In January 2009, in a memorandum to the heads of executive departments and agencies on Transparency and Open Government, President Obama pledged a commitment to openness, saying, “Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in government.”
The concepts of openness and community participation in government are not only the basis of democracy, but also the underpinnings of open source. In some areas of government these notions have already been applied to technology, and open, by-the-people IT initiatives are already underway.
Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) for example, is a National Security Agency security mechanism that was enhanced and integrated into Linux by Red Hat. In late 2000, it was released under the General Public License (GPL) by the National Security Agency’s Office of Information Assurance. It has been further developed by the open source community in collaboration with the NSA. SELinux as it exists today is such an effective security tool that it is not only embedded in Red Hat’s flagship Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but has become a part of baseline Linux as well.
More recently, the Department of Defense last year launched Forge.mil, a Web site where developers can use the community-based principles of open source to work collaboratively on projects for the Department of Defense. The site incorporates the DoD’s security requirements while also offering members project management and other collaboration tools. It currently has 6000 members and 300 registered projects.
“We’re trying to change the culture of government so the thought process is to engage. It’s not an add-on, it’s how we do business now,” GSA associate administrator David McClure said speaking at a government Input event in June 2010. “There’s a lot of value in allowing citizens to feel like they actually are engaging with the government, including the increase in ideas brought to the table.”
At NASA, the Nebula open-source cloud computing project was created as an alternative to building costly data centers to accommodate NASA data processing needs. Nebula uses virtualization and open-source components to provide high-performance, instantly provisioned computing, storage and network resources to NASA’s research community. Using Nebula, NASA scientists and researchers can share large, complex data sets with external partners and the public. Last summer, Nebula became a member of OpenStack, a consortium of companies that will play a key role in driving interoperability and portability for the cloud, essentially creating a cloud stack.
According to NASA, “Nebula opens the doors to crowd sourcing and collaboration with powerful, economical computing resources that are built for government. The flexible capability that Nebula offers hastens the pace of innovation, collaboration, and new breakthroughs in a way that we see everyday in the private sector. By working with the open source community and operating in a fully transparent manner, Nebula continues to build upon NASA’s heritage of forging new ground and sharing its results with other government Agencies.”1
In March of 2009, the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) took a step toward open source as well when it formed a partnership with the Open Source Software Institute (OSSI). The partnership enables the federal government, non-profits, academia and industry to collaboratively research and develop software for use by the DoD, other branches of government and the public. The partnership initially focused on releasing an open source version of DISA’s Corporate Management Information System (CMIS), a Web-based workforce management tool that contains approximately 50 applications. In announcing the agreement, DISA officials said that other agencies have wanted to adopt the CMIS, and creating an open-source CMIS was the best way to allow other agencies to use it while at the same time leveraging ideas from other users to improve the system.
The military generally needs software changed quickly, but proprietary programs must be modified by the software’s owners, which can take a long time,” said Joshua L. Davis, co-founder of the Military Open Source Software (Mil-OSS) working group, and a GTRI research scientist.2 “Open-source changes can be tackled by any member of a programming community and are usually delivered quickly, sometimes in hours.”
Even the historically clandestine intelligence community has taken a page from open source. Intellipedia is a Wikipedia-like online system for collaborative data-sharing by the United States intelligence community. It was started in 2005 with access to the system given to all 16 agencies of the US intelligence community. There are three levels of classification – top secret, secret, and sensitive but unclassified – and users can access the appropriate wikis depending on their clearance levels.
For all the examples of open source technology making inroads into government, there are still instances where opportunities for open source principles have been identified but not yet implemented.
One stumbling block to governmental efficiency that theoretically spans many agencies is the IT procurement process. The National Research Council’s report, “Achieving Effective Acquisition of Information Technology in the Department of Defense” outlined many of the problems with the government’s multi-year purchase plans, whose time frames are too slow for today’s environment. Congress acknowledged the problem also in section 804 of last year’s DoD appropriations bill, calling for alternative acquisition strategies including:
- early and continual involvement of the user;
- multiple, rapidly executed increments or releases of capability;
- early, successive prototyping to support an evolutionary approach;
- and a modular, open-systems approach.
Continual involvement of the user, successive prototyping, and an evolutionary approach are all concepts that ring true in the open source community-based culture. The recommended modular, open-systems approach suggests a component-based infrastructure, which would make it easier to change one part without disrupting the whole.
Complaints about the IT procurement process are not new. Identifying these pain points might be the Congress’s first step toward resolving them. Meanwhile, Forge.mil, Nebula and some of the other initiatives underway are examples of how agencies are moving government IT forward despite cumbersome procurement processes.
“I would say that open source software can be made to be more secure than proprietary,” GTRI’s Davis explained in an interview with Network World3 “With proprietary, it is all based on trust. Without the source you never really know. With the source I don’t have to trust you to trust the software you wrote.”
As for open source, there are already signs that more open source is in the United States government’s future. Red Hat partners Carahsoft Technology Corp. and DLT Solutions have both been awarded Blanket Purchase Agreements through the DoD’s Enterprise Software Initiative to provide open source solutions – including Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware – to the DoD community. These Blanket Purchase Agreements are both five-year contracts, meaning the government is still in a multi-year mindset in its approach to procurement. In this case though, it is five years of moving toward a more transparent, open, nimble, lower cost government architecture.
In conclusion, while the government might not historically be associated with cutting-edge IT, government agencies have fostered a lot of innovation in recent years. And it’s not only coming from the scientific areas of government where it might be expected. There is still work to be done. Procurement processes that sometimes seem glacial may slow modernization. But with recognition by congress that procurement needs to be overhauled, even that stumbling block to modernization may soon be eroding. Red Hat can now be found in most government agencies, and more significantly, the concepts of open source, seem poised to transform the way agencies approach and enhance IT, as well as the means by which government can work collaboratively both internally and with external resources.
1 http://www.nasa.gov/open/plan/nebula.html
2 http://gtresearchnews.gatech.edu/open-source-military/
3 Network World, “U.S. Military Adopts More Open Source: Is that secure enough for you?,” July 27, 2010, http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/us-military-adopts-more-open-source-secure-en
