From the webpage:
Welcome to the DARPA Open Catalog, which contains a curated list of DARPA-sponsored software and peer-reviewed publications. DARPA funds fundamental and applied research in a variety of areas including data science, cyber, anomaly detection, etc., which may lead to experimental results and reusable technology designed to benefit multiple government domains.
The DARPA Open Catalog organizes publically releasable material from DARPA programs, beginning with the XDATA program in the Information Innovation Office (I2O). XDATA is developing an open source software library for big data. DARPA has an open source strategy through XDATA and other I2O programs to help increase the impact of government investments.
DARPA is interested in building communities around government-funded software and research. If the R&D community shows sufficient interest, DARPA will continue to make available information generated by DARPA programs, including software, publications, data and experimental results. Future updates are scheduled to include components from other I2O programs such as Broad Operational Language Translation (BOLT) and Visual Media Reasoning (VMR).
I don’t know if I would use binaries from DARPA but with open source you get to choose your own comfort level. 😉
Maybe I should ask:
How does it feel for DARPA to be more open source than your favorite vendor?
What do you think? More backdoors in open source* or binary software?
I first saw this in a tweet by Tim O’Reilly.
* Remember that open source doesn’t mean non-commercial. You can always copyright open source code. Copyright has protected Mickey Mouse longer than binary has protected COBOL programs.
Besides, open source with copyright makes it easier for you to search for infringing code doesn’t it? Enables you to ask what your competitors must be hiding. Yes?