Technology Lab / Information Technology

US government shouldn’t fear foreign participation in

Red Hat's public sector strategist explains why the US federal government …

In an effort to reduce IT costs and boost efficiency, the US federal government is increasingly turning to open source software. We wrote last year about, a code sharing site that was established by the military to encourage broader collaboration and reuse of existing source code throughout the Department of Defense. The US General Services Administration (GSA) is planning to launch a similar site, called, that is intended to serve a related function, but for a broader range of government agencies.

In a recent blog post, Red Hat public sector strategist Gunnar Hellekson described several of the challenges posed by and explained why it's important for to be operated as a more inclusive environment. Various security considerations made it necessary for to be developed as a relatively closed ecosystem, one which is only accessible to DoD employees, contractors, and others who have a DoD Common Access Card. The isolation obviously precludes public participation and leads to military-only forks of mainstream public open source projects.

Hellekson is concerned that the GSA's plan to require users of to prove US citizenship will pose similar problems. Hellekson contends that it is an arbitrary barrier to entry that can only hamper the project. Because there are no security issues that necessitate walling it off, he argues, would benefit from being made accessible to the broadest possible audience.

" may be instructive and inspiring, but it's a corner-case and fraught with compromises that have diminished its utility. In the case of, it would be hosting unclassified code for civilian agencies. There's no need to create a 'trusted' environment," he wrote. "Let's agree that making US citizenship a prerequisite is counterproductive, unworkable, unnecessary and most important: it's un-American."

CollabNet's Guy Martin, who is involved in the project, has a different view. He acknowledges that the citizenship requirement will create a barrier to participation, but believes that it's necessary in order to safeguard important software infrastructure that will be used by a wide range of government agencies. Allowing broader public access might dampen the confidence of some of those agencies.

"I realize that putting up a barrier to entry in the form of positive identification of US citizenship and a vetting process will irk some who believe that everything should be free and open. However, I'd urge those folks to think seriously about the balance between security, reliability and transparency when talking about federal government systems that control everything from the IRS, to Veterans Affairs, to Health and Human Services," he wrote.

It's a challenging issue, one that won't likely be resolved overnight. It's important to remember, however, that a very significant amount of open source software development happens outside of the United States. It seems short-sighted for the US federal government to impede opportunities for collaboration with other governments around the world. One can only hope that US government agencies will become more comfortable with true openness and transparency in the software process as they acclimate to open source development methodologies.

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