A Chat with David M. Mihelcic, CTO at DISA Mihelcic is also helping lead an in-depth exploration of open-source software. He views it as a way to accelerate software development while cutting reuse costs and leveling the playing field among industry partners—big and small. DEFENSE SYSTEMS: What’s driving DISA’s move to open-source software? How will you ensure security is built into the products? So when you type www.disa.mil into your Web browser, DNS automatically provides your computer with the most up-to-date IP address of the server that has the Web page you need. Without DNS, the Internet would not operate. Without the Berkeley Internet Name Domain, there would be no DNS. Moving forward, my goal is for us to embrace open-source in our development. We will require our vendors to take all of the software they develop for us and place it in an open-source license so it will be available to everyone over time. Currently, if you’re a small company, it’s difficult to crack the marketplace because someone else owns the software and you can’t get access to it. Open-source is going to be a model moving forward because it’s going to help accelerate the development of software and it will help us with software reuse in the DOD. With open-source, it’s easy to share and reuse software. In some ways, open-source will enable us to enhance the security of software. With proprietary software, we have no insight as to how that software is built. With open-source, you can see the code. We’ll have complete visibility into the development process.
MIHELCIC: I believe open-source software is a tsunami that will overtake software globally. Driving it is the Linux operating system, as well as the fact that open-source software has really been at the heart of the Internet since the beginning. Things like the Domain Name System server software—the Internet itself would not run without that piece of open-source software.
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