“The days of proprietary technology must come to an end. We will no longer accept systems that couple hardware, software and data.”
– Vice Admiral Mark Edwards, US Navy, 6 March 2008
Edwards spoke on the importance of open systems to ensure interoperability, and even went so far as to suggest that the Navy was at a strategic disadvantage in information technology, such that a sudden threat could destabilize the organization as the Strategic Defense Initiative did with the Soviet Union. I feel that may be overstating the case, but I appreciate his zeal. Open systems, in my mind, ideally implement open standards through open source software. Especially in the DOD, where programs can field systems that will not be replaced or touched for years at a time, the durability of open standards with open source implementations is indispensible.
a technology job is no excuse 