> 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.
"and that’s a particular worry for Oren Falkowitz, one of the developers of the database, who has left the NSA to start Sqrrl, a company that seeks to build a business around Accumulo in much the same way Red Hat built one around the Linux operating system."
Likely Oracle. They have a NoSQL product now http://www.oracle.com/NoSQLDatabase and would probably push that onto their clients if they can't push Oracle DB.
The real cashcow is their hyper-expensive Oracle DB and Application Server products. They'd use political lobbying to protect the marketshare and billions in revenue.
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.
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.
Accumulo is almost identical to HBase, except it has security features built in to its core. I wouldn't be surprised if it started out as a fork of HBase.
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.
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.
Why wouldn't I be more upset with the lobbyists and consultants? They're the ones getting rich off of lying and gladhanding. The government employees are just trying to get through the day. They have a billion processes to make sure they're not getting kickbacks or a fraction of the lobbyists's pay.
Sounds like your beef is more with corruption than it is with government.
I'm not sure how you missed that I was not happy about the consulting firms. I am very unhappy money is spent do to lobbying / power players to feed the consulting firms around the beltway that are hired to do the jobs government employees were hired to do. It isn't individual corruption, it is the whole system of how government works in DC.
There used to be an office devoted to providing Congress with unbiased information about technology, but it was eventually shut down because "Congress is spending millions of dollars on itself" makes for a good soundbite.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessment
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.
I can almost guarantee that. It is always another vendor that pulls the strings. It comes with litigation threats, lobby efforts etc. It happens for small stuff, it definitely happens for multi-million dollar items.
What reason would Google have to object anyway? Bigtable isn't open source so there's no benefit in shutting down work on Accumulo - the man-hours are not going to go into Bigtable instead.
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.
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.
> 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.
What makes you think that "Congress", or even a small subcommittee, knows what BigTable is?
Yes, a congress critter used the word. They're typically speaking from scripts.
Tha article only talks about "The Senate Armed Service Committee"...sounds not like the The Senate or Congress, but rather a small company of people which most likely know what they're doing.
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
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.
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.
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.