Ozone Widget Framework to transition to OSS

Open source advocates within the intelligence community are applauding a provision of the fiscal 2012 defense authorization bill requiring the Defense Information Systems Agency to publically make available source code for a National Security Agency-developed widget development framework.

The Ozone Widget Framework has already been distributed openly to defense and IC programmers, but the authorization act language requires framework custodians to establish a process under which members of the public can contribute improvements to the source code and documentation.

President Obama signed the fiscal 2012 defense authorization into law on Jan. 5. The Ozone Widget Framework is a JavaScript framework for lightweight browser-based applications.

As a short-term mechanism for displaying information culled from multiple databases, "it's easier doing that than trying to integrate databases together," said John Scott, a senior systems engineer at Colorado Springs, Colo.-based Radiant Blue and a proponent of military open source software.

The act also charges the Defense Department chief information officer with encouraging the use and development of the framework among defense contractors.

Although the act does well in promoting open source within defense and intelligence community computing environments, the fact that Congress had to legislatively insist on it is a sign of top-level resistance, Scott said.

"There should have been more leadership in the IC to force it to be open already," he said. "It's a shame to have it be at the point where Congress had to do something about it."

For more:
- go to the THOMAS page for the fiscal 2012 defense authorization act

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