Code.mil – An experiment in open source at the Department of Defense
This is a huge battle I am in the middle of fighting right now. I am working on a project that is extremely late and we are having all kinds of political pressure put on us by very senior people. Meanwhile their damn IA staff won't approve any of the tools or hardware that I <i>need</i> to help us get the job done.<p>One huge obstacle to open-source anything in DoD is the attitudes of their information assurance professionals. I have been told by numerous DoD IA people that "Open Source is bad because anyone can put anything in it" and "We'd rather have someone to call." I understand the second point -- we honestly don't have the time to run every last issue to ground and it's probably better if we do have some professional support for some of our most important tools. But the first just boggles my mind.<p>But the IA pros are, as a group, schizophrenic, because <i>somehow</i> people are getting things by them anyway. The system I'm working on has Python as a build dependency. The devs are creating reports using Jupyter notebooks.<p>Basically the DoD needs to stop being so damn obstinate about open source.