Ellen and I decided that we would do our 30^th anniversary ‘stuff’ later this year. Not everyone would understand this reference but this is not dissimilar to many American Jewish families who don’t like the time of year their son or daughter’s birthday is for having a Bar or Bat Mitzvah event so they just move it to another time of year.

It occurs to me that all of this may have begun when we moved historical events to being celebrated on Mondays regardless of when they occurred that year and how this shows our modern culture isn’t willing to deal with the problems they face and would rather deal with the problems they chose to, but I digress.

In any event, as part of my mantra to do whatever Ellen wants in order to continue to encourage putting up with me, we decided to go to a Bed & Breakfast in Harpers Ferry over the President’s Day weekend, tying accidently into the Monday holiday thing.

Oh, I need to mention one other thing before actually getting to the Monday breakfast and the subject of the entry. On Friday, February 18^th, I appeared on the Francis Rose In-Depth show talking about the three stories I thought important relating to Federal IT that week, http://www.federalnewsradio.com/?nid=17&sid=2276999. Other than noting that Francis is still another person who has played APBA baseball for many years, why I bring this up will become clear shortly.

So that is why the morning of February 21^st, Monday, Ellen and I found ourselves at breakfast with two other couples around a table at the Jackson Rose B&B, http://www.thejacksonrose.com/, no relation to Francis. The Jackson part comes from the fact that Stonewall Jackson used the building as a headquarters part of the time during the Civil War, the Rose part comes from a reference he made in a letter to his wife referring to a pleasant rose that grew there.

One note at this point, I pretty carefully do not express any opinions about the backgrounds and/or the political positions that some of the members of the other two couples in my description below. That does not mean I do not have them or in some cases might not agree with them. It is merely because I wanted to focus on something else as will become evident.

To my right was a couple from Richmond VA. The wife’s family came from Armenia. Her grandmother was pregnant with her mother when Turkey forced the family, among other others, out of country. From there they went to Beirut Lebanon and then to the US. She has been very active with the American Armenian community interested in publicizing what they call the Armenia Genocide, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide.  They were there because they came every year to visit.

Between that couple and we were a relatively young couple. The pregnant wife was from Palestine and is an employee at CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, http://www.cair.com/.  Her husband had come to the US some sixteen months ago from Egypt. During course of the breakfast, he said that he recognized me. We realized that on Friday while I was at the radio station, he had walked by and said hi. He worked there supporting the IT infrastructure. They were there because, amazingly, the Egyptian husband had developed a fascination with the American Civil War and was in the process of visiting all of the local Civil War battlefields. Harper’s Ferry was one of the last one’s on the list.

And of course, there was Ellen and I, American Jews whose families had come from various locations in Europe. During the course of the breakfast we discussed the recent events in the Middle-East and the viewpoints on a variety of topics including the homelands of each of the couples. Ellen discussed a recent play we had seen at the Theatre J, located in the Washington DC Jewish Community Center, called Return to Haifa, http://www.washingtondcjcc.org/center-for-arts/theater-j/on-stage/10-11Season/return-to-haifa/ with the Palestinian wife.

The play, written by an Israeli, was based on a novella written by a Palestinian. It tells the story of two couples and a child associated with both. One couple were Holocaust survivors who emigrated to Israel and as part of being given a house to live in were asked to adopt and raise a child left behind when Palestinians left the house in the chaos of the departure. The second couple was the family that left. The child became an Israeli soldier. The play went back and forth between the past and the present telling the complicated narratives that represent the difficulties in coming to an agreed to peace in the Middle-East today.

When we attended this was followed by a pretty highly-charged audience discussion with lots of disagreements. Audience members included Israeli’s, Palestinians, and US Citizens of various persuasions.

The Egyptian born husband was the first to remark that he felt that only in America could these three couples accidently come together, in Harpers Ferry of all places at a Bed & Breakfast, and have the conversations we had that morning. On this one point, everyone at the table agreed completely.

I was on January 15^th, you can listen to the entire show that week at http://www.wfed.com/index.php?nid=17&sid=1865007.

In this post, I wanted to briefly touch on the second of the two articles I discussed, DISA expands access to ProjectForge cloud environment, http://gcn.com/articles/2010/01/13/disa-projectforge-collaboration.aspx.

The article illustrates the greater comfort level that Government has with using open-source software produced by non-Governmental organizations. While not explicitly mentioned, this increased involvement is leading to open-source development going the other direction; being produced by Government and then placed into the greater community.

Just to make sure that everyone is on the same page, I should explain a few terms.

DISA, which stands for Defense Information Systems Agency, provides an increasingly large part of the Information Technology infrastructure for the Department of Defense; http://www.disa.mil/.

As I have mentioned in a number of venues before, I believe there needs to be a Civilian version of DISA to serve a similar purpose. The most logical candidate to me for this is GSA, though historically GSA has done a better job of managing contracts than managing the implementation of contracts. Regardless, as the Government increasingly understands the value of centralizing the provisioning of infrastructure, allowing the Program staff to focus on their program mission, DISA has increased its responsibilities; not without growing pains but that is a different blog entry.

The article talks about DISA expanding its ProjectForge effort associated with Cloud Computing, this effort is part of its forge.mil program. The word ‘forge’ comes from the original efforts to develop Open-source software.

Open-source software typically is created by crowd sourcing, which is with the participation of many contributors often in a fairly loosely coupled fashion. The process and the resulting source code is presented transparently. Companies typically make money around open-source efforts by selling training, consulting, and/or support contracts of one sort or another.  For more details, see http://opensource.org/.

There has been a continuing argument within Government over the proper place for open-source software. Some people are uncomfortable with the thought that the software has no single creator or owner.  Open-source advocates would argue that the gains achieved by making the source code completely visible are significant. Security experts tell me that security that is premised largely on secrecy ultimately fails. In the same way, the power of exposure, at least in theory, reduces the possibility of bugs and/or trapdoors which cause security vulnerabilities in a software application.

Fundamentally this discussion represents the much broader issue of the real-world value or power of crowd sourcing versus classical hierarchically produced results. I plan to talk more about this in later blog entries a bit more.

Returning to the article I presented, it is clear that the argument over Government use of open-source is being largely decided in favor of use. Here we have one of the largest providers of IT in the Federal Government with an active open-source effort both in concept and execution within the Federal Government.

The article also illustrates one of the under-reported stories; that of Government produced open-source software. It is increasingly common that the Government makes use of privately produced open-source software. But there are an increasing number of situations where the Government is creating open-source software and either making it available to a larger community for usage or even setting up relationships with non-Governmental organizations to manage the resulting open-source community.