'Open-sourcing' key to the high-tech war against terrorism

good article on open source intelligence a few notes on the open source software comments of Paul McNabb, chief security architect at Argus Systems:
"As opposed to Sun and Red Hat, both outspoken champions of the open source movement, McNabb was willing to point out its disadvantages. “It does dampen certain types of [software] development by eliminating the financial reward,” he said. “And it results in software with no clear ownership and responsibility, so you can’t hold a company’s feet to the fire the way you can with a proprietary company.”

1. Financial Reward: the real money in [government] software deployment is in integration, maintenance and support. Financial rewards and incentives are still there for proprietary vendors, just keep innovating and developing new ideas versus milking old IP and customer lock-in.

2. Ownership: ownership of open source is clear, it is in the copyright agreement and grants rights to users of that code. The copyright agreement gives any organization the right to use and modify code, in effect making it 'yours'. Only if you distribute that code (say Walmart giving it to IBM) then you must provide that code back to the code-community.

3. Yelling:  having a software vendor to yell at and complain might feel good and they may even listen to you. But unless it's a critical bug fix and they are setup to send them out, you'll be waiting a while for that fix or new feature. Also end of the day you've already paid for that software, you are just asking a proprietary to do more work uncompensated. At least with Open Source you as the owner of a system can see code and modify it, a good thing if your in the middle of a crisis. 

Responsibility for deploying systems is (as always) with the group that deployed it (all EULA's  deny any responsibility for their software malfunctioning - use at your own risk, you have no recourse beyond the cost of the license (no pain and suffering...))

At least with open source you have options and flexibility to reengineer code as required by a mission versus waiting for a bug fix or new version.