After several years of evaluation, the Navy Department has approved the use of open-source software in all Navy and Marine Corps information technology systems.
A June 5 memo from Navy Chief Information Officer Robert Carey gives open-source platforms the same status as commercial and government off-the-shelf software products, specifying that Navy IT administrators should consider open-source code for all acquisitions and can use it if they determine it to be the superior product.
In writing
The department “recognizes the importance of [open-source software] to the warfighter and the need to leverage its benefits throughout the [Department of the Navy],” according to the memo.
In 2004, the Navy’s previous CIO, David Wennergren, formed a working group to formulate the Navy’s open-source software policy based on positive results from a cooperative research and development agreement between the Naval Oceanographic Office of the department’s Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command and the industry-backed Open Source Software Institute.
The policy “simply says that open-source software has an official seat at the Navy table,” said John Weathersby, executive director of the Open Source Software Institute and a member of the Navy’s Open Source Working Group.