Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
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, Informative) by MostCynical on Friday August 18 2017, @07:36AM (1 child)
"we've found a way to get geeks to do stuff for us, and we don't even have to pay"
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 18 2017, @11:47AM
whatever. I say scipy is a lot better than matlab because it is free and open source, and its writers use it so they benefit.