Comment by wolverine876 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wolverine876 | Hacker News Reader

Real challenges to FOSS in the military (or other large organizations) would seem to be long-term stability of features, and implementation of enhancements and fixes:

A commercial vendor works to please large customers, such as the military. If the big customer needs a feature supported long term (remember that military systems commonly last decades), the vendor makes it happen. If the big customer needs a specific enhancement or fix, that is a priority for the vendor, and if it's needed ASAP, that can happen too.

FOSS communities are a bit more independent-minded (which I generally like) and some developers won't want to help the military for ideological reasons. Communication with FOSS communities is much different than communication with commercial vendors, and much less efficient.

I think DoD needs access to paid, professional developers who can provide those services for FOSS. That could be someone like Red Hat, it could be outside consultants, it could be internal developers, they could hire members of the FOSS community. Also, DoD will need to fork projects when the community is uninterested in a DoD priority.

And there's another major problem: Imagine bombs are falling, people are dying, national security priorities are being lost - and the military needs a fix or enhancement now. Submit a bug to bugzilla and wait? Email the dev list? IRC? They need someone to call, who can answer the phone and get things done.

I can't imagine that there's a FOSS project which directly provides mission-critical, "press this button to stop the war" functionality.

I think there are still one or two steps/precedents needed from this memo to a real pipeline of FOSS projects getting DoD funding, but these projects would be foundational things like video transports protocols, container orchestration tools, etc. (to name a few).

In addition, if there is a mission-critical fix which needs to be made to a project, this memo authorizes + encourages DoD personnel to contribute to FOSS projects!

> Employee participation in OSS projects used by DoD is often in the Government's interest, and is typically a legitimate use of government resources when the Government uses the software in question, either directly, as a component of a larger government system, or as a component of underlying government infrastructure.

> (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.

> if there is a mission-critical fix which needs to be made to a project, this memo authorizes + encourages DoD personnel to contribute to FOSS projects!

Yes, but that is rarely a means to get anything done urgently.

> I can't imagine that there's a FOSS project which directly provides mission-critical, "press this button to stop the war" functionality.

Of course. You have to do

sudo ./war.sh -f --command STOP

Nah, it'd definitely be running as a systemd service.

Thousands perish as I try to remember if it is

systemctl war.service stop

or

systemctl stop war.service

Here you go: https://sites.gatech.edu/falconview/

> I think DoD needs access to paid, professional developers who can provide those services for FOSS. That could be someone like Red Hat, it could be outside consultants, it could be internal developers, they could hire members of the FOSS community. Also, DoD will need to fork projects when the community is uninterested in a DoD priority.

That much is a given, and it was already true today. Even if DoD would do nothing more than contract for outsiders to build its software, the people writing the contracts need to have access to government staff who understand software (i.e. actual developers).

> And there's another major problem: Imagine bombs are falling, people are dying, national security priorities are being lost - and the military needs a fix or enhancement now. Submit a bug to bugzilla and wait? Email the dev list? IRC? They need someone to call, who can answer the phone and get things done.

I regret to inform you that the military is already used to this taking months and years. The Navy was unable to field a COVID tracking software tool in time for it to matter when the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt got sidelined by COVID, the needed tool ended up being fielded by Defense Digital Service who operate under different authorities.

But even if we pretend the wider military could do need this, that's the internal developers you already mentioned (like DDS), or developers already on contract to provide urgent support. But that's separate from FOSS vs. proprietary. If anything, the farther we get into an "everything-as-a-Service" model, the less likely it will be that a company whose product is not open source would be able to meet those kind of urgent timeframes, because making changes willy-nilly to their -aaS product may risk their FedRAMP certification and DISA P-ATO.

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