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Comment by rectang | Hacker News Reader

The NSA open sourced what became Apache Accumulo years ago, so that government org has made peace with the copyright issue.

The DoD, though, is still trying to feel its way around. There seem to be some lawyers there who are very hard to convince. For years, they've been asking to have various licenses and CLAs modified and we've been telling them no.

Here's their latest request for the Apache License 2.1:

http://markmail.org/message/eueu4rzlbpe2ugcj

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Just so it's clear, NSA is technically part of DoD. (Though it's a bit like FBI's relation to DOJ, they operate very independently.)

Also, the DoD CIO has had, since ~2003, this excellent FAQ supporting open source:

http://dodcio.defense.gov/Open-Source-Software-FAQ/

But as people on this thread and elsewhere will tell you, that hasn't resulted in widespread support at DoD for open source.

As discussed elsewhere in this thread, acceptance of open source is very much an agency-by-agency deal within the DoD. IC orgs have pretty wide latitude to do what they want and NSA even more than others because of the primacy of their mission. Accumulo is widely used within the IC so it was to NSA's advantage to let it out - no doubt they did not want to maintain it themselves. Many orgs don't want to take on the burden of maintaining something, especially in the current budget climate where they'll have to go fight for $$$ and probably drop some other mission to make room.

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