The good people at O’Reilly have posted my Open Source in Government talk at OSCON 2009 on blip.tv. It’s also on YouTube. I’ll admit to cringing a bit when I started watching, but I’m pretty happy with how it all went. Here are the slides.
In the panel afterward, someone asked my why open source developers should be helping companies make money on open source software, or helping the military-industrial complex or the prison system. I completely sympathize. There’s no reason whatever that someone should help the military or the prison system if they don’t want to. Those were just the examples that I used. There are many opportunities to work with the government elsewhere, especially at the local level. A good way to start is by finding something that’s annoying or broken in your local schools or library, and use open source software to fix it. Open Source for America should be making it easier for people to find these opportunities. But more on that later.
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Two soldiers in a hastily built watchtower.
In Iraq, Sergeant 1st Class Martin Stadtler had nothing. He was stationed near Mosul, at a base that covers 24 square kilometers. Surrounding the base was a wall, and at intervals along that wall stood watchtowers. Those towers were improvised; they were large concrete water pipes, stood on their ends.
Inside each tower is a pair of soldiers. They’re watching for insurgents. To communicate with the home base, they had standard-issue tactical radios. Unfortunately, these radios couldn’t reach home base — the base was too big. Soldiers had to play a game of Telephone to reach the base: one tower radios the next until they are finally in range of the home base. Obviously, this would not do.
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Using open source software, the National Security Agency was able to gather a community of professional and amateur security experts together to make unprecedented security protections available to public.
The National Security Agency has a mission. It is not just the nation’s code keeper and code breaker, but it must ensure the security of the nation’s digital infrastructure. Ironically, it had a security problem: the ecosystem for software that was keeping top secret information secret was deeply broken. There was little competition, no innovation and this essential software was expensive, slow to market, and antiquated.
Multi-Level Security, or MLS, is a complex problem: how to allow data with many different security classifications exist on the same machine? MLS software is difficult to get right, and easy to get wrong. It is subject to a stringent certification process. Although useful in certain areas of the private sector, there’s really only one customer for this kind of software: government. Once you’ve deployed MLS software, it’s very difficult to move to another solution as every MLS system was different. These are near-perfect conditions for very expensive, proprietary software that doesn’t innovate.
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Using open source software, the US Navy was able to standardize the shipboard systems on its new destroyers, reducing the complexity of the ship’s systems and their reliance on proprietary real-time software. Wall Street now uses this same technology to execute orders predictably, without relying on vendor-specific hardware and software.
Every ship in the Navy is a floating data center. Computers run the ship, handle navigation, and track inventory. There are mail servers, databases, and everything else you would expect in a corporate data center. Unlike a corporation, though, the Navy also has weapons systems and radars. These systems are unique, since they must perform in a very predictable way: when you pull a trigger, you can’t wait for the computer to send an email. It has to happen right away. This determinism in a computer system is called “real-time” performance.
The Navy has already saved millions by moving to industry-standard computers and commercially available software. This real-time requirement flew in the face of this: the software is very expensive, and often very proprietary. Frequently, real-time systems require specialized hardware and specialized software, which was also expensive. These new systems also meant special training for the operators. So this meant two sets of infrastructure: one to regular applications, one to run the real-time applications. This was expensive and inefficient, especially since a Navy ship is so constrained by the lack of space. It would be much easier to have the regular computers handling the real-time work.
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If this is the future of computing as a whole, why should U.S. health IT be an exception? Indeed, given the scientific and ethical complexities of medicine, it is hard to think of any other realm where a commitment to transparency and collaboration in information technology is more appropriate. And, in fact, the largest and most successful example of digital medicine is an open-source program called VistA…
– Phillip Longman, “Code Red“
For a number of reasons, I’m fascinated by the fight over the <video> tag in HTML5 as related by Ryan Paul of Ars Technica – and not just because I like the idea of not having to install a plugin to watch video online.
On the technical side, it’s mind-boggling to think about the possible consequences of some of these decisions. You have Google suggesting that the wrong codec would demand more bandwidth to run YouTube than is available on the entire Internet. That’s a big number. I am sincerely glad I’m not the engineer who has to manage changes at that scale.
More optimistically, you have the prospect of having native support for video in every browser, without paying or contracting with Adobe for the privilege. That’s exciting.
The friendly rivalry between Theora and H.264 is also neat to watch. I think it’s great that the Theora folks are responding to Apple and Google’s quality and performance concerns. It sounds like addressing their objections has made for a better standard.
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Open standards are motherhood and apple pie – they ensure a level playing field in which many implementations can compete against each other, keep the barrier to participation low for newcomers, will outlive any given company, and ensure that systems can communicate with each other with a minimum of fuss. In other words, open standards create efficient and durable markets.
Open standards also keep costs low for buyers, who have many options and a minimum of friction when they want to switch from one implementation to another. Because the standard is open, there is no danger of being locked into a single vendor since anyone can create a new implementation against the standard. Since open standards will always exist, there’s no danger of the standard disappearing, becoming unsupported, or being later made proprietary. An open standard will encourage these efficient, durable markets for as long as the standard is useful.
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I'm the Chief Technology Strategist for the Red Hat US Public Sector group, an open source and free culture advocate, a picky drinker, an amateur aesthete, and a dog enthusiast.
