> Q: Isn’t OSS developed primarily by inexperienced students?

> No, OSS is developed by a wide variety of software developers, and the average developer is quite experienced. A Boston Consulting Group study found that the average age of OSS developers was 30 years old, the majority had training in information technology and/or computer science, and on average had 11.8 years of computer programming experience.

If true, that’s an amazing statistic.

The only problem I have with this document (which is quite good), is that it basically is a reflection of the mentality that we have to answer all these questions because commercial proprietary software is the "normal" path and we need all these justifications / answers for OSS.

For many things (or in an alternate universe), you would hope the opposite had been the default, and commercial proprietary software had to justify why it should be adopted.

> Public Law 115-232 defines OSS defines OSS as “software for which the human-readable source code is available for use, study, re-use, modification, enhancement, and re-distribution by the users of such software

> The following organizations examine licenses; licenses should pass at least the first two industry review processes, and preferably all of them, else they have a greatly heightened risk of not being an open source software license

The first two are OSI and FSF.

Some other questions also allude to not including more restrictive "source available" licenses, presumably including commons clause, as open source.

I like how officially military documents are now delegating to the GNU project’s documents for definitions.

I'm led to believe that the DoD is Red Hat's largest customer. This is based on my own experience seeing and using various systems in the US Army (most notably FBCB2 [0]), plus a quick web search which turned up a few articles that agree with me without giving any actual data or source.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_XXI_Battle_Command_Briga...

Dr. Albert Einstein has a famous quote: “In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.” [1]

While this and more recent documents [2] indicate that Open Source software is encouraged in the Army, the reality is that software selected first has to be on the site local "Approved Products List" or APL, or the wider Army APL. If it is not then an approval request form must be submitted, requiring services running, ports opened, and so on. The approval process can be weeks or even months.

[1] https://www.nonprofitpro.com/post/understand-the-difference-...

[2] https://dodcio.defense.gov/portals/0/documents/library/softw...

Indeed this seems like a fairly accurate account so far.

Also, while the section 'What are synonyms for open source software?' later clarifies what is meant by Free Software, the FSF would likely avoid calling OSS and Free Software synonyms, even if by implication:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

The DoD has recently updated some of their policy around use of open-source software as well: https://dodcio.defense.gov/portals/0/documents/library/softw...

They spent more resources writing this FAQ than contributing actual source

I just love the idea of the military using gimp.

   General: So, Major, how did you prepare those fine graphics of the war plans?
   Major: Gimp sir.
   General: 'Gimp' you say?