Over the past two years I have attended Military Open Source Conferences in Washington DC to talk about geospatial open source software. I was impressed by the degree to which open source software has penetrated DoD. Of course for the geospatial insiders one of the most venerable open source projects is GRASS, which originated with the US Army Corp of Engineers, and is still going strong as part of OSGEO. Perhaps contrary to popular belief, one of the reasons DoD has adopted open source is security. Eric Raymond’s “many eyeballs” theory about open source seems to have convinced many folks at DoD.
Federal Computer Week reports that the Department of Defense
has just launched a new Web developers site for DoD projects. The site is named Forgemil.com, and appears to have been developed by Collabnet. CNET reports that the site is intended to be open for read only to the public, but I haven’t been able to access it yet.

Be the first to comment