

Darpa Open Catalog - kbar13
http://www.darpa.mil/opencatalog/

======
penland
Dr. White, who heads this up, spoke yesterday at Strata . . . it was the most
bizarre talk I heard in the 3 days by a mile. At one point, he actually put a
slide from a Wired peace that bashed him, then spoke for about 45 seconds
about how the piece was wrong when no one in the audience really cared. He's
just an odd duck.

On this, he put forth a really solid vision of what he sees coming out of this
- a classic melding of Machine Learning dark arts with the ease of use of a
traditional, modern web framework. It's a pretty bold vision, but he's got the
cash to spread around to certain contributors.

------
dschiptsov
If I had piles of govt money to spent I would rather support the development
of already established OSS projects with adequate teams and would try to
influence further direction by contributing "scientific basis" and "rational
reasoning" about functionality I think is necessary. That means I would enjoy
"free" community testing and support and probably even bug-fixes.) The mantra
for Open Source is "make something for others to [re]use", which, I think,
govt officials could never understand.

~~~
andrewfhart
XDATA participant here...

I completely agree with your emphasis on the community as one (if not the)
defining attribute of what makes open source special. I think, however, that
attitudes towards open source in government are definitely starting to shift.
Events like the (3rd annual) Open Source Summit [1], and efforts like XDATA
contribute greatly to overall awareness of the importance of understanding and
embracing open source in government.

As far as supporting established OSS projects, this is definitely a big part
of what XDATA is doing. Several of the projects on this list have well-
established communities at the Apache Software Foundation (e.g.: OODT, Spark,
Shark, Mesos, Tika) and others have strong ties to university research
programs (Stanford, University of Washington, USC, UC Berkeley, etc.)

In a sense, what XDATA is doing is helping to connect these communities and
funding them to come up with ways to collaboratively leverage their software
and skills to solve data-intensive problems.

[1] [http://ossummit.org](http://ossummit.org)

------
jonnybgood
Not surprising Julia is DARPA sponsored. Julia has a big future ahead of
itself in the military and government. It has perhaps more of a future than
any other modern language in those industries.

~~~
rdtsc
> Julia has a big future ahead of itself in the military and government.

Hmm, curious, why would that be? Or rather, what are the features that make
you think Julia has that other languages and technologies don't have that
would be killed in military and government?

I work within that area and if anything the military and government love their
red tape, certifications, protection profiles, rubber stamps that it would
seem like the last industry to jump on a new and largely yet unproven
language. You wouldn't believe the number of Windows XP and RHEL 4 and 5
servers still running.

~~~
scriptproof
The list of features is impressive:
[http://julialang.org/](http://julialang.org/). Concurrency, metaprogramming,
efficient macros, generics, etc...

~~~
nn3
Too many features in a language sounds like a bad thing to me. Anyone
remembers
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PL/I](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PL/I)

Trying to be everything to everyone just makes you lose focus and causes too
much complexity. Better to be lean and mean and somewhat specialized

