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In Part I, we discussed the Senate Armed Services Committee (SACS)'s attempt to hobble the open source Accumulo project in the DOD. They directed the Department's CIO to jump through a number of reporting hoops before Accumulo would be allowed inside the DOD, and directed the Accumulo team to upstream their work into related open source projects. It appears to be an attempt to dismantle the project on the assumption that it was competing with products and project from the private sector. » Read more

The dozens of software projects launched in the wake of Google's Big Table and Map Reduce papers have changed the way we handle large datasets. Like many organizations, the NSA began experimenting with these "big data" tools and realized that the open source implementations available at the time were not addressing some of their particular needs. » Read more

The Government Open Source Conference, masterfully curated by Deb Bryant and the good people at the Oregon State University Open Source Lab, is one of my favorite open source events. Every year, they manage to pull together quality speakers from innovative agencies and projects in a warm, collaborative, and exciting environment.

Before the earthquake unpleasantness later in the day, I was able to was able to catch the "Cutting Costs" session. Alex Howard of O'Reilly ("The hardest working man in Gov 2.0") moderated a panel discussion between » Read more