you really add some salt to the discussion. Did you read that a joint U.S. and Canadian organization that certifies encryption tools for use by federal government agencies has suspended its validation of OpenSSL cryptographic technology? A lot of work is still needed, and now that FOSS is progressively perceived as viable, proprietary vendors are lobbying hard against it. We are in the Middle Earth, nowadays.

I don’t know much about SHARE, and despite the acronym sounds a lot about sharing, if I got it right it is pretty ‘closed’. I saw similar initiatives here asking contributors odd things, and I think that with patience it is possible to get things done properly, eventually.

On the other hand, Public officers need a change of mentality, and that is far from obvious (hence the need for goodwill).

Last but not leasr, while I am not welcoming initiatives like the European Union’s license, I believe you are right saying that a standardization in this respect might be helpful.

I agree that the issue of software tech news you point to has some good material in it; and David is doing a great job getting people to understand in government that FOSS is a form of COTS that they can leverage under the FARS.

I’m a bit disappointed though that in DoD circles the question continues to be “can I consume COTS FOSS projects?” and most of our discussion is still around that concept. It is taking a long time, but it is basically inevitable that this battle will be won.

To me, the much more interesting thing is how we will do “C” with open source-like methods; either spanning the DoD boundary into commercial community, or inside a very large walled garden when necessary.

SHARE is a great example but still hampered by the facts that 1) it relies on (to me) nearly worthless government purpose license rights as an IP model and 2) is gated way too narrowly (because it relies on GPLR, I believe the repository is only accessable if you are currently under contract).

At the fringes, in projects like OpenEaagles (http://openeaagles.org/) and Delta3D (http://www.delta3d.org/), evidence is mounting that real value comes from spanning commercial and DoD communities with truly open systems to satisfy “C” projects more cheaply and with better quality.

For those that can’t span into commercial communites (for security reasons or whatever) I imagine a world where Government General License (GGL - a not-yet-real license, closely modeled on GPLv2) is the standard contract clause rather than GPRS and that anyone with a CAC card can access most repositories and contribute to community.