3 ms·
Can you name some projects that have been scrubbed and handed over?
by rackjack 5y ago
Can you name some projects that have been scrubbed and handed over?
- derefr 5y agoThat would rather put to waste the effort of scrubbing them, no? A lot of the reason for the scrubbing isn't confidentiality of authorship per se (though obviously that's important), but rather optics. If people see a FOSS project described as being e.g. "created by the NSA", they'll get skeeved out of using it or contributing to it, even if the NSA is no longer involved (or is only involved in the sense that people who happen to work at the NSA contribute to the project as civilians, in their time off, without the goals of the NSA driving the contributions.) Most of these opened projects are just a result of people in the organizations seeing a genuinely-good project that was created as a byproduct of some project — probably by some contractors that were actually decent for a change — that nobody internally can get the resourcing to maintain any more, and so is going to be canned and replaced — and thinking they can advocate to give it a new life as a civilian asset. People thinking of the public good, basically. If revealing the origins of the work would void that benefit to the public good, they'll fastidiously avoid doing so.
- samus 5y agoSELinux was contributed by the NSA. Doesn't really stop people from using it.
- neatze 5y agoNot always, ATAK[1] was release open source on purpose so emergency services and civilians can use it too. [1] https://github.com/deptofdefense/AndroidTacticalAssaultKit-CIV https://github.com/deptofdefense/AndroidTacticalAssaultKit-C...
- badsectoracula 5y agoNSA opening up Ghidra didn't seem to stop it from becoming a very popular reverse engineering tool though.
- turk- 5y agoApache Nifi and Accumulo do come to mind, both out of NSA.
- znpy 5y agoAnd SELinux, still from the NSA.