I'm don't about the hesitation part, I see more and more everyday...
With some hesitation, the Defense Department is starting to give open source products a whirl.
One day a few years ago in the bowels of U.S. Central Command's central headquarters in Tampa, Fla., something new awaited the techies whosupport the Global Command and Control System. The military relies on GCCS-Joint to present a unified global picture of itself - how ready its troops are to fight, where they're located, intelligence reports and more. Its primary residence is CENTCOM.
The new thing was a situational awareness piece of hardware and software called the Joint Range Extension, which tracks airborne assets. Andrew Seely, a GCCS lead system administrator contractor, recalls that it "just showed up one day, bang, it's in the rack.
"It was literally a black box . . . no documentation, no experience, no knowledge and big, fat serial cables coming out the back," Seely says. It could interface with the GCCS system, but it soon stopped working, and no one in Tampa knew why. Turns out the internal structure was proprietary, and CENTCOM hadn't paid for access to the technical documentation. So, the malfunction was a mystery. To fix it, system administrators had to hack their way in to find the bug causing the system crash.
That's what can happen (and happens often enough) when the government pays the private sector to develop an information technology system but doesn't pay for access to the source code or the technical documentation. Often when it does pay for the code, it can afford only a limited-distribution license. Companies charge extra to write documentation or hand over what they consider their intellectual property.
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