Defense Department: Choose 'OSS solutions before buying proprietary'
Posted by Luke Fretwell · February 7, 2022
The U.S. Defense Department released a memo that gives agency direction on open source software usage, citing a preference for and the benefits of its adoption.
From the January 24 memo:
The Department must follow an “Adopt, Buy, Create” approach to software preferentially adopting existing government or OSS solutions before buying proprietary offerings, and only creating new non-commercial software when no off-the-shelf solutions are adequate.
As “an experiment in open source,” the Defense Department launched Code.mil in 2017.
“This is a direct avenue for the department to tap into a worldwide community of developers to collectively speed up and strengthen the software development process,” said the Defense Deparment at the time.
“Modern software is open sourced software (OSS),” says the Defense Department on its Code.mil website. “The creative contribution of individual developers to help solve complex problems of impact is largely untapped by DoD. We must more actively participate in the open source and free software communities if we are to truly reap the benefits of OSS.”
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