DoD Leads In Federal Open Source Usage

GMGruman writes "A new open technology report card shows that only a third of federal agencies get a passing grade on open source usage and contribution, with the Defense Department leading the way. Savio Rodrigues explains what both government and business can learn from the DoD's open source prowess."

Re:I for one am shocked!

[cayenne8]

Well, it is a relatively NEW thing for the DoD to allow any open source software to be used on their networks. Just a few short years ago (5 or so), it was almost impossible to get them to use anything on any of the systems I was associated with. Solaris used to be the OS of choice for server rooms, and Oracle the database.

I've seen a LOT of Linux these days replacing Solaris...Oracle still rules the database as from my experience. I've wanted to try to get some dev to test out using postgres, which would be a natural open source alternative as that it mimics Oracle a great deal, not extremely hard to convert to from Oracle....and it does have scalability that I still believe elludes MySQL....

Whatever we have done...we always try to discourage windows and MSSQL from the server rooms. So far so good on most projects I've worked on.

But it took a LOT of effort to get the DoD and related branches of govt to start even to consider open source.