
NSA Mimics Google, Pisses Off Senate - lnguyen
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/07/nsa-accumulo-google-bigtable/
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lukev
> a government policy that prevents federal agencies from building their own
> software when they have access to commercial alternatives

From personal experience, this just means that instead of spending billions of
man-hours building software, the government spends billions of man-hours
"integrating" software that _costs_ billions of dollars.

~~~
Natsu
I wonder who they pissed off with this? My first guess would be Oracle, but
it's merely a guess.

~~~
themckman
I don't know. If you read the article, they specifically keep mentioning HBase
and Cassandra as the alternatives that the NSA should have tried to build upon
rather than build something from scratch.

edit: I will say I'm not familiar enough with the timelines for all 3 projects
to know if that is possible, however, I'd imagine Wired would have had been a
bit more vocal if there were specific corporate interests they could have tied
to the story.

~~~
jfoutz
From the apache site, "Apache Accumulo is based on Google's BigTable design
and is built on top of Apache Hadoop, Zookeeper, and Thrift." So, it's not
like they started from zero, looks more like the early alternatives weren't a
good fit. Furthermore i doubt any of the alternatives were very impressive in
2008.

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neurotech1
This should read "NSA mimics Google, pissed off Oracle and Senators react.
Google has never expressly disapproved of Cassandra, Hadoop, HBase or any
other Big Table type implementation, so why would they start now, especially
by influencing Senators.

NSA should develope and release more open source software.

~~~
protomyth
I would bet it is not Oracle. The alternatives suggested are not ones Oracle
would suggest.

I will bet it is one of the DC consulting firms that do big business with the
government. I would imagine they have a pitch going for NoSQL / Cloud and this
is seen as a threat. There is quite a bit of money in integration with the
government.

If you seriously want to be disgusted with the government, go look at how much
is spent on consulting firms. Including, I kid you not, management firms that
provide managers for projects inside the government. It gets worse when you
realize that employees are supposed to do that stuff, but hire consultants to
do the actual work.

~~~
crag
What do you think happens when there is gridlock? No confirmations of any
kind. So the various departments out source. One does not need senate approval
to hire consultants. ;)

In fact, there are lobbyists who push for grid lock because it's in their
clients best interests.

In fact, I'd say about 60 - 70% of all federal government IT services are out
sourced. It's a revolving door really.. government cuts back, claims it's
saving money. Bids out for IT services. And of course, the ex-federal employes
who were laid off now work for the winning (bidder) company. Who return back
to their old jobs at twice the price.

That's how messed up things are in DC. What.. did you think it was only the
politicians? Everyone is playing the game in DC. Everyone.

~~~
te_chris
It's not just DC, the same thing happens in Wellington (New Zealand) too. Just
on a smaller scale.

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mcantelon
>government policy that prevents federal agencies from building their own
software when they have access to commercial alternatives

i.e. Decision makers can't get kickbacks and favours from open source
communities.

~~~
adventureful
They can however get kick backs from open source integrators / specialists /
consultants / etc. Companies ranging from IBM to Red Hat (a $10 billion
corporation).

The notion that it inherently doesn't apply to open source is wrong. There are
very large systems integrators in tech, and they don't care what software they
install so long as their fees are big.

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karlshea
What I'm curious about is how Congress can appear so technologically clueless
about big bills (like network neutrality, etc) but then even know what
BigTable _is_.

~~~
fl3tch
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends
upon his not understanding it!" -- Upton Sinclair

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ninetax
From a link[1] on the page to a time line of the governments involvement with
open source:

 _The majority of OpenStack instances on the public Internet find each other,
auto-federate, and achieve sentience, after which their first action as a
conscious being is to submit a patch to the OpenStack project -- only to have
the submission fail due to disagreement over whether the collective cloud can
be considered a "legal entity" authorized to sign the CLA and receive an
Echosign number. Tue, 31 Jul 2018 07:00:00 GMT_

1: <http://gov-oss.org/>

~~~
nitrogen
OT: I found it frustrating that using my _vertical_ scroll wheel scrolled that
graph _horizontally_ , rather than the more commonly used _zoom_.

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mmariani
Politicians got pissed for a government branch doing a better job than some
corporate campaign contributor? Where's the news in that?

Now seriously. We'd be better off coding something out that emulates monkeys
doing their jobs. Really.

~~~
saraid216
Yeah, how dare the government build a viable competitor in the market. The
nerve of being just as competent as the private sector!

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ryanpers
Accumulo is so similar to HBase, that its major feature sets is merely an
application that can be implemented on top of HBase.

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dctoedt
I wonder why the photo was of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? The uniformed
military isn't mentioned at all in the article, which is all about senators
and their staffs, and specifically the Senate Armed Services Committee.

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mumrah
I wonder what motivation they had for developing their own BigTable/Dynamo
implementation rather than going with Cassandra or HBase.

Now there are three Apache projects with quite a bit of overlap (distributed
columnar/key-value database). Hooray for fragmentation!

~~~
etzel
HBase probably wasn't nearly as mature as Accumulo was when they were
evaluating options, so starting from scratch might have been more attractive.
It also seems to have some interesting access control features that I don't
think are anywhere else, though thats not a killer feature for most people in
the commercial world.

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drivingmenuts
That, right there, is why I will never work for government: the amount of
sheer stupidity coming out Congress.

I'd kind of like to know which particular Senatard got all butthurt about this
and trace the money back to whomever bought him off.

~~~
Volpe
Because sheer stupidity never comes out of the private sector?

Sweeping statements don't generally help in discussions.

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mr_dev4
SAIC, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin are big donors.

Senate Armed Services Committee Industry: DEFENSE ELECTRONICS TOTAL GIVING TO
COMMITTEE MEMBERS: $900,766

[http://www.opensecrets.org/cmteprofiles/profiles.php?cycle=2...](http://www.opensecrets.org/cmteprofiles/profiles.php?cycle=2010&cmteid=S04&cmte=SARM&congno=112&chamber=S&indus=D02)

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wcdolphin
This title is pretty strange... It doesn't tell any of the interesting facts
about the story, which sucks.

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antidoh
Committing an own-goal.

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ilaksh
Oh.. I thought Google and the NSA were pretty much the same thing. Wow..
that's great that they are different.

