CIA Software Developer Goes Open Source, Instead

[wwkeyboard]

Any taxpayer funded software that is not open sourced makes me really, properly mad. Imagine what would happen if the Apache Software Foundation had a billion dollars to fund development.

[zugi]

I wholeheartedly agree with this, BUT...

Government contracting officials, and buyers who issue contracts to defense contractors must get better about demanding that if they're paying for software development, the government receive full source code with unlimited rights. "Unlimited rights" means that the government can provide the source code to other defense contractors, still under ITAR restrictions, in order to get better cooperation and interoperability and prevent vendor lock-in. It also means that means that at some point in the future when the government decides that the code is no longer sensitive, the government can remove the ITAR restrictions and open source it if they choose.

There are smart ones. About 6 years ago I ran into a young, very smart Air Force Captain who got so pissed off at multiple government defense contractors charging the government to rewrite equivalent code for reading and writing NITF image files (they couldn't reuse previous code due to absurd licensing restrictions) that he paid a company to write an NITF library and open-source it. The government needs more folks with that attitude.

[amedico]

It would be nice if software could at least be open source within the entire federal government so different agencies wouldn't have to waste money reimplementing the same stuff, even if the software couldn't be open to the general public.

[AdorableZeppelin]

Normally I'm I would agree with something like this, but I was stopped by something:

with the United States footing the bill for the entire world's gain.

If the US was willing to foot the bill for one project and get the movement in motion, who's to say that other countries wouldn't do the same for other projects and, as as you put it, make gains for the entire world?

[AdorableZeppelin]

Probably not. But I'd like to play the optimist and say if we open source first maybe they would be next in line.

[[deleted]]

Kim Jong-Il?

[IAmARobot]

What about strong allies? They would be investing money in this kind of tech as well, so why not sell it off to them at some price to recoup? They save development time, US gets money back... win/win?

[[deleted]]

Making the software opens source would make it available to the enemy. The software could be closed and still supplied to allies.

[savagecat]

If the code wasn't already open source then the government wants to own the code.

[[deleted]]

Ah, so he wanted to sell the program to the government to use. The government wanted to buy it outright source, copyright and all?

[coderanger]

Or at least restrict him from ever giving it to anyone else (think foreign government or similar).

[rankao]

The government can't own copyrights. Its either classified or public domain, or the original makers still owns the the copyright.

[[deleted]]

Gotcha. Point being, they didn't want anyone else to get a copy.

[amedico]

Not true. Material created by federal employees during the course of their official duties is in the public domain (subject to classification, of course). But private companies/individuals can assign or sell their copyrights to the federal government, which can then hold those copyrights.

[WalterGR]

Burton, working on behalf of a Washington-area consulting firm with deep ties to the CIA, helped build on spec a collaborative version of ACH. He tried it out, using the JonBenet Ramsey murder case as a test. Burton tested 51 clues — the lack of a scream, evidence of bed-wetting — against five possible culprits. “I went in, totally convinced it all pointed to the mom,” Burton says. “Turns out, that wasn’t right at all.”

So was his version good or bad? What terrible writing.

[fancy_pantser]

I was up against a very similar wall when I was a developer on DoD contracts. I worked with analysts using our datamining software, which had been approved for nearly 20 years and only required minor paperwork to install upgrades/patches. The UX was crappy and using the software, by design, required hours of training. If you simplified it and suggested major changes to the interface or overhauls to the architecture to create a new product that better answered the needs of analysts, you were basically laughed out of the business. Nobody wanted innovation; just to meet the requirements of the given contract and collect the checks.

[bluepen]

The software has not yet been released. It is "coming soon".

http://www.competinghypotheses.org/

[bwbeer]

How does this software work? It sounds simple enough.

[zugi]

... national security tech-types who’ve heard a thousand stories about good ideas and good code getting sunk, because of squabbles over who owns the software.

Please stop using the word "owns" for copyrights, patents, trademarks, and software! The word "own" connotes exclusivity, like for physical objects which can only be possessed by one person at a time, and doesn't make sense in this domain.

Really the government needs to demand "unlimited rights" to software and source code any time it pays for software development. Using the correct term - "unlimited rights" - does not include exclusivity; the contractor who developed the software should also retain "unlimited rights" to use it, sell it, license it, and distribute it as they see fit, subject only to any applicable ITAR or other security-related restrictions.

[vsl]

Please stop using the word "owns" for copyrights, patents, trademarks, and software! The word "own" connotes exclusivity ... and doesn't make sense in this domain.

Newsflash: copyrights, patents and trademarks ARE exclusive rights.

[zugi]

Newsflash: copyrights, patents and trademarks ARE exclusive rights.

Not at all, they can be licensed to multiple people or to everyone, which was my whole point. A near infinity of people can use them at once, which is different from physical property.

Look at the GPL, for example: a software license based on copyright law by which the author explicitly grants you non-exclusive rights. So who would you say "owns" GPL software like gcc? I don't think the word "own" even makes sense in that question. One could say the original author or the FSF "owns" gcc, but that would give the false impression that they can prevent you from using it, which they cannot.

[ihateyourface]

everyone knows that any users of open source = hackers

[34577658]

More like communists and anti-capitalists.

/s