[jandrewrogers]

I think the best future model for DoD software is to bring much more of the systems integration and product development in-house, mostly using open source, which will produce a higher quality and less expensive result for the DoD. Critical differentiated software technologies will be outsourced to boutique software companies that can offer software capabilities that are qualitatively superior to anything available in open source but can't be developed on DoD software engineering wages and/or budgets.

There are often large gaps between the mission requirements and the technical capabilities of open sources software, and research labs lack the expertise and budget to address those gaps in practice. Of course, the usual system integrators can't build this software either but they will charge the taxpayer a lot of money to fail at it.