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You're right, there's a smoking man in a dark room pulling the strings here

jimrandall 29th Jul 2010

Or... maybe you're paranoid.

Dana - let the adults talk for a minute.

Conspiracy theories are great for driving web traffic, and if that's all this is, then it doesn't necessarily mean that you're an idiot, just a troll.

I have another theory. *Maybe* Lockheed is legitimately trying to leverage all of the benefits of developing open source software - with which I'd hope you're familiar, given the subtitle of this blog...

or... *maybe* the team developing the app is full of 20-something software developers that run Linux and OSX at home, embracing open source and trying to change the closed culture of the defense industry.

And to your Fox News-style "who is this STerlecki character?" sensationalist inquiry... Let me give you a little insight here, because you clearly gave this no thought. The guy's email address is @lmco.com. So, in one breath you're shocked that Lockheed opens up source, and in the next, you're surprised that this Lockheed employee hasn't personally worked on open source before with his corporate profile. And maybe he's not the author anyway - maybe he's just the poor shlub that was tasked with maintaining the repository after a long development cycle.

Think, Dana... Think...

Now, before you lose focus... let's also play out the absolute most nefarious, worst-case scenario you can dream up. Let's go ahead and consider this plot where Lockheed is injecting spyware into a corporate communications app that's - (have you forgotten?) - open source. I assume they'd have some really clever top secret code scrapes and transmits that corporate data off-site to Lockheed's servers, whose addresses are cleverly obfuscated in the code, and I'd also have to assume that they'd expect to never get caught.

What would they do with this data, and do you really think nobody would notice megabytes of daily info heading out to lmco.com servers?

Really, Dana? Really?

Let's continue with this thought, Mulder, I think you're onto something...

So, we've described this top secret world where Lockheed's releasing internal corporate communications web apps that sends data back to their servers through brilliantly disguised open source code. And, we haven't described any motive... Who knows why they're doing it besides you, the expert, right?...

What about when they get caught? Are you suggesting that the company is risking multi-billion dollar government contracts so that they can spy on random corporate tweets?

Are you really that insane, Dana?