At a time when banks are shedding IT roles by the dozen, it seems counter-intuitive that 83 per cent of the nation’s chief information officers should report they are confident about the future of their business to the extent that 45 per cent expect to hire IT staff in the first six months of the year. The question remains – is this a dead cat bounce?
The US Department of Defence has unequivocally backed the use of more open source software, describing the genre as one that provides advantages when it comes to achieving the department's objectives.
Chief information officer David Wennergren said in a memo(PDF), that to effectively achieve its objectives, the department had to develop and update its software capabilities faster than ever, anticipate new threats and respond to constantly changing requirements.
"The use of open source software can provide advantages in this regard," he wrote.
Six years ago, the Department had issued a memorandum about the use of open source software in the department; the new memo, issued on October 16, supercedes that advice.
In 2003, the Department had also issued a study(PDF) done by the private Mitre Corporation on its use of this genre of software.
Wennergren said that while there were many open source programs in operational use by the Department in both classified and unclassified areas, "Unfortunately, there have been misconceptions and misinterpretations of the existing laws, policies and regulations that deal with software and apply to OSS, that have hampered effective DoD use and development of OSS."
He attached a set of guidelines to clarify these misconceptions.
The first clarification states that in almost all cases, open source software meets the definition of "commercial computer software" and should be given appropriate statutory preference in line with existing directives.
Executive agencies were directed to take open source software into consideration when conducting market research for procuring property or services.
A listing of the positive aspects of open source software included the lower total cost of ownership, peer review that supported software reliability, the ability to modify source code as needed, and the ability to "test drive" the software with minimal costs and administrative delays.
The common misconception that changes made to code had to be released was clarified, with the correct reading that such changes have to be released only if distribution of the changed program is undertaken.
The Department is not the only US government entity that has more than a passing interest in open source software; the National Security Agency has its own security-enhanced Linux (SE Linux) project.
According to Russell Coker, one of the contributors to that project, SE Linux is a kernel patch to add security features, and patches to applications to allow them to determine the security domain in which to run processes.
Michelle Thomas
| Smelly Black Dog Internet is proud to announce that the company has signed up for Simtronic Technologies new wholesale broadband service as an…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
