OSCON06: Open Technology Development

John Scott's talk on Open Technology Development: Open Source and the U.S. Government was about how to change the culture in DoD and the U.S. Government in general to foster better software development, be it in-house or contracted development. Not surprisingly, canvassing DoD he found huge interoperability problems, lots of re-invention, lots of failed projects, and that those in the field use whatever it takes to get the job done rather than try and do it by the book. This is entirely a problem of policy, not a lack of technology. So DoD is looking to the open source software model to provide a faster development process. The current acquisition process for DoD software fosters interoperability, stifles innovation, and is far from cost effective (for all the contracts DoD has with PeopleSoft they could have acquired the company). Worse, many opponents "out develop" the DoD because the process is so slow. So how does one go about creating a community that develops software collaboratively across all of DoD? First, you rename "open source" to "open technology development" so as not to scare those afraid of open source. Next, you need a policy that allows and even encourages it. (The part he is currently working on.) It can be done, there are some isolated projects that DoD has contributed a lot too such as openssl, geo-spatial tools, solid modeling, and secure linux.

Scott co-authored a report entitled OTD Road Map that outlines why and how DoD should create a DoD open source software development community. On 14 September 2006 there is a conference by the Association for Enterprise Integration on Open Source New DoD Paradigm, or Business as Usual?. Some other related sites are Open Technology Development and Governement Forge.