December 15, 2006 • Volume 4 • Number 17

Open Source Transcript

December 12, 2006

WFED 1050 AM, Washington, DC

www.FederalNewsRadio.com

MODERATOR

Jim Flyzik, The Flyzik Group

PANEL

Colonel Kevin M. Dietrick, Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training & Instrumentation, U.S. Army

Michele Weslander, Principal Deputy Associate Director of National Intelligence and Deputy CIO, Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI)

Casey Coleman, CIO, Federal Acquisition Service, GSA

Andrew Gordon, Director, Open Source Solutions, Federal Systems, Unisys Corporation

Chris Runge, Technical Director, Red Hat

FORUM TRANSCRIPT

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

For today’s show we will discuss Open Source solutions in government. Let’s get right into the issues today. I’d first like to start by asking each panelist to give our audience an idea of your involvement with Open Source solutions and approaches within your respective agencies. Let’s start with Casey Coleman over at GSA. Casey can you give us an idea of your involvement with this issue?

CASEY COLEMAN, GSA

Sure, Jim. The Federal Acquisition Service (FAS) represents the legacy Federal Supply Service (FSS) and Federal Technology Service (FTS). And the Federal Supply Service, now FAS, has been involved with Open Source for about the last four years.

We had started off with more of the infrastructure type components: Linux for the operating system, Apache for the web servers. Over time we’ve moved more into integrated development environment (such as knowledge management) and more up the application complexity chain. So at this point we have about half a dozen of our applications running on Open Source or using Open Source and it’s permeated throughout the whole organization.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Terrific and we’ll explore all of that as we move on through the show today. Michele Weslander over at ODNI, can you give us a sense of what they are doing over there and how you guys are embracing Open Source and your approaches?

MICHELE WESLANDER, ODNI

Thank you. We are currently using a lot of Open Source software to include web server software, database software, media Wiki, Linux and log-in software. We are also using open standards and protocols like XMPP and Java, using instant messaging clients as well as Open Source web browsers. And we’ve implemented a lot of this on our intelligence web called Intelink.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Terrific! Some of these things have come a long way over the last few years. It’s just amazing how that technology’s taking off once again. Chris Runge over at Red Hat, a little different perspective since you guys are one of the major players in this space. Can you give the audience an idea of what is your role in Open Source approaches at Red Hat?

CHRIS RUNGE, RED HAT

Well, at Red Hat, Open Source is part of our DNA. We participated in the Open Source development process in a number of different technologies; whether it’s the Linux kernel at the operating system level; whether it’s JBoss at the SOA and middleware level; whether it’s new technologies like security enhanced Linux or Xen for high speed virtualization.

As a company we take these technologies, productize them, provide the necessary certifications, support, training, and services necessary to implement them in a sustainable and supportable manner.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Terrific! We’ll revisit some of those comments too later. I’m interested in the industry view of whether or not Open Source is reaching a new plateau here or taking off, and growth. We’ll come back to that.

Let’s go to Colonel Kevin Dietrick who’s up here from sunny Florida. Colonel Dietrick we’ve read a lot and heard a lot about things that the army is doing. Can you share with the audience your involvement in Open Source solutions?

COL. KEVIN DIETRICK, U.S. ARMY

I’m very glad to be here. At PEO STRI we build training and testing solutions for the war fighter. We have a large customer base and a broad range of requirements that are evolving every day, and that’s particularly true now that we are at war.

And so the Open Source approach provides a good opportunity or a good way for us to connect with our users and be very responsive to their needs. The Open Source paradigm has provided solutions for us in several areas across PEO STRI, including our immerging constructive computer based simulation systems, a common translator that links our simulations to command and control systems, and a common terrain format for use across all of our computer based simulations.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Terrific! I’m anxious to hear more about that also. Andrew Gordon from Unisys heads up their Open Source solution. Andrew, can you give us an idea of the kinds of things that you are involved with over at your organization?

ANDREW GORDON, UNISYS

I’m a director at Unisys responsible for the Open Source business unit, where I lead the go to market activities for Open Source in Federal systems. Open Source is a strategic pillar of Unisys’s strategy and it is permeated across all of our offerings from both commercial and in the services industry.

When I first started at Unisys, which was back in March, one of the exercises I went through was to determine how much Open Source was used in the Federal systems. We found that we had dozens of applications across most of the Federal agencies that we served including USDA, GSA, OSDPA, the Air Force, Army and more.

What I also found out was that we have over 700 consultants with Open Source experience. And that was quite amazing for a company who is really just embarking now on the Open Source market. I spent quite a bit of time establishing thought leadership and market leadership in Federal and we are making progress here.  An exciting chunk of my efforts goes towards helping our Federal clients understand the benefits of the Open Source model and SOA. And helping them understand the challenges of transitioning to them.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Great! That’s a great lead in too, Andy. I appreciate your mentioning that you work to help your clients understand the benefits of Open Source approaches. And I’d like to go there now, let’s talk a little about that.

Open Source has been debated for quite some time. There are various approaches, proprietary approaches, Open Source approaches. What do we think, what does the panel think, are some of the benefits of going to some of the Open Source approaches? Let’s start with Colonel Dietrick, Colonel can you share with us what you see as some of the major benefits of going to an Open Source solution?

COL. KEVIN DIETRICK, U.S. ARMY

Sure Jim. I think the major benefit associated with an Open Source approach is the ability to leverage both the talents and the resources of a community of people. This pertains not only to the development of new capabilities but also in the identification of errors and bugs.

As you can imagine, modeling a military environment is extremely complex. The nature of the threat is continually changing, as well as the effects due to the new equipment and doctrine that we put up. So an Open Source approach that meets a modeling and simulation solutions for us that are more rapidly developed, that is with more people collaborating on the product, and more complete with a wider array of expertise applying to each solution.

Another benefit is that Open Source allows an organization to assume control and develop new or tailored capabilities and fix bugs in accordance with the users’ schedule. In the OneSat approach for example the user can have the capabilities built into the system in one of three ways: first, the user can work with the combat developer to include the requested functionality as part of the ongoing development by PM OneSat (sounds like). A second option is that the organization can also work with PM OneSat and develop the capabilities as a customer funded effort (sounds like). Thirdly and finally the user can assume complete control of these modifications to the OneSat base line and receive the base line for free and can apply resources towards the development effort without engagement with the combat developer or with our PM OneSat.

So there are basically two conditions to this final piece. First of all the user is not allowed to redistribute the OneSat base line without authorization from us and secondly the user must also provide those changes back to us for possible reintegration into the OneSat base line. If it’s worth putting in there for the rest of the community, we want that option to do so.

Finally, other benefits include reliability and security of the software. Both of these benefits are for the same reason. Open Source software is peer reviewed software to a much greater extent than closed proprietary software, and so the bugs that I mentioned as well as the vulnerabilities that are in the software are more readily exposed through this process.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Terrific, thank you Colonel! I’d love to revisit that at some point in time too.   I know in the early days, years back there was a lot of debate about security with Open Source solutions and back and forth. Chris from Red Hat do you want to make a comment on this?

CHRIS RUNGE, RED HAT

Yes, I just wanted to touch on the comment that Colonel Dietrick had on security. You are right, that is a point that has been debated a lot. But there have been some interesting studies that have been performed that actually looked at the development process both on the Open Source side as opposed to the traditional proprietary development process.

So there was a study that was done by Coverity back in December of 2004 for example, that looked at the development of the Linux 26 kernel and there were a lot of interesting numbers that came out of that, but one of the facts that struck me was that that they found that for every 10,000 lines of source code there was less than one defect.

There was a similar study that was done at approximately the same time by the National Cyber Security Partnership that looked at the proprietary development model, and they found between one to seven defects per 1,000 lines of code. So on the one hand you have less than 1 defect in 10,000 lines of code with the Open Source approach, and at best one defect in 1,000 lines of code for the proprietary development model,  and I think that comes from the transparency and the peer review process that Colonel Dietrick had touched on earlier.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

That’s a very interesting statistic. We could have like a point counterpoint radio show someday talking about proprietary approaches versus Open Source but those are very good points. Thanks Chris. Casey Coleman, what are the benefits of Open Source approaches from your perspective?

CASEY COLEMAN, GSA

I think one perceived benefit was the cost benefit from using Open Source because you don’t have the licensing considerations and that was my perception before really getting involved with Open Source.

I bring that up only to say I think that’s a common perception but it’s not a correct one because our early implementations with Open Source really didn’t show any cost advantage, but over time I think we will show cost benefits and cost savings.

But that’s really not the reason to get into Open Source. The benefits are, as Colonel Dietrick mentioned, are the transparency and availability into the source code base and the ability to understand what’s in it, what functionality exists, and really to take control of our own destiny; by being able to take a particular release and upgrading it, modifying it and enhance it and to customize it for what we need.

I would say that another interesting benefit from the government perspective is procurement issues. With Open Source you are not necessarily tied to the traditional budget and capital planning cycle. You can map your implementation timing to the immerging mission needs and not be constrained by having to wait, put something in next year’s budget, and be able to actually procure it the year after that, which is the more common government procurement cycle.

So there are some interesting benefits and I think there are some interesting misperceptions about Open Source. The real advantage is the collaboration and the transparency and the agility which you get with Open Source.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

It does open up your eyes to a lot of things. I like that idea about procurement cycles. I never thought about that. That is an excellent point. Michele Weslander, how about benefits for Open Source approaches from the perspective of ODNI?

MICHELE WESLANDER, ODNI

The benefits we see are the development is usually performed by people who have a personal interest or an expertise in a certain area. We’ve seen a lot of cases versus a lot of proprietary tools that meets the needs of a broader user base. In that peer review and open insight into the development process. We also see that there’s an ability to modify that if necessary to tailor to our needs without violating license or use agreements.

BREAK

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Welcome back. When we left we were talking benefits and we didn’t have a chance to hear comments from our industry guest. Andrew, I wonder from your perspective, how do you view this and what are some of the benefits that you tell your customers about as to the reasons to go to Open Source purchases?

ANDREW GORDON, UNISYS

Open Source products are really no different than proprietary software products. They really should be evaluated in the same way. You need to look beyond the software to the Open Source business model; to the control it gives you over your operational processes; to fully appreciate the value it brings to the Federal and local economy and the Federal constituency.

Open Source products inherently offer a higher degree of security over investment security in terms of faster enhancement and defect resolution times (with) levels of operational control that are difficult to achieve even by the most quality conscious proprietary vendor. The combination of open code accessibility and the leverage associated with large numbers of users and developers using and testing the software are really critical differentiators.

Collaboration, peer review, rapid feedback are enabled in global real time for the Open Source model and when considered  together these factors provide for a secure enterprise that cannot be achieved with a proprietary vendor approach.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Chris you mentioned security. Were there other benefits from the Red Hat perspective you’d like to mention briefly?

CHRIS RUNGE, RED HAT

One of the other benefits, and there are many, but one of the other benefits that we see is the rapid innovation that the Open Source development model provides.

What you have really is for the first time users can develop and participate in the development process, so they don’t have to wait until a product is in its final cycles before they have an ability to evaluate it, provide feedback, say what is working, say what isn’t, and give ideas for improvement.

And so what you see are all these Open Source technologies, whether they are things like the Linux operating system, or whether they are things like the Mozilla Firefox web browser, where users are participating early in the development process, providing this important feedback, and as a result these technologies are really developed independent of any one company’s product cycles.

We saw something interesting a couple of years ago with the introduction of the security enhanced Linux, which is a technology that originated with the NSA, was developed in the Open Source community. Everyone was aware of the strong security capabilities that Linux provided, but these strong mandatory access controls had never really been provided in a mainstream operating system before. And by introducing those technologies early, giving users access to them early through the Fedora project, we were able to provide what had enterprise Linux four first shift a product that had a strong flexible mandatory access controls but was immediately usable, right out of the box.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

You know, listening to all this it makes you wonder why we haven’t seen more adoption of Open Source over time. The benefits seem to be pretty strong. So let’s switch us over then, what are the downsides, some of the challenges.

Why haven’t we seen Open Source solutions proliferate as much as one would expect with all these benefits? Are these challenges technical, are they more of a business nature, does culture play a part here? Let’s start with Michele. What are some of the challenges you think need to be overcome to see Open Source solutions’ more widespread adoption?

MICHELE WESLANDER, ODNI

I would say that a lot of the challenge is perception. There is a perception that Open Source code will not be stable; or the fact that there is no single configuration management authority. What is controlling the baseline? There are issues: a lot of people have a perception of security, although many of my colleagues have highlighted how in a lot of cases it is more secure.

So depending on the use and the environment in which you will be using it, you may want to do a little more testing especially if we are not aware who actually contributed to the code. But a lot of it I think is perception and more and more as we adopt more Open Source solutions, people are seeing more of the benefit.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Casey? What are the challenges or some of the constraints that need to be over come? What are you seeing at GSA?

CASEY COLEMAN, GSA

I believe one of the biggest challenges is really a business challenge and that is the user of Open Source software is required to really be a much more educated, a much more proactive consumer and user of Open Source, than if you are using cost products.

There’s not a large cadre of salespeople coming to educate you about Open Source products, although we do have some industry representatives. It doesn’t have the same market force that cost products do. And so it requires us to take the initiative and educate ourselves and to learn and understand how we can make the best use of it. So that’s an educational and business challenge that’s been a primary constraint that we’ve observed.

And I would say that a secondary or lesser challenge is that it really takes a lot of discipline from the developer team to use Open Source effectively. Because there are nightly updates with new releases, new features, new fixes, and you could find yourself in an endless spiral checking every release every night to get the newest and best stuff. You really have to pick one, stick with it and develop from that point. And exercise a lot of discipline over your architecture.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

I like this idea of educational awareness. I know from my years of running the Federal CIO council, we never even brought up the subject, it was like we knew there was this Open Source but we never had a dedicated effort to work on it. Michele, do you have a follow up point to make here?

MICHELE WESLANDER, ODNI

I was going to say, as you highlight education, we have found that it is very encouraging with our younger work force coming in, they know these tools, they are exposing them to us and saying look I use this at home all the time, it’s free, it’s great, we should look at implementing it in our network environment. And so that has been a great benefit to the adoption of Open Source.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

The kids these days, I know anytime I have a problem with my computer, I get one of the kids. And I was a CIO at one time! And they remind me of that. I’m just glad I got high enough up in the organization before these kids started growing up. Colonel Dietrick any comments you can make on some of the challenges that you see from your perspective in moving to Open Source solutions?

COL. KEVIN DIETRICK, U.S. ARMY

I’ve heard a lot already that I agree with on this point. Michele and Chris both talked a little bit about security and I agree. DOD has been slow or cautious to embrace the Open Source paradigm, but I think we see movement in that direction.

Somehow we’ve got to embrace this huge transformation that’s occurring in the information world and find new ways of securing our information systems and I think we are seeing the DOD move in that direction with Open Source code.

To maximize the benefits of a wide scale collaboration effort though, someone needs to be the integrator and provide appropriate configuration management, and Michele spoke to this too, I think.

The net benefits can be enormous but the integration, the test and the configuration management aspects do come with a cost. Challenges are both technical and programmatic. Technically there must be a process and tools in place that balance the desire to integrate capabilities from a wide number of sources on the one hand, with keeping a base line architecturally sound on the other.

In our OneSat program we make the coding standards and the process known to any potential external developer.  We have received code for reintegration that was developed in other organizations with a high degree of control, and some from those that operate in a near chaos situation. You might wonder why we would accept code from the latter but in fact, those chaotic organizations, while they lack documentation and don’t follow rigorous design practices, their products may be extremely valuable to us and they may be something we want to incorporate.

So programmatically the PM must be willing to either resource efforts like that to bring those products up to standard or to communicate with those developing them to help them to help them address issues in their own code.

Keep in mind that there is a benefit to those organizations to have their code integrated into our OneSat baseline. Once we accept that and integrate it, our PM assumes the responsibility to maintain those capabilities. If we don’t integrate it, then those organizations providing it would need to continually reintegrate their code into every new release of our OneSat baseline.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

We’ve heard repeatedly now that the theme coming up is good program/project management discipline to be in place. I guess that would hold true no matter what you are implementing in your organization. That’s a point that is coming across loud and clear here today. I appreciate that.

Andrew, from your perspective in Unisys and working with your customer base, what do you see that some of the challenges may be in creating this environment that embraces Open Source solutions?

ANDREW GORDON, UNISYS

As I mentioned earlier, we have Open Source solutions in many of the agencies that we service today. So I would suggest that Open Source solutions are common but not in widespread use. As was mentioned earlier, also perception is an issue. And I would relate that to past performance being a key deterministic factor to increasing the use of any type of software in the Federal market. The fact that real time operations of an aircraft carrier are being operated with MyX2l, Linux and JBoss makes believers that this stuff is real.

The trend I have consistently observed is that once a project is implemented using Open Source software, the next and subsequent projects always look to Open Source alternatives first because of lower development cost, higher quality and reliability the Open Source model brings to the Federal.

I think in that context I would suggest that appreciation for the value of the Open Source model is evolutionary in the Federal government and accelerating this evolution is the need to do more with less.

Acquisition is also a challenge and we are working with the acquisition community to demonstrate how to compose RFPs that would result in acquisitions that deliver agility, innovation, and give the government complete control over its investment.

Giving the government the flexibility to always be in the position to choose the best solution by insisting on unrestricted access to the source, open systems and open data will force industry to compete on innovation and execution. Ultimately it is the Federal government and its constituency that reaps the benefits.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Chris Runge, what do you see as some of the challenges that need to be overcome for more widespread use of Open Source solutions in the Federal government?

CHRIS RUNGE, RED HAT

I think that from our perspective, obviously as being a provider of these solutions and technologies, we think the technology is there, particularly on the server side. So really you have for the first time a main stream operating system that can scale in so many different dimensions. It can be used on a system that has hundreds of CPUs with terabytes of memory, and can scale down to small embedded devices like cell phones and even the TiVos  that people are familiar with.

It’s a technology that can be used to process millions of transactions on Wall Street, and another heavy transaction environment, and yet can be used for time critical systems in the navy and the army. And it’s a system that is a general purpose operating system but that can be locked down in such a fashion that it can be used where really you’d have to have a very specialized trusted operating system in the past.

From our perspective, we think the business side is there as well. We’ve done a lot of work at Red Hat in combination with a number of industry partners to go through the checks to make sure that we have the thousands of certified hardware and software applications that we’ve gone through the rigorous common criteria process. And that we are providing the services, training and support necessary to support the platform.

So I think that what you see are in some ways some of the challenges that are associated with the introduction of any new technology or process into an environment. People are always going to ask, they are going to weigh the value of those new technologies against what is the time to migrate, what is the impact on training, and one of the things that we’ve been lucky to have is the fact that Linux is very much like Unix in a lot of ways and so people that are existing Unix system administrators, people that are existing Unix developers, you have a Unix like operating system that can run on low cost high performance industry standard hardware and so the gap to make that migration is made a lot smaller in that case.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

We are going to shift gears once again here and we are going to get into what I think is probably the most important issue that I’d like to talk about and get into some real life examples of where Open Source programs have been successful and where they are being used in government agencies today. Bring it home with what’s really happening out there. We are going to do that right after the break.

BREAK

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Welcome back. Let’s switch over now and talk about real life examples of solutions in government agencies perhaps we should call them best practices or a way to talk. Let’s start with Michele. Michele, I’ve read an awful lot, Mr. Negroponte was talking about how the ODNI is using Open Sources to collect intelligence and announced some major programs there. Can you tell us a little bit some real life examples about how the ODNI is using Open Source solutions to meet its mission?

MICHELE WESLANDER, ODNI

I’d be happy to do so. One of the solutions that got a lot of media attention recently was what we call Intellipedia, which is our intelligence version of Wikipedia. It’s based on media Wiki, MySQL and Linux primarily, and while we’ve had to do some minor tweaks for implementation, it was pretty much 90% out of the box.

For those who have used the Wikipedia it’s more like an encyclopedia out on the Internet, but we’ve used it to develop documents, to create living documents and allow analysts from throughout the community to contribute to that.

So previously let’s say we were working on a national intelligence estimate. You might get inputs from various components of the intelligence community, and somebody would try to compile that. In a lot of cases you would have a final document and you would have really lost the history of everything that went into that, as well as competing view points.

So we see things like Intellipedia have allowed analysts to express counterpoints that constructive criticism and considered from this aspect, as well as we can go back and see the history of how we finally evolved and came to this position on say, a national intelligence estimate on Nigeria for example.

And so (with this) some of the barriers that initially we might see when we try to change business processes (are coming down). (We are providing) for a culture (allowing) exposing things that people feel uncomfortable with putting out there. (It allows the analyst to say) “You know I’m not sure about this”, and allowing their colleagues across the community to contribute. So that is definitely an example of something that we have used.

So in recent history we’ve rolled out the blogs, the discussion forums, the instant messaging, Intellipedia. In the near term we are going to roll out something, it’s similar to delicious, known as “Intellicious”, a social book marking.

Also, think about it. If you’ve heard statistics, we have had the analysts, a lot of analysts in the community, less than 5 years. How do you quickly share knowledge? These Open Source solutions where people can say, I found this valuable, you might find this valuable as well, is one way to share that knowledge more rapidly.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

I’m so glad to have you here today to share that with us. It’s rare we hear a lot of these stories about positive things that are happening around town and things that are very, very important to our country, in critical programs. Casey Coleman, when you and I were talking a couple of months back and I mentioned the radio show and you said that Open Source solutions were something that you had an interest in talking about. Can you share with us some real life stories of the programs that you have worked with?

CASEY COLEMAN, GSA

Yes, little did I know when we were talking that I would actually end up on the program. But we do have a lot to brag about in terms of our Open Source usage. We, as you know the mission of GSA is procurement, contract management, management of government wide programs and services for the other agencies such as automotive and fleet management, travel management and a lot of our applications are configured precisely for that kind of space.

We use Open Source as a key element to meet our mission. We use JBoss application server stack in our fleet management program called ‘Roads’, and in our solicitation management applications, called SWS, that’s solicitation writing system. We use Apache, I think everyone uses Apache, but we use it in all of our web based applications including SWS and our electronic offer system which is to vendors to put out solicitations.

We use the Eclipse integrated development environment for all of our coding and like Michele we use Media Wiki, MidaSQL and Linux for an internal system for knowledge sharing, information capture, to capture the ongoing dialogue among our internal staff and to learn lessons and pass those off to new folks coming in.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Colonel Dietrick I know I read about a number of things going on in Orlando which how it first put me in touch with your office to help me learn a little bit more and ask you to be on the show to share some of those things you are actually doing down there. Can you share some of that with our audience?

COL. KEVIN DIETRICK, U.S. ARMY

We mentioned already the OneSat program which is our newest program. We are proud to announce that we released Version 1.00 of that software a couple of months ago. I believe that we have made the upfront investment in that that is going to allow it to blossom in the coming years into a really great program for our customers.

But we also have been doing work on Open Source solutions for a number of years. In fact OneSat’s predecessor, a program called Monosat has been around for about 10 years. And I’d like to spend just a minute talking about that.

OneSat was an early example of a program that provided Open Source for the community back as early as the mid 90s. That source code has been used for a long time and continues to be used simply because the user base has the ability to modify and extend the code. That code eventually developed into something that we call OneSat test bed base line which developed into our objective OneSat system. It also delivered source code as part of a product delivery and has been a very successful tool used through out the army.

Many of the lessons learned during these programs have been applied to our OneSat objective system and as I said OneSat objective system has been delivered in version 1.0. But even before we delivered and released Version 1.0, organizations were already developing their own capabilities to our base line. The U.S. Marine Corps for example created functionality for their combined arms command and control raining upgrade system; a research group at SAIC Corporation created a set of capabilities like these is now available for the OneSat community at large.

While the OneSat base line was only released a couple of months ago, we are looking at near term integrations from the Space and Missile Command, the common architecture for the army, and another delivery for the U.S. Marine Corps. So PM OneSat has programmatic relationships to collaborate on the creation of capabilities for the future combat system of the army, the synthetic environment corps and a number of other interests including some international partners. In fact, the United Kingdom has a project arrangement with the U.S. to collaboratively build and exchange simulation capabilities with OneSat.

All of these efforts offer a benefit and an opportunity to the overall OneSat community that would not have been afforded except through our Open Source code.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Thanks so much for sharing that with us. Chris over at Red Hat, since you are a major supplier of Open Source software, I imagine that you have quite a few different examples that you can give us, but do you have a favorite in the Federal government; a particular real life example of an agency that has taken advantage of Open Source solutions?

CHRIS RUNGE, RED HAT

Well there are many. I think one of the more recently well publicized ones is the FAA.

At the FAA they had an enhanced traffic management system and so this is a system that monitors the planes flying all across the country. You couldn’t get much more of a mission critical system than this. This was a system that was built many years ago on proprietary UNIX systems. They were faced with a major hardware upgrade and so like many people in this situation, they evaluated their options. Do they upgrade that UNIX hardware or do they look at migrating that system over to Linux.

They chose to migrate the system over to Linux. Part of that gain was due to reasons of cost but cost wasn’t the only factor. Obviously due to the critical nature of the system, maintaining a high degree of reliability was just as if not more important than lowering costs. So one of the things that they saw was not only a 50% cost reduction but also an increase in efficiency, which they estimated at about 30%.

And that efficiency is something that we see with a lot of customers where they are able to, because again of a higher performance hardware, consolidate the number of physical systems that they are using and so people as a result are not only able to drive down the initial acquisition costs, but are also able to consolidate in other areas. Things like data centers, space, cooling, power and their system administrators can be more efficient.

And then we see a number of these customers looking out to the future with technologies like virtualization; Xen in particular, which is a high performance Open Source virtualization platform where they can consolidate these systems even further.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Terrific. Casey, do you have a comment?

CASEY COLEMAN, GSA

The point Chris was making was an interesting one about hardware considerations. We have a big legacy mainframe environment and we are now putting some of our Open Source tools on the mainframe. So we have been able to decouple the hardware decisions from the software architecture decisions and that allows us to optimize both and make good use of our mainframe with modern tools, so that has been an interesting side benefit.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Yes, that’s fascinating. In fact we’ll come back to that when we get ready to close the show out and talk a little bit about what we are beginning to see all of a sudden is propriety and Open Source hybrids coexisting with one another and I think that direction continues to proliferate. We’ll revisit that before we go. Andrew at Unisys being a, providing support to government agencies in implementations of Open Source solutions, and  I wonder if you could give us some examples of real life implementations somewhere that you are proud to talk about.

ANDREW GORDON, UNISYS

 I’d be glad to do that. Unisys helps many agencies achieve their missions by providing them with Open Source solutions. Just a few quick examples: we provide NASA with flight simulation software, USDA we are writing Linux server GeoSpacial software with the National Weather Service, and many of the applications that Casey Coleman has mentioned earlier.

I want to drill down into one specific application and that is the U. S. Army’s global freight management (GFM) application. It’s a global freight management’s automated DOD freight traffic management system. It supports the procurement of commercial freight transportation services for the DOD; serving the Army, the Navy the Air Force, Marine Corps, the DOA, as well as the Coast Guard and FEMA, among others.

The transportation services provide key capability within logistical operations of the armed forces. And GFM itself is a web application created to decrease costs and enhance operational efficiencies. To give you an idea of the scope, Global Freight Management has 6800 users, in 2005 there were over 1.5 million total shipments that went through the system, and it serves an average of 350,000 HD requests today.

So Global Freight Management, it turns out, migrated from a proprietary applications server to Jboss. And why did they do that? Well, when they needed to perform an upgrade from an earlier version of the application server, they determined that the workload was huge, just to do the upgrade. When they looked for alternatives to reduce the workload, they discovered the JBoss applications server and determined that the workload would be significantly less.

The second benefit was the fact that they would no longer have to pay license fees and it became very attractive to them to embark down that path. The team had had some success with Open Source software on a small scale before, a small scale part of this, and they found it to be extremely reliable, functional and robust, really because of the Open Source model. And so during the migration, the users never were impacted, they had no knowledge that the migration had occurred.

So why did they choose JBoss? Well, JBoss, because of the large installed base and it’s also positioned in the largest quadrant of application servers. As I said, the users were never impacted by any of the changes. Really this is a testament to the reliability and quality that occurs because of the leverage associated with thousands of users and developers using and testing and developing the code according to the Open Source model.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

We are going to come back and have a final session where I’m going to ask the panelists about will we see more of this taking off?

BREAK

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Welcome back. With the final few minutes that we have left here, I want to ask each panelist, you know there has been a lot of debate over the years about Open Source approaches versus proprietary approaches and there’s been a lot of press recently about Microsoft signing agreements to work with Open Source software providers, we see Sun talking about making a lot of its proprietary code available on Open Sources.

Do you think we are at a point where Open Sources are about to take off or are we at a point where we are going to see a lot more adoption of Open Source in the future? Let’s start with Andrew from Unisys. Andrew, what is your final point on that?

ANDREW GORDON, UNISYS

The Microsoft-Novell agreement and Sun’s decision to Open Source Java are clear indicators of the maturity and mission critical nature that Open Source solutions have achieved. There were two key elements to the Microsoft-Novell agreement that highlight industry insistence that Microsoft and really Open Source solutions in general coexist in a peaceful and efficient way.

Customers were insisting on, the agreement talked about customer protection and product interoperability and efficiency. Customers really wanted to have uncertainty removed from their environments. And this resulted in an agreement to indemnify the customers from each donor’s patent portfolio.

And secondly finally Microsoft admits that Linux Open Office, Xen Source, virtualization, and the other Open Source software is really of a superior quality and it is here to stay. Microsoft uses Open Source software in its own products. Their customers use Open Source software in mission critical applications.

Really they are demanding cooperation between Microsoft and all Open Source vendors and Open Source products, not just Novell. There have been agreements before, there are agreements with Sun, there are agreements with Xen Source, there are agreements with JBoss and really the customers are looking for the software to really work efficiently together.

And examples of that are with Xen Source and Microsoft are each putting in specific virtualization assists to create synergy between their applications. The Sun announcement is really an overt decision to take advantage of the strengths of the Open Source community and the Open Source development model. This is about innovation, reliability and quality that results when thousands of users and developers are using and testing the code. Yes, these are advances that are clear signs of the mission critical maturity of Open Source products.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Thanks so much. Colonel Dietrick, is Open Source taking off?

COL. KEVIN DIETRICK, U.S. ARMY

In the DOD paradigm or the DOD construct, I think that we have to take all of the things that we heard today, that we talked about, for example the cost savings that Casey mentioned, I didn’t really talk a lot about that, but they are big, along with the functional and the capabilities that this Open Source paradigm brings us and we have got to take advantage of it.

Linux has taken off. DOD needs to recognize that and continue to recognize that in building solutions. In the end, I don’t see an alternative; I think we’ve got to move in this direction. I’d like to close Jim by saying thanks to our partners in what we are doing in PEO STRI, it’s not just PEO STRI alone, but it’s the whole DOD community including the industrial based, the training command, and our users the war fighters out there that are partnering with us in developing these solutions.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Thanks. Chris, has Open Source taken off?

CHRIS RUNGE, RED HAT

Well in many ways, I think Open Source solutions already have taken off. Depending on the agency we’ve come from a situation where Linux and Open Source was overtly banned, to allow them to waver, to not only approved for use but in many cases have become the preferred platforms for new development.

Microsoft’s agreements along with the recent announcements by Oracle and others are an acknowledgement by two of the world’s largest proprietary software companies of the relevance of Open Source and Linux as both a technology development model and as an operating system platform.

And adoption has really reached a critical mass where it’s not so much a question so much of whether you have an Open Source strategy but what your Open Source strategy is. And that applies to industry and the customer base alike. And then finally I’d like to end by applauding Sun’s decision to Open Source Java under the GPL.

I think what we are going to see that there is the same rapid innovation occurring within Java that we’ve seen in other Open Source technologies. And that gets to the critical point where Open Source is not just a specific operating system, a specific tool kit, it really has become pervasive and so, as others have said, people are now looking to leverage the capabilities of Open Source up the stack, from the operating system layer to the data base persistence layer with technologies like my sequel and post stress (sounds like) to the identity management layer to the storage management layer and other areas.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Michele Weslander, is Open Source, taking off?

MICHELE WESLANDER, ODNI

Well, to follow that metaphor, we feel it’s left the runway and is gaining altitude. We see low cost of deployment, great value, and return on that deployment, the ability to rapidly expand. We have a very unpredictable World; we can bring in non-traditional partners very rapidly without having to budget years in advance to get these tools deployed.

An example that’s facing the globe is avian flu, being able to leverage Open Source tools to create a portal and information sharing for that. On the horizon some of the things that we are looking at are leveraging things like Google ads sensor or Amazon.com’s model and if you are interested in this you might be interested in this. And as people start to use things like Flicker and other peer-to-peer sharing instead of replicating every possible place where we might use something, putting that data, posting it once, making it discoverable on the fly, and allowing people to coalesce that data as they need it and we think Web 2.0 has great promise.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Casey Coleman, you started the show off this morning, you get to close it out here.

CASEY COLEMAN, GSA

Well, I agree with the other panelists that Open Source is really essential to the infrastructure of almost any enterprise today. But what we are seeing is Open Source moving into new realms like the area of end user applications.

We see remarkably robust applications in the Open Source arena for customer relationship management, customer resource planning, knowledge management and document management; things where Open Source really didn’t have a presence two or three years ago. So we think that poses interesting opportunities for consideration of more complete enterprise architecture.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Well, thank you so much Casey. This discussion has certainly has made a believer out of me. I tend to think with a lot of the points made here we are going to see an awful lot of innovation and creativity and a lot of hybrid environments and movements towards Open Source and some of these agreements that we are reading about are going to open a whole new worlds of opportunities for new applications and new ways for government to work with providers to solve their critical mission objectives, so I am excited about that. I want to thank all our panelists for taking the time from their busy days to be with us today to share their thoughts on this subject.