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The Army's decision to formalize its open-source software development policy is paying off. At least two major projects have benefited from the policy announced this spring, with open source helping to speed development and save taxpayer dollars, according to officials from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory.
"Open source can reduce development time and lower overall costs, resulting in a win-win situation for the Army and the U.S. taxpayer," said ARL Deputy Chief Scientist Mary Harper.
When it comes to defense agencies embracing open-source software development, the Army is hardly at the cutting edge. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency paved the way with the launch of its GitHub open-source community in 2014. The Navy issued a guidance on the use of open-source code as early as 2007.
Still, ARL leaders say they expect to reap big benefits by formalizing their approach to open source, a term used to describe software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be shared and modified.
[...] Looking ahead, ARL leaders say their explicit embrace of an open-source approach should be a boon to the other military services. But they aren't yet offering insight into just what those evolutions might look like.
"It's extremely difficult to guess how the code might be used or leveraged by others," Harper said. "ARL's belief is that [the U.S. Army Tank Automotive Research Development and Engineering Center] and other groups will leverage the code as they see fit to support mission and potentially improve ARL's code at the same time. This has been the case for extremely popular open-source projects such as the Linux kernel, and ARL hopes to leverage this power as well."
Source: https://www.federaltimes.com/it-networks/2017/08/14/army-reaps-benefits-of-open-source-policy/
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Friday August 18 2017, @03:49AM (5 children)
You know? Not many geeks are able to develop and/or test the software without the appropriate hardware.
So, unless you provide a tank to 400-1200** [pingdom.com] contributors, I doubt you are going to... mmm... leverage the same popularity as the Linux kernel.
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** those numbers are 5 years old
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 18 2017, @04:24AM (1 child)
Tank emulator.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 18 2017, @07:50PM
bzflag?
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Friday August 18 2017, @04:34AM
*cough*China*cough*
Not to mention, the software can give pretty nifty clues as to how the hardware works.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Friday August 18 2017, @07:35AM (1 child)
Yeah, I think that whole idea will tank.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 18 2017, @12:51PM
Is that all the tanks we get?