The document discusses the potential and implementation of open source systems and standards, particularly in the defense industry and modeling & simulation (M&S). It highlights the importance of economically viable reasons for adopting open systems and the value of community collaboration in problem-solving. Additionally, it emphasizes the benefits of cloud computing, big data, and the necessity of engaging stakeholders to define and support the M&S ecosystem moving forward.

1. Open Source, Systems, Standards, and
Content
Jeffrey Wallace, Ph.D., Continuous Transformation Environment Laboratories
Mark Visco, Analytical Graphics, Inc.
Defense Industry Workshop: Strengthen DoD
Stewardship and Application of M&S
April 17, 2014, 8:15 am to 12:15 pm

2. Central ideas
Open Source and Content: When Does It Work?
Open Systems and Standards
Examples and Evidence
Geospatial Visualization
Hadoop/Map Reduce
Accumulo
MongoDB
Open Scene Graph
MakeHuman
Flight Gear
Opportunity
Implementation
Way Ahead
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3. Open Source and Content
When Does It Work?
A community, organizations and individuals, decides to collectively
solve a problem
There has to be a viable economic model enabling the community
Many of the successful open source efforts evolve related
commercial variants or compliant components and tools
An organized approach has to evolve from the community
Requirements/Management
Configuration Management
Development
Testing
Release
Support

4. Open Systems and Standards
When Does It Work?
There must be an economically viable reason to open up
access to a system (Open Systems)
There must be an economically viable reason to comply
with a standard
The implementation must not be a high economic barrier to entry
(otherwise you have merely created a cartel)
And sustainability…
In most cases an organization must evolve and sustain
itself to:
Specify the interface or standard
Manage versioning and release of the specification
documentation

5. Examples
Geospatial Visualization
Hadoop/Map Reduce
Accumulo
MongoDB
Open Scene Graph
MakeHuman
Flight Gear

6. The benefits of cloud computing, advanced analytics, and big data
are all around us
At the foundation are infrastructure pieces that enable economic
ecosystems
Yahoo led the way by creating an open source approximation of
Google’s core infrastructure (Hadoop/MapReduce)
A commercial variant powers Walmart and American Express, among
others
Over 60% of the world’s websites are running the open source
Apache webserver
That is great, why does someone use something different?
What do they use?
The commercial versions have to comply with open syandards and
support certain open interfaces
Evidence – supporting facts for their advocacy
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7. Webserver Usage

8. The opportunity has tremendous upside – improve the
product in a revolutionary way, lower the cost, and speed
delivery
The cost is likely just a reprogramming of existing
resources
Obviously this will not be easy, but it might also be obvious once
you look at it
The benefit would be to actually enable all the different
elements of the government that could use modeling and
simulation to do so in a way that optimizes scare resources
What is opportunity to the Enterprise – what is
the Cost/benefit?
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9. In a public-private partnership way:
Get a list (by funding) of the top XX M&S users in government
and industry
Identifies the mass of economic ecosystem and gives you an idea of the
true size
Not all economic theories are valid at all sizes of ecosystems
Understand infrastructure requirements and areas where efforts
could collaborate
Understand where existing open source opportunities lie
Are there any government funded efforts that should convert to open
source? How would that work?
Anything that should be started as a new open source system with seed
funding?
Do Not Get Lost In Meetings Just Do It (Something)
How would you implement this?
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10. The way ahead
M&SCO should host an industry day(maybe a day and a
half)
Identify the ecosystem as it exists
Engage the community about how to:
Define an M&S Enterprise
Describe the M&S infrastructure universe
Identify open source, systems, standards, and content opportunities going
forward
Coalesce a group of key government stakeholders to
mentor the process and support M&SCO
Create a new roadmap
Own the execution as part of stakeholder mission success
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11. Questions
Comments and Questions from
the Panels?