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Having grown comfortable buying open-source programs, agencies begin openly publishing their own software code
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Earlier this year, when the Army Research Laboratory posted one of its venerable computer-aided design applications on the Web—including the source code—the program’s user base doubled almost overnight. Impressive as the software’s sudden popularity was, the laboratory wasn’t just interested in generating buzz. It was hoping volunteers would smooth out some of the rough edges on its 25-year-old Ballistic Research Laboratory Computer-Aided Design program.
After all, it worked for NASA. The agency’s World Wind satellite imagery program received just such a polish, courtesy of the public at large. Volunteer coders have contributed a number of improvements to World Wind since its release last summer as an open-source project. Likewise, when the Labor Department commissioned an e-learning content management system under an open-source license, a private company was able to improve on a basic design and offer the product back to various Labor agencies as a low-cost CMS.
In government, buying open source is one thing; developing open-source software is another. As agencies increasingly use low-cost or free programs honed by the open-source community—such as Apache Web server software and Perl programming language—they are also finding an open-source model can help develop their in-house applications.
“We are already seeing benefits from going open source,” said Lee Butler, an ARL program manager overseeing the BRL-CAD program. “We have several people working on the package for platforms we don’t currently support. There have been discussions of other people adding features that we have been wanting for several years but didn’t have funding for.”
Taxpaying programmers who lighten the government’s load? Welcome to a new kind of public-private partnership.
Tapping smart people
“Anything that is released under public license encourages reuse,” said Peter Gallagher, president of Development InfoStructure Corp. of Arlington, Va., which designed Labor’s content management software. Through that process comes a segment of users—either volunteers or companies—who are smart enough to improve a program significantly.
Sometimes these improvements are the product of simple philanthropy, coming from individuals who spend a few hours of personal time fixing an annoying bug. Other improvements come from companies that will eventually resell or service the software. By releasing the program’s source code under a well-crafted end-user license, an agency can reuse those changes and improvements, gratis.
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