Military enlists open source community

The U.S. Defense Department is enlisting an open source approach to software development -- an about-face for such a historically top-down organization.

In recent weeks, the military has launched a collaborative platform called Forge.mil for its developers to share software, systems components and network services. The agency also signed an agreement with the Open Source Software Institute to allow 50 internally developed workforce management applications to be licensed to other government agencies, universities and companies.

Taken together, the two developments show how the Defense Department is trying to take advantage of Web-based communities to speed up software development and reduce its costs.

Dave Mihelcic, CTO of the Defense Information Systems Agency, says the military believes in the core Web 2.0 philosophy of the power of collaboration.

"The Web is a platform for harvesting collective intelligence," Mihelcic said in a recent interview. He pointed to "remixable data sources, services in perpetual beta and lightweight programming models" as some of the aspects of open source software development that are applicable to the Defense Department.

One example of the Defense Department's new community-based approach to software development is Forge.mil, which was made generally available for unclassified use within the department in April. The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has issued version two of SoftwareForge after a three-month trial that grew to 1,300 users.

SoftwareForge provides software version control, bug tracking, requirements management and release packaging for software developers, along with collaboration tools such as wikis, discussion forums and document repositories, DISA said.

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