U.S. DOD releases “Open Technology Development Guide”

The U.S. Department of Defense has just released a pretty amazing document: “Open Technology Development: Lessons Learned and Best Practices”. (Warning: if you don’t like reading rave reviews, stop now.)

The U.S. Department of Defense has just released a pretty amazing document: “Open Technology Development: Lessons Learned and Best Practices”. (Warning: if you don’t like reading rave reviews, stop now.)

In the words of RedHat’s Gunnar Hellekson: It’s a handbook for using and making open source in the DOD and the US Government, sponsored by the Secretary of Defense. It provides practical advice on policy, procurement, and good community governance, all under a Creative Commons license. I’ll be providing some more commentary later, but this is a huge step forward in the adoption of open source in the US Government.

He’s absolutely right. This document is about as thorough as one could hope for, and hopefully will carry weight throughout the federal government, not just in DOD. The authors dig deeply into contracting policies, government acquisition of intellectual rights, etc, gently but methodically demolishing common misconceptions as they go. They also devote a lot of space to open source social dynamics, the importance of building a technical community, governance structures, vendor participation, etc.