Accumulo language watered down in conference defense authorization bill

Legislative language that could have cast doubt on defense and intelligence agencies' ability to utilize a National Security Agency-developed big data open source database has been significantly watered down in a compromise version of the fiscal 2013 national defense authorization bill unveiled Dec. 18.

The House and Senate conference version of the bill (.pdf) only requires the Defense Department to conduct an analysis of big data databases and tools and require competitive procedures in the acquisition of them – or if deciding to skip a competitive process within the next 5 years, notification to Congress of the waiver.

That's a marked change from the Senate's version of the bill, would have required the DoD chief information officer to certify that there exists no viable commercial big data open source database with security features comparable to it (such as the HBase or Cassandra), or that Accumulo is a successful open source project. Some within the open source community felt the Senate language was "a big gun being pointed at Accumulo," as a member of the Apache Foundation Accumulo Project management committee said in June...