have a lot more to consider,” he said. Tat, he continued, includes “legal concerns with issues like trademark, copyright and patent law. For instance, open source code is generally released under a stan- dard license that relies on copyright as an enforcement mechanism, but federal government works do not have copyright protection.”
Te problem is that such licenses gov- ern limits of liability and warranty, as well as how intellectual property can be used and shared. Without a license (or with a license that was declared invalid), releasing software may open the door to significant litigation against the govern- ment, and against anyone that uses or contributes to government open source projects, Karan said.
“Te White House has published a very high-level policy,” Karan said. “It will be up to individual agencies how to imple- ment it.”
Open source DOD projects remain few. Tough military
organizations differ,
there are three major reasons why more projects have not yet been released as open source—visibility, operational secu- rity and paperwork.
Releasing software to the world means just that: Te world can see it. Tere is a certain amount of fear, even within the Dshell team, that releasing software could decrease its effectiveness because others will know how it works and how to avoid it. Te risk has to be weighed against the benefits.
Open source is also not necessarily always a good fit for Army projects. Obvi- ously, anything classified is precluded. Even something unclassified may not be releasable if it ties back to close-hold methodologies.
Publicizing software also comes with certain responsibilities. Once a project is released, a community will form around it, and the community will expect a cer- tain amount of feedback. It will expect answers to questions, responses to con- cerns and regular updates.
When deciding on software to release, Karan said, “it will take scrutiny of each project as we go forward into a new level of transparency.”
Te U.S. CIO’s push for change makes it easier for organizations like ARL to real- ize the benefits of open source software with the new policy. Dshell’s full-on jump into the ocean of open source proj- ects helped find the path and potential pitfalls in the release process, and that should help future projects more easily achieve a public release. ARL is looking for more ways to open public access that are both meaningful to the Army and beneficial to the software community.
CONCLUSION Karan has coordinated ARL’s open source policy for publication to GitHub in hopes that other agencies would copy, use and change the document in a way that allows ARL to easily incorporate any feedback. Te posting also allows other agencies to use ARL’s policy as a starting point for their own open source initiatives. “Tere is no point for every- body building from scratch, which is part of the reason for open source,” Karan explained.
In November 2016, U.S. CIO Tony Scott launched the new website Code. gov, which ARL will use alongside other options to share computer code to sup- port basic and applied research. For a research laboratory, releasing projects to the open source community provides an easy way to share the code and methods
used in published papers, simplifying external peer review.
Karan described a recent experience with one of his projects. “I have a simulator project that showed amazing results— that is, until I found the bug that was making it so perfect. Once I fixed that bug, it went back to what you would actu- ally expect. If I had published that paper and had the code out there, experts could debate the results and find the glitch. I would have had to retract the paper in that case, but I would have improved the science.”
Releasing research projects to the open source community provides wider vis- ibility of computational expertise at the lab. It encourages openness and sharing in a constructive way that can potentially improve projects and processes.
“If we have projects that get traction, that’s a big success,” Karan added. “More importantly about putting the code out, it helps us to improve the science.”
For more information about Dshell or about the ARL software release process for unre- stricted public release, go to https://github. com/USArmyResearchLab.
MR. JOSHUA EDWARDS is a software developer with ICF providing
contract
support to ARL. He holds a B.S. in information technology with a concentration in database technology and programming from George Mason University. He was instrumental in ARL’s Dshell release, and has been working in the cybersecurity realm within the Network Security Branch of ARL for nearly seven years.
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SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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