA; Andre Boisvert, co founder of Pentaho and former president and chief operating officer of SAS Institute Inc; and Mark Tolliver, Chief Executive Officer of Palamida and former Sun Microsystems executive.
Tuesday Dec 04, 2007
I have been an open source advocate since my time at the DoD. When I was a CTO for the US Army PERSCOM, I was running over 380 Linux servers in production in 1993, when Linux was very young. Everyone thought I was crazy back then, but it worked great as a file server and web server platforms on 486s. I even replaced Solaris with Linux on Sun SPARC 3000s because it was faster than Solaris at the time, that didn't make many friends for me among the Sun sales folks.
In 2000, my wife's career forced me to leave the DoD and move to the west coast. I looked at many companies at the time, and Sun had always been a big open systems supporter. They also seemed to have the "smartest" technical people of all the companies I looked at. I took a job with Sun in 2000 and worked in Sun IT later taking over as Sun's Chief Information Officer.
As soon as I arrived at Sun I started pushing for open source and for Sun to get more involved in Linux. It was not until Jonathan Schwartz and Greg Papadopoulos started pushing along with me that we really got serious about it. I do think we were a little schizophrenic about open source for a while, with all our work on BSD, Apache, Mozilla and Open Office, then on the other side keeping Solaris closed.
That all changed about 2001, and we started internally on the path of open sourcing Solaris, and then later, embraced it all the way across all our products. It took over 5 years to open source Solaris because we had to indemnify every line of code (prove that we wrote it) and / or pay off the companies we licensed it from (we paid out over $200M to make that happen with Solaris).
Today, all our software is either open source (under an OSI approved license) or is in the process of being open sourced. We have committed at the top leadership (Jonathan / Greg / Scott/ Rich Green ) to this direction. We have been committed to this for over 3 years and you can see the proof as we have released Solaris, DTrace, Glassfish, ZFS, Java, Dir.... and we are in the process of open sourcing mail/cal, Identity, and JCAPS. Even our Sun Ray code is going through the open source process.
So at this point, we are completely committed across the company to open source. We are even open sourcing our hardware...you can't get more committed than that.
I would like to see the US Government even more committed to open source than it already is today. Some of them have started building "bonus points" into program RFPs for people that present an open source solution, and I would like to see that across ALL the RFPs. Open source is well established in the Intell and DoD communities because of their concerns about security (open source being more secure), but there are still a lot of IT leaders in other parts of the U.S. government that don't really understand open source or its advantages. I would also like to promote open formats and standards across the Federal government....it's good for security, it's good for the US, and it's good for the tax payers...
Lots of customers ask me about Sun's commitment to open source and Linux. Let me be VERY clear that Sun is completely committed to make sure Linux is supported across our systems and software platforms. All our open source software runs on top of Linux, Solaris, and Windows. And we don't just support one version of Linux, to us "Linux" means Ubuntu, Debian, SuSe, and RedHat.
There are many great things about Linux, and we love to see Linux grow, because it grows open source and choice. However, we also believe there are many great things about Open Source Solaris. Both operating systems are really Unix based, both are open source, both are multi-platform, and both are OEMed by a number a major hardware manufactures. A bunch of our customers have asked me, "OK, if Linux is great and Open Source Solaris is great, how do they compare?" So, let me give you the best information I have on comparing some of the features of both operating systems. I am using RedHat Linux only for comparison, other distributions may have different features. I welcome feedback and "corrections" to the UPDATED chart, as I get them in the comment section of my Blog I will research them and correct them in the table to make sure it is as up to date as possible.
Tuesday Sep 27, 2005
Last year I asked everyone at Sun to get on board with truly understanding
and promoting open standards. Since then some have asked me about the
difference between "Open Standards" and "Open Source." So, I'm sharing
industry standard definitions from TechWeb's TechEncyclopedia.
When talking to customers, inside and outside of Sun, here are some of the points I feel strongly about getting across to focus on Sun's commitment to open standards:
1) Open Source DOES NOT EQUAL Open Systems or Open Standards
2) By definition, an Open Systems implementation using Open Standards IS NOT proprietary.
3) A software package that is not Open Sourced, but follows Open Standards, IS NOT proprietary.
4) An Open Source software package that DOES NOT follow Open Standards, IS proprietary. Releasing the source code to a system that has proprietary interfaces does not make it an Open System, it's just a proprietary package you can view the code on.
At Sun, we are committed to open standards, because this gives users choice and allows heterogeneous systems and vendors to interoperate.
Linux and BSD also follow Open Standards. Linux, BSD, and Solaris are also Open Source. Following Open Standards and being Open Source are VERY good things and can not be called "proprietary".
However, in an attempt to lock users into their own OS version, some open source vendors add proprietary extensions to Linux and other open source operating systems that do not follow Open Standards. They also go out of their way to keep users locked in so they can never switch. It also just happens that their code is open for people to look at it. But that does not matter because you are still locked into their version of the OS, and an application you write to one distribution most likely will not run on other versions.
Of course, if you write your application in Java, it will always run everyplace on every OS, no matter what version or type. That is very open. :)
It's all about following and implementing open standards. Providing the open source code to the community is REALLY good as well. Jonathan Schwartz was quoted in a recent article called "How open source gave power to the people" that exemplifies the value of distributed innovation contributed by a broad community. Having open source code fosters creativity, increases security, because all the code is available, encourages people to improve and expand the code base. All good things, and better than "closed source", but what you really want is Open Standards to keep you from being locked into a vendor, and Open Source to keep the product honest and secure.
DEFINITIONS:
*Open Standards*
Specifications for hardware and/or software that are publicly available. Open standards imply that multiple vendors can compete directly based on the features and performance of their products. It also implies that the existing open system can be removed and replaced with that of another vendor with minimal effort and without major interruption. Contrast with proprietary standards.. See open systems and open source.
*Open Source*
Refers to software that is created by a development community rather than a single vendor. The source code of such software is free and available to anyone who would like to modify it for their own purposes. This allows an organization to add a feature itself rather than hope that the vendor of a proprietary product will implement its suggestion in a subsequent release.
Although open source is free, many companies sell a distribution version of the software for a fee, which combines the free source code along with proprietary development utilities and a technical support package. For example, the Linux operating system, the most widely known open source project, is available from several vendors. Although most all operating environments have open source projects, open source is particularly common in the Unix/Linux/Java world; for example, the Apache Web server, sendmail mail server and JBoss application server. The Netscape Web browser was also turned into open source in 1998 and later released as the Mozilla browser for Windows, Linux and Mac (see Mozilla).
Open source developers claim that a broader group of programmers produces a more useful and more bug-free product for everyone, especially because more people are reviewing the code. Peer review, where another programmer examines the code of the original programmer, is a natural byproduct of open source. Peer review is an important safeguard against poorly written code, but is often given little attention by software companies. Naturally, vendors of proprietary software counter by saying that "too many cooks spoil the broth!" They say that having complete control over software ultimately results in better products.
A distinct advantage of open source software is that as long as there are a few devoted contributors, the program will continue to be supported for many years. In the commercial world, useful software may be abandoned if it does not generate sufficient profit compared to other products. For more information, visit www.opensource.org. Contrast with shared source
*Proprietary Software*
Software owned by an organization or individual. Contrast with public domain software.
When talking to customers, inside and outside of Sun, here are some of the points I feel strongly about getting across to focus on Sun's commitment to open standards:
1) Open Source DOES NOT EQUAL Open Systems or Open Standards
2) By definition, an Open Systems implementation using Open Standards IS NOT proprietary.
3) A software package that is not Open Sourced, but follows Open Standards, IS NOT proprietary.
4) An Open Source software package that DOES NOT follow Open Standards, IS proprietary. Releasing the source code to a system that has proprietary interfaces does not make it an Open System, it's just a proprietary package you can view the code on.
At Sun, we are committed to open standards, because this gives users choice and allows heterogeneous systems and vendors to interoperate.
Linux and BSD also follow Open Standards. Linux, BSD, and Solaris are also Open Source. Following Open Standards and being Open Source are VERY good things and can not be called "proprietary".
However, in an attempt to lock users into their own OS version, some open source vendors add proprietary extensions to Linux and other open source operating systems that do not follow Open Standards. They also go out of their way to keep users locked in so they can never switch. It also just happens that their code is open for people to look at it. But that does not matter because you are still locked into their version of the OS, and an application you write to one distribution most likely will not run on other versions.
Of course, if you write your application in Java, it will always run everyplace on every OS, no matter what version or type. That is very open. :)
It's all about following and implementing open standards. Providing the open source code to the community is REALLY good as well. Jonathan Schwartz was quoted in a recent article called "How open source gave power to the people" that exemplifies the value of distributed innovation contributed by a broad community. Having open source code fosters creativity, increases security, because all the code is available, encourages people to improve and expand the code base. All good things, and better than "closed source", but what you really want is Open Standards to keep you from being locked into a vendor, and Open Source to keep the product honest and secure.
DEFINITIONS:
*Open Standards*
Specifications for hardware and/or software that are publicly available. Open standards imply that multiple vendors can compete directly based on the features and performance of their products. It also implies that the existing open system can be removed and replaced with that of another vendor with minimal effort and without major interruption. Contrast with proprietary standards.. See open systems and open source.
*Open Source*
Refers to software that is created by a development community rather than a single vendor. The source code of such software is free and available to anyone who would like to modify it for their own purposes. This allows an organization to add a feature itself rather than hope that the vendor of a proprietary product will implement its suggestion in a subsequent release.
Although open source is free, many companies sell a distribution version of the software for a fee, which combines the free source code along with proprietary development utilities and a technical support package. For example, the Linux operating system, the most widely known open source project, is available from several vendors. Although most all operating environments have open source projects, open source is particularly common in the Unix/Linux/Java world; for example, the Apache Web server, sendmail mail server and JBoss application server. The Netscape Web browser was also turned into open source in 1998 and later released as the Mozilla browser for Windows, Linux and Mac (see Mozilla).
Open source developers claim that a broader group of programmers produces a more useful and more bug-free product for everyone, especially because more people are reviewing the code. Peer review, where another programmer examines the code of the original programmer, is a natural byproduct of open source. Peer review is an important safeguard against poorly written code, but is often given little attention by software companies. Naturally, vendors of proprietary software counter by saying that "too many cooks spoil the broth!" They say that having complete control over software ultimately results in better products.
A distinct advantage of open source software is that as long as there are a few devoted contributors, the program will continue to be supported for many years. In the commercial world, useful software may be abandoned if it does not generate sufficient profit compared to other products. For more information, visit www.opensource.org. Contrast with shared source
*Proprietary Software*
Software owned by an organization or individual. Contrast with public domain software.
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