More open source news
November 13, 2007 – 4:50 pmIf it is good enough for the Department of Defense, it should be good enough for CU’s, right?
From Colin, the DOD is hosting an open source conference this December in DC. To quote the DoD article, they are,
"Fostering collaboration and interoperability across DoD"
Just cross out DoD and put in CU. The credit union movement seems to be the perfect industry to grow open source projects, and not just software ones, but there seems to be quite a hurdle to getting true collaboration. It seems to me that many CU’s would fear "interoperability", like cell phone number portability, because they could lose members to their neighboring CU.
I would like to think that if the DoD came out with a publication that says open source meets their requirements for security, CU’s would be much more comfortable in adopting those technologies. But as Matt Dean from Trabian has said before, the hacker to contributor ratio is vitally important. With Linux, Firefox, or Apache, there are a great number of eyes looking at the continued development of the product and hacking a linux distro would maybe get you access to a server or some data. The ratio of hackers to contributors would be much greater in an open source core processor than in Apache or Linux because they payoff for hacking would be much greater. They could again access to hard dollars and potential transfer money straight to an account in the Cayman islands where I do my banking.
Thoughts?
4 Responses to “More open source news”
While I agree that Matt’s assessment of an infant open source core is correct, I think an open source core that has reached maturity in the market would have many more eyes on it than we currently have.
In maturity, an open source core would not only be supported by CUSOs and volunteers, but also a number of companies building add-ons, offering hosting and implementation, and monitoring security. Would these “extra eyes” be enough? I don’t know, but I’d love to find out!
By Mark McSpadden on Nov 13, 2007
But what about in that infancy stage? If we’re trying to get CU’s signed up, we’ll have to have a secure product. While an open source project at maturity is secure, how do you handle it in the infant stage?
By Robbie Wright on Nov 14, 2007
@Mark - I agree, I’d love to find out too… and we’ll never know unless we try.
@Robbie - There has to be a way. Maybe during the infancy stage the product is run as a simulation, without actual dollars or information at risk.
By Josh Jones on Nov 15, 2007
@Josh - But we’d have to have a functioning product to deliver to some of our investor CU’s…
By Robbie Wright on Nov 15, 2007