4 ms·

If you take money out of the equation, how will you convince the generals to select/help enhance your project when you cannot offer them a half million dollar a

by mikece 5y ago

If you take money out of the equation, how will you convince the generals to select/help enhance your project when you cannot offer them a half million dollar a year VP job at your software project when they retire? I'm not joking or being cynical, this is how DoD acquisition works: the revolving door from General to VP to civilian DoD manager to Senior VP for a defense contractor to whatever political appointment can be wrangled. I would LOVE to see OSS succeed at the five-sided puzzle palace but unless it's a civilian DoD contractor pushing it (and charging a boatload in the process) I'm just skeptical this will change much.

ritwikgupta 5y ago
In my opinion, the waves of change towards OSS are already being stirred by DoD military, civilian, and contractor personnel alike. I think this also aligns with industry adopting an open-source-first, provide services/hosting model as well. Anecdata, but most DoD program managers (CIV, CTR, or MIL) I know who work on software programs are generally driven by a need to solve the problems that they face. They gladly embrace open source solutions when they're made available easily.
- mistrial9 5y ago
  Q. How does the Open Source community benefit from this?
  - klyrs 5y ago
    wrong answers only: https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=95644#c4 https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=95644#c4
  - TAForObvReasons 5y ago
    A: Like with most of these programs, a few large organizations like google and microsoft stand to make a lot more money, but the people at the heart of the problem (the actual maintainers) stand to lose. AT the bare minimum, even doing it yourself, it costs more money to create a company and apply for 501C3 status than the paltry sums of money most projects receive in donations.
    - ritwikgupta 5y ago
      I completely agree that there's some overhead associated with my proposed route, and really only makes sense if your project is large enough such that this overhead is already being incurred. I believe there is still a large gap between projects supported by large tech companies and companies that fit this bill, and in that gap are projects that can benefit from this change.
      - mlinksva 5y ago
        There are also various c3 and c6 (and similar statuses outside the US) fiscal sponsors that may work for some projects that don't want to set up a whole organization.
  - ritwikgupta 5y ago
    By enabling a contractual path to supporting FOSS projects/foundations with real funding, the DoD becomes a valid (authorized) player to support the community. Additionally, the memo enables (and encourages) DoD personnel to contribute to open source software as part of their job's responsibilities. This brings thousands of developers into the OSS community who otherwise may not have engaged/may not have been allowed to engage. > (1) Government employees may contribute to existing OSS projects (including being the primary maintainer) as part of their official duties, so long as they consult with their supervisor first to ensure a common-sense approach for contributions that preserve Operations Security (OPSEC) and further the Government's interests.
  - astrea 5y ago
    Worst case? They don't. They adopt OSS where possible to cut costs, fluff resumes, reduce effort and it ends up in a private repo somewhere only a few people will ever see. Best case? They create a public fork that fixes bugs and makes it suitable for their use case. Source: anecdata from being in the kitchen while the sausage was made.
  - kodah 5y ago
    The same way Open Source benefits from the NSA's current and former contributions.
  - tannhaeuser 5y ago
    By having yet another discussion about OSI's version of the term "Open Source", and in particular about whether restriction in military use is covered by the "Fourth Freedom" (or wherever they postulate absence of purpose restrictions). NB there's no such thing as an "Open Source community", just individuals and orgs with different goals: some want to show off, some want additional maintainers if at all possible, some want to give away their complement, some want to establish an alternative to a competitor's product, some want to promote a language or format, some want xGPL for political reasons, yet others don't care at all
csdvrx 5y ago
I'm sure RedHat, Amazon or Microsoft could, and would.
walrus01 5y ago
the cynical side of me says "that's okay, the generals and such can still get cushy jobs at companies that manufacture hardware used by the DoD"
wolverine876 5y ago
> I'm not joking or being cynical, this is how DoD acquisition works What is that based on? Have you worked at DoD? Is there research supporting it? DoD acquisition depends much more on civilians, not uniformed officers, and then they must be part of the President's budget and, ultimately, Congress. Officers play a minor role.
- someguydave 5y ago
  Top officers select which civilians get control.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    Who did and when? Can you provide any evidence. Also, the oficers often have bad relationships with the President and the National Security Advisor and staff, not to mention Congressional committees - the officers certainly wouldn't select them if they could.
thisismyaccoun7 5y ago
Acquisition is not the only way DoD operates. I work at a Navy research center that's 3000+ employee strong and feeds all of DoD (we're a working capital fund, meaning we take customers to fund ourselves). In four years here, I've worked projects sponsored by Air Force, DHS/CBP, Navy, Marines, and two three letter agencies. There was no general involved in any of them, and I don't know any projects by coworkers that involved acquisition of technology. As for my projects, all except one still still in R&D have transitioned into production systems. All involve OSS to some degree. One was a design for a COTS multi source information fusion system meant to be deployed in the cloud and has all the open source tech there you'd expect, NiFi, Kafka, Spark, etc. My current project is a combination of us (correlation) and two contractors (separately IT and predictive models). Again, it's all the OSS and tech you'd expect to find in a real time analytics/tipping system and CI/CD pipeline/orchestration. I bring up my experience not to say you're wrong but to show there are other avenues it comes in. There are lots of research labs, and researchers aren't about buying software from contractors.
- Frost1x 5y ago
  >There are lots of research labs, and researchers aren't about buying software from contractors. In these DoD research environments (I've worked in them before), researchers typically aren't about building software, either. It's expensive, even if you hire the teams. Not always, but unless your research is technology driven, it tends to be about cutting corners on software and delivering research quality MVPs (semi-working prototypes) while all focus is on the research. You can forget overhead of best practice infrastructure for development/engineering, that's wasted overhead in some of those group's eyes. The more theoretical it is, the easier it is to get away with, the more applied, the less easy it is to handwave away reality. If you're at a heavily funded technology focused org like NRL (which the description sounds a lot like--neat stuff comes out of NRL), then this can be the case. There are, however, a lot of DoD funded research labs that are dumpster fires in terms of the software--NRL is almost the golden child compared to most of them. Again, in some such labs, a project may only have sufficient budget for 0.05 to 0.1 FTEs worth of software engineers. In such cases, 0.4 FTEs of software engineers can be considered a significant investment for a project, which is beyond laughable.
atonse 5y ago
How does this matter? You still have to pay these DoD contractors to implement the OSS stuff. It won't implement itself. License fees are a rounding error compared to the cost of personnel.
not2b 5y ago
Open source software needs support. They could use the old Cygnus model and have people who are paid well to fix everything the DoD needs fixed. The general in charge of the contract could move there on retirement.
kidme5 5y ago
Great example of this is Michael D. Griffin. He started the Space Development Agency for commercial launchers and then retired to join the Rocket Lab he enabled.
citizenpaul 5y ago
But they are prioritizing it! With what? Encouragement and Prioritization. It will be a huge succees /s

by mikece 5y ago

ritwikgupta 5y ago

In my opinion, the waves of change towards OSS are already being stirred by DoD military, civilian, and contractor personnel alike. I think this also aligns with industry adopting an open-source-first, provide services/hosting model as well. Anecdata, but most DoD program managers (CIV, CTR, or MIL) I know who work on software programs are generally driven by a need to solve the problems that they face. They gladly embrace open source solutions when they're made available easily.

mistrial9 5y ago
Q. How does the Open Source community benefit from this?
- klyrs 5y ago
  wrong answers only: https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=95644#c4 https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=95644#c4
- TAForObvReasons 5y ago
  A: Like with most of these programs, a few large organizations like google and microsoft stand to make a lot more money, but the people at the heart of the problem (the actual maintainers) stand to lose. AT the bare minimum, even doing it yourself, it costs more money to create a company and apply for 501C3 status than the paltry sums of money most projects receive in donations.
  - ritwikgupta 5y ago
    I completely agree that there's some overhead associated with my proposed route, and really only makes sense if your project is large enough such that this overhead is already being incurred. I believe there is still a large gap between projects supported by large tech companies and companies that fit this bill, and in that gap are projects that can benefit from this change.
    - mlinksva 5y ago
      There are also various c3 and c6 (and similar statuses outside the US) fiscal sponsors that may work for some projects that don't want to set up a whole organization.
- ritwikgupta 5y ago
  By enabling a contractual path to supporting FOSS projects/foundations with real funding, the DoD becomes a valid (authorized) player to support the community. Additionally, the memo enables (and encourages) DoD personnel to contribute to open source software as part of their job's responsibilities. This brings thousands of developers into the OSS community who otherwise may not have engaged/may not have been allowed to engage. > (1) Government employees may contribute to existing OSS projects (including being the primary maintainer) as part of their official duties, so long as they consult with their supervisor first to ensure a common-sense approach for contributions that preserve Operations Security (OPSEC) and further the Government's interests.
- astrea 5y ago
  Worst case? They don't. They adopt OSS where possible to cut costs, fluff resumes, reduce effort and it ends up in a private repo somewhere only a few people will ever see. Best case? They create a public fork that fixes bugs and makes it suitable for their use case. Source: anecdata from being in the kitchen while the sausage was made.
- kodah 5y ago
  The same way Open Source benefits from the NSA's current and former contributions.
- tannhaeuser 5y ago
  By having yet another discussion about OSI's version of the term "Open Source", and in particular about whether restriction in military use is covered by the "Fourth Freedom" (or wherever they postulate absence of purpose restrictions). NB there's no such thing as an "Open Source community", just individuals and orgs with different goals: some want to show off, some want additional maintainers if at all possible, some want to give away their complement, some want to establish an alternative to a competitor's product, some want to promote a language or format, some want xGPL for political reasons, yet others don't care at all

csdvrx 5y ago

I'm sure RedHat, Amazon or Microsoft could, and would.

walrus01 5y ago

the cynical side of me says "that's okay, the generals and such can still get cushy jobs at companies that manufacture hardware used by the DoD"

wolverine876 5y ago

> I'm not joking or being cynical, this is how DoD acquisition works What is that based on? Have you worked at DoD? Is there research supporting it? DoD acquisition depends much more on civilians, not uniformed officers, and then they must be part of the President's budget and, ultimately, Congress. Officers play a minor role.

someguydave 5y ago
Top officers select which civilians get control.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  Who did and when? Can you provide any evidence. Also, the oficers often have bad relationships with the President and the National Security Advisor and staff, not to mention Congressional committees - the officers certainly wouldn't select them if they could.

thisismyaccoun7 5y ago

Acquisition is not the only way DoD operates. I work at a Navy research center that's 3000+ employee strong and feeds all of DoD (we're a working capital fund, meaning we take customers to fund ourselves). In four years here, I've worked projects sponsored by Air Force, DHS/CBP, Navy, Marines, and two three letter agencies. There was no general involved in any of them, and I don't know any projects by coworkers that involved acquisition of technology. As for my projects, all except one still still in R&D have transitioned into production systems. All involve OSS to some degree. One was a design for a COTS multi source information fusion system meant to be deployed in the cloud and has all the open source tech there you'd expect, NiFi, Kafka, Spark, etc. My current project is a combination of us (correlation) and two contractors (separately IT and predictive models). Again, it's all the OSS and tech you'd expect to find in a real time analytics/tipping system and CI/CD pipeline/orchestration. I bring up my experience not to say you're wrong but to show there are other avenues it comes in. There are lots of research labs, and researchers aren't about buying software from contractors.

Frost1x 5y ago
>There are lots of research labs, and researchers aren't about buying software from contractors. In these DoD research environments (I've worked in them before), researchers typically aren't about building software, either. It's expensive, even if you hire the teams. Not always, but unless your research is technology driven, it tends to be about cutting corners on software and delivering research quality MVPs (semi-working prototypes) while all focus is on the research. You can forget overhead of best practice infrastructure for development/engineering, that's wasted overhead in some of those group's eyes. The more theoretical it is, the easier it is to get away with, the more applied, the less easy it is to handwave away reality. If you're at a heavily funded technology focused org like NRL (which the description sounds a lot like--neat stuff comes out of NRL), then this can be the case. There are, however, a lot of DoD funded research labs that are dumpster fires in terms of the software--NRL is almost the golden child compared to most of them. Again, in some such labs, a project may only have sufficient budget for 0.05 to 0.1 FTEs worth of software engineers. In such cases, 0.4 FTEs of software engineers can be considered a significant investment for a project, which is beyond laughable.

atonse 5y ago

How does this matter? You still have to pay these DoD contractors to implement the OSS stuff. It won't implement itself. License fees are a rounding error compared to the cost of personnel.

not2b 5y ago

Open source software needs support. They could use the old Cygnus model and have people who are paid well to fix everything the DoD needs fixed. The general in charge of the contract could move there on retirement.

kidme5 5y ago

Great example of this is Michael D. Griffin. He started the Space Development Agency for commercial launchers and then retired to join the Rocket Lab he enabled.

citizenpaul 5y ago

But they are prioritizing it! With what? Encouragement and Prioritization. It will be a huge succees /s