Contrary to the picture painted by this article, the military industrial complex has always been an extremely active contributor to the open source community. In fact, depending on what you include in the amorphous term "military industrial complex," the American military industrial complex is THE single biggest contributor to open source software worldwide, period. This becomes less true as time goes by, simply because the types of projects developed as open source has expanded beyond the computing, science, math, and technology-related projects that historically dominated the open source world (the MIC doesn't contribute to a lot of personal finance or recipe management projects
), but I have a hard time imagining anyone ever doing more for open source than the US military and its appendages. With the exception of places like Argonne, they rarely host or even claim sponsorship of the projects they contribute to. Contributors don't participate as representatives of their organizations, but as individuals, and as a result the level of activity is rarely recognized. This isn't because they are trying to hide their involvement, but because there is simply no motivation for company recognition. In many cases their contributions to an open source project aren't an explicit part of their job, it's just a side effort that helps them get their *real* job done.Employees of national labs have been particularly strong contributors to the open source world. Not only do they work in a completely not-for-profit environment, but they see part of their mission to be the advancement of technology available to the nation and the world. They have the same motivations for using open source as everyone else, but with even less motivation to create a product they can call their own. They also tend to submit their contributions back to the project more frequently than a commercial participant might. They have no competitive reasons to hold back contributions, and it's actually easier than keeping it to yourself if you have any interest at all in keeping up with the project's changes. In my opinion, the non-commercial elements of the industrial military complex embody the spirit of open source better than nearly any other organization in existence.
It's easy to explain why Lockheed would "reinvent the wheel," too. From past experiences with them, I know they've been strict about NOT using open source in their products, more strict than they need to be in my opinion. Unlike much of the industrial military complex, their commercial status makes them more vulnerable to being required to expose source code that is considered sensitive for either proprietary or security reasons. I suspect that they recognize that they over-extended the "no open source" policy, and now they are simply doing what they wanted to do all along by putting those products that aren't part of their core business into the open domain.
There's no co-opting going on here. You can't co-opt what you already possess. There's no infiltration any more than walking into my own home is an infiltration. There's no "sudden gaining of religion" when it's the same religion they've been following for decades. The military industrial complex is largely responsible for building and supporting the open source culture and community you are a part of today. You just didn't know whose house you've been living in.
