 Hi there, my name is Gunnar Alexson. I'm the technology strategist for Red Hat's US Public Sector Group, and here's my Ignite Talk, which is about the US government versus open source. So I started a project with Carl Fogel, who is an O'Reilly author of a producing open source software. What we did is tie together a bunch of data about software that the US government has released as open source and about a bunch of milestones and major events in the history of the government and open source. So what we did is we took the bibliography on one side, made it a Google spreadsheet, took the list of code releases, made it a Google spreadsheet, and then had this HTML page that ties them all together with some JavaScript and presents them as a timeline. This is the timeline. It starts with 1978 when we released the BSD TCP IP stack, which was actually funded by ARPA. Well, what's interesting is that the government actually starts releasing a bunch of software and is obviously comfortable with open source. But then there's this huge stretch in the 90s when nothing happens. I'm sure there were some things. But for the most part, it's just this dead zone. But then, shbam at the same time that the US government is passing Klinger Cohen, which tells them how to buy software, Cathedral and the Bazaar is being written. So you have this relationship between the rules being created and then people advocating for changes to the rules. And that's what this next section is. This big lump of green are all these publications that are advocating for more use of open source software in government. And what's ironic about all of this advocacy is that in 2003 or 2004, both the OMB and the DoD start passing rules around, yes, you're allowed to use open source software. The irony of having passed all these policies is that while they were wringing their hands and worrying about how to pass policy, the Department of Energy was actually releasing open source software the entire time. They were using it. They were releasing it. It was no big deal for the DoD, this huge deliberative effort for the DOE, no big deal. And so it all culminated. And actually, the best and highest point of this process was actually in 2009 when the DoD released its open source memo, which said that open source is safe to use and, in fact, has a bunch of attributes that should be encouraged. So that represented kind of the final stop, the final moment of legitimization for open source. And now, a day, is what you see is all of these new code releases coming from not just the Department of Energy, but from the White House and from other groups. And we're starting to see advocacy for more release of government software. This is ironic, again, because in the popular press, to read headlines like this one, you would think that Linux was brand new to the government and that it was going to change the way the GPL worked. There's a lot of hyperbole in this article. When the fact is the government has been very comfortable using Linux for about 10 years. If you look at the data, what's interesting is that the government really does understand open source in terms of procurement. It's not an ideological thing. It's how to work with all of these complex rules that you see on the slide. And so in order to deal with open source and matching them to these complex rules, they start writing memos, like this one from MITRE. This MITRE memo from 2003 tells the DoD that it really should be using more open source software. So things go from memos, and then eventually they turn into policy, and then they eventually turn into actions. What's great about these memos is that people write them. People like David Wheeler, people like Don Myricks, and you see the same people occur over and over and over again. If you look at these advocates, eventually they start writing the policies themselves. So you can actually see Dave Wheeler pop up in about 10 years of history, first as an advocate, and then suddenly he starts writing policy. And a lot of these documents are actually connected through common people. It turns out there's actually a very small cabal of people interested in open source in government. So if we look at these policies, what most of these policies are doing is, again, legitimizing open source. And what they're doing is saying that open source is commercial off-the-shelf software, or COTS. That means that they are on equal footing, open source software, is on equal footing with commercial software, which has a preference. So rather than building something itself, the government should go out and buy something off the shelf. And off-the-shelf means commercial is the same thing as open source software. Now what's interesting about all of these policies is that you see this explosion right around when the Obama administration started the Open Government Directive. You see this explosion of people actually releasing code. And again, this difference between Department of Energy, they just went ahead and did it. And then the DOA, who actually had this very deliberative process, it took them years to finally pass policy. But the policies actually don't matter, it turns out. Because if you're an innovator, you're going to innovate anyway. The policies are for the relatively conservative folks in the middle of the adoption curve. It's also interesting that none of the advocates were actually advocating for mandatory open source policies. All they wanted was equivalence. So there's a lot of opportunities for future research on this. Doing a network analysis to see the relationship between people and publications, that would be really interesting. There's a whole trove of data from the Center for Strategic and International Studies that would be interesting to overlay onto this. And also to explain those dark ages. In 1990, he's like, what went on there? Why was it so quiet? Dun-dun-dun-dun-dun.