Need Open Source Policy? Ask the DoD.

It’s coming up on a couple of years since I wrote about the reasonable approach toward open source software adoption put forth by the U.S. Department of Defense, which was ready and willing to use open source, but was not requiring a less-realistic all-open source or only-open source approach.

Today, we see that measured consideration of open source and its adoption has served the DoD well, given it just published a guide (PDF) regarding its experience with policy and adoption of open source software. This provides a valuable lesson to enterprise organizations considering use of, participation, increased adoption of open source software. Based on our findings that more than 60% of open source users and customers have no policies or guidelines for contributing to open source software (November 2009 survey of 1,711 open source users and customers), it is also needed.

Some highlights from the guide, titled ‘Open Technology Deployment – Lessons Learned and Best Practices for Military Software,’ which was nicely released under the open source Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License, include: