The use of open source software might seem paradoxical inside the Defense Department or at best, a relatively recent development.
It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the government has only recently discovered open source software, said Dan Risacher, associate director for information enterprise strategy and policy in the DOD Chief Information Officer’s office. Keep reading →
Open source software has long been touted as the antidote to monolithic, buggy, and security-challenged software packages developed by the industry’s 800-pound gorillas.
But a presentation from the National Security Agency (NSA) during a technology symposium last week presented a stark warning for the proponents of open source software: Get your house in order because sooner or later government and industry customers are going to demand verifiable information about where your software came from, who developed it, who had access to the code, and whether or not you can vouch for its security. Keep reading →
A new narrative is emerging in government innovation and it goes something like this: Truly great leaps in innovation are almost never possible with monolithic, proprietary approaches to software development, and many small innovations, when taken together, often lead to large, game-changing paradigms.
That was the message delivered by both government and private sector IT professionals at the Red Hat Government Symposium on Oct. 23. The event, sponsored by Red Hat Inc. focused on the importance of transparency, open sharing, and collaboration to the success of the Obama Administration’s Open Government Initiative, as well as how open source software can help agencies accomplish their missions in a time of dwindling resources. Keep reading →
There’s a battle brewing in the agency IT world, and for once, it has nothing to do with cloud computing — at least on the surface.
This fight is over hypervisors – a key component of a virtualization strategy and one that forms the basis for a successful private or hybrid cloud implementation. Specific battle lines are drawing around the various hypervisor “flavors” and which, if any, federal IT teams should standardize upon. Keep reading →