Impact
Prior to this report, very little data had been available about how—and even whether—FOSS was used widely in U.S. DoD systems. The report changed this aspect of the discussion immediately, proving beyond any reasonable doubt that the U.S. DoD was already a major user of FOSS. More importantly, the report documented that FOSS was being used in important and even mission-critical situations. One of the more surprising findings documented in the report is that the cyber security community was the most upset of any group at the prospect of FOSS being banned. From their perspective, FOSS provides high code visibility and the ability to fix security flaws quickly and quietly. As a result of the findings, any serious consideration of banning FOSS was dropped. The effort to develop a policy on using FOSS instead moved towards a much more even-handed policy that was initiated with the Stenbit open source software policy, that requires U.S. DoD groups to treat FOSS in the same fashion as proprietary software, and subsequently made even more explicit in the 2009 Wennergren clarification of the Stenbit policy.
The broader impact can be realized by recognizing that if the security-conscious U.S. DoD had banned FOSS, it is likely many other federal components, state and local governments, corporations, and international groups would have followed suit. The result would have been a world much less friendly both to FOSS and to FOSS-like efforts such as Wikipedia.
Read more about this topic: Use Of Free And Open Source Software (FOSS) In The U.S. Department Of Defense, History
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