These two white papers arrived side by side in my inbox this morning, both were originally commissioned by us.
One is produced by Janes Strategic Advisory Services, a long standing source of information for the defense and intelligence sector, and one by our own defense team here at Microsoft.
The paper from Janes concludes;
The demand for and utility of OSS in the military context, particularly as it applies to C4I systems, is a complicated issue that involves its own decision-making calculus. The on-going debate regarding OSS and CS strengths and weaknesses is not entirely irrelevant, but the high-stakes of the military context—tactical and strategic advantage and ultimately, lives—the long lives of C4I platforms; operational exigencies; and the generally risk averse nature of most militaries have produced priorities for software acquisition that are different than many of those commonly associated with commercial procurements. Clearly, OSS has played and will continue to play some role in the military context, but it is just as evident that trusted commercial providers are sought after in an environment that stresses supportability, ease of use, deployability and restricted communities. Several militaries that are pursuing transition to a more network-centric model of warfare (Australia, the UK, Israel, the Netherlands) have aggressively sought to solidify their relationships with CS and trusted providers even as other elements of their governments have sought to test OSS solutions.
For me, this is a pretty realistic summation of where most of our customers are today, and I think is reflected well in some of the recent work that Microsoft has been engaged in with open source community projects.
The concept of “it is just commercial software” or “it is just open source software” being the right answer for any complex computing environment is probably an idea from the past at this point, CIOs are choosing the right products from either pool to build the solutions they need.
Click on the images above to read the papers themselves.
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