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Comment by transpute | Hacker News Reader

Gov-acquired software can be architected to separate open-source components from classified components. This enables reuse of commercial (open or closed) software with the economics and rapid iteration of larger markets. For open-source components, this enables public collaboration on COTS, with non-public collaboration on classified GO(v)TS components.

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Pretty sure this is how BRL-CAD works, most of the software is open source, but there are a few classified extensions not released.

Thanks for the pointer, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRL-CAD

> The BRL-CAD source code repository is the oldest known public version-controlled codebase in the world that's still under active development, dating back to 1983-12-16 00:10:31 UTC.

Who is going to pay for this?

It's practical for software vendors on platforms [1] with virtualization, which have been gradually increasing over the past decade, including Windows, ChromeOS and Android.

[1] https://www.intel.com/content/dam/doc/case-study/enterprise-...

I'm a little lost, but it seems like you aren't - how does virtualization help with the actual work of splitting codebases into reusable components?

It doesn't help with doing any splitting (e.g. 20 years ago) but in current era where software is architected as micro-services and packaged for containers and VMs, software is more likely to be "born as reusable component".

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