The Army\u2019s decision to formalize its open-source software development policy is paying off. At least two major projects have benefited from the policy announced this spring, with open source helping to speed development and save taxpayer dollars, according to officials from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cOpen source can reduce development time and lower overall costs, resulting in a win-win situation for the Army and the U.S. taxpayer,\u201d said ARL Deputy Chief Scientist Mary Harper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When it comes to defense agencies embracing open-source software development, the Army is hardly at the cutting edge. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency paved the way with the launch of its GitHub open-source community in 2014. The Navy issued a guidance on the use of open-source code as early as 2007.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Still, ARL leaders say they expect to reap big benefits by formalizing their approach to open source, a term used to describe software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be shared and modified.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cTo date, all projects that have been released by ARL as open source have been done under an ad hoc decision-making process. This policy is an experiment by ARL to normalize the process, making open source a day-to-day activity of ARL,\u201d said Cem Karan, an ARL computer engineer who helped formulate the policy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
ARL is publicly disclosing two projects that it says are benefiting from the recently announced policy, known respectively as Dshell and BRL-CAD.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dshell is an extensible, network forensic-analysis framework and a defensive cyber tool. \u201cIn a nutshell, Army networks are under constant assault by various actors. The methods used by these actors change constantly,\u201d Harper said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cDeveloping effective countermeasures under short deadlines requires tools that can quickly analyze large amounts of data, and present to analysts only the portions that they need to determine the method of the attack,\u201d Harper continued. \u201cDshell is a tool that simplifies the defenders\u2019 job.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Of the 25 contributors on the project, only five are U.S. government or military entities. The remaining outside contributors have been drawn at least in part by the open-source nature of the work, ARL suggests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
BRL-CAD is a modeling system that for more than 20 years has been used to model weapons systems for vulnerability and other analyses. An open-source platform, it is used widely across military, industrial and academic applications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cBoth programs have received contributions from outside of ARL that have significantly accelerated their development,\u201d Harper said. \u201cWithout these external contributions, the cost to the U.S. taxpayer would have been increased \u2014 to pay for additional personnel \u2014 or the work would have been delayed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Both projects help to highlight the anticipated benefits of having a more formal approach to open source:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Looking ahead, ARL leaders say their explicit embrace of an open-source approach should be a boon to the other military services. But they aren\u2019t yet offering insight into just what those evolutions might look like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt\u2019s extremely difficult to guess how the code might be used or leveraged by others,\u201d Harper said. \u201cARL\u2019s belief is that [the U.S. Army Tank Automotive Research Development and Engineering Center] and other groups will leverage the code as they see fit to support mission and potentially improve ARL\u2019s code at the same time. This has been the case for extremely popular open-source projects such as the Linux kernel, and ARL hopes to leverage this power as well.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Army Research Laboratory leaders say their explicit embrace of an open-source approach should be a boon to the other military services.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":47892,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":16,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":{"5":{"categories":["your-army","news","daily-news-roundup","newsletters"],"primary_category":"your-army"},"8":{"categories":["it-networks","it-cloud-report","newsletters","daily-brief"],"primary_category":"it-networks"}}},"categories":[106,16,32],"tags":[],"coauthors":[2063],"class_list":["post-16180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-brief","category-it-networks","category-newsletters"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"NYGVOBTPWZASXDNYFYMQT2LZ5Y","arc_canonical_url":"\/it-networks\/2017\/08\/14\/army-reaps-benefits-of-open-source-policy\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n