Defense Department Needs to Embrace Open Source or Military Will Lose Tech Superiority

The Center for a New American Security warns that if the DoD doesn't embrace open source, it will be 'left behind'

The Department of Defense needs to move past open source myths that have been debunked and jump on the open source bandwagon or the Department of Defense (DoD) and U.S. military will not be able to maintain tech superiority, warns a Center for a New American Security (CNAS) report.

Open source software is used in the Pentagon, which should strongly suggest that open source is not an unsecure and vulnerable hot mess. Yet the DoD overall is stuck in the past, clinging to “erroneous and unfounded misunderstandings about open source software.” Those misconceptions often mean open source is not even considered as a viable option for DoD software projects.

The report pointed out that open source licensing does not mean that any changes to code must be shared publicly. “The ability to see source code is not the same as the ability to modify deployed software in production.” Additionally, using some open source components is not the same thing as creating an entire system that is open-sourced...