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Precedents for Government Funding of Open Source Projects

Government funding has played a significant role in the development of open source software and protocols.

• OpenBSD - A DARPA grant of $2.3 million funded security improvements to OpenBSD starting in 2001, along with related projects. Wired reported funding was cut off to OpenBSD in March 2003 after project leader Theo de Raadt made uncomplimentary anti-war statements about his sponsor, telling The Toronto Star that he was uncomfortable accepting money from the DoD. The same story ran in the New York Times and elsewhere. "De Raadt estimates about 85 percent of the DARPA grant has been spent, with about $1 million being used to pay for OpenBSD developers. Much of the work has been handled by a team of 80 unpaid volunteers. Another $500,000 of the money funded the work of United Kingdom-based researchers on a related project called OpenSSL, which is used to encrypt data." De Raadt is quoted as saying it was an issue of freedom of speech, apparently in the belief that offending his sponsor was within his free speech rights.
• GNU Ada - The DISA Ada Joint Program Office supported the development of the Ada 95 GNU compiler and an Ada 95-to-Java cross-compiler.
• CMU Sphinx Speech Recognition - Carnegie Mellon University has released the DARPA-funded Sphinx project as open source, "in order to stimulate the creation of speech-using tools and applications, and to advance the state of the art both directly in speech recognition, as well as in related areas including dialog systems and speech synthesis".
• Perl - Perl was conceived as part of a secret project for the National Security Agency known as the "Blacker". Larry Wall didn`t control the rights to the first version of Perl he wrote for the government and reimplemented it later as open source.
• The Internet - DARPA and NSF networks were the basis of what became the Internet.
• The Web - CERN, a tax-subsidized European particle physics research lab, paid Tim Berners Lee to develop the protocols of the world wide web. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, defining HTML (HyperText Markup Language), HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) and URLs (Universal Resource Locators).
• Email - BBN computer engineer Ray Tomlinson invented Internet email in 1971 while working on Arpanet for DARPA.
• The Mosaic Web browser - Funded by the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, Mosaic was later reimplemented as Netscape and released as open source Mozilla. The original Mosaic code was eventually licensed to Microsoft to become Internet Explorer.
• Apache - Funded by the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois.
• BSD UNIX - DARPA grants largely funded the development of UNIX 4.1 BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) as well as the later development of the TCP/IP networking protocols. BSD evolved into FreeBSD and the kernel of Mac OS X.
• NSF Open Source Workshop
• NSF-funded Open Source Physics Curriculum
• The National Cancer Institute Center for Bioinformatics - Funded by NIH, the NCI has established the Center for Bioinformatics (NCICB) to provide bioinformatics support and integration of its diverse research initiatives. To achieve this goal the NCICB has been ... deployed through open source tools and systems.
• Standards and Open Source Software at NIST - NIST Software
• First Genetic Trust building open source Gene-Expression Informatics Platform for NCI - Open source bioinformatics platform to analyze publicly available genotype and gene-expression data.
• NSA Takes the Open Source Route
• NSA deputy director says “never again” to Open Source - Despite the title, the article actually says it is the GPL license, not open source generally, that NSA had trouble with.
• Composable High Assurance Trusted Systems (CHATS) funded by DARPA for open-source initiatives that improve security
• Galaxy Communicator - An open source architecture for constructing dialogue systems funded by DARPA
• The Library of Congress - Network Development and MARC Standards Office is developing a framework for working with MARC data in a XML environment.
• More links to government open source solutions, resources and agency initiatives