Achieving Better Buying Power for Mobile Open Architecture Software Systems Through Diverse Acquisition Scenarios

Abstract

The U.S. Defense community denotes an ecosystem of system or software component producers, system integrators, and customer organizations. For a variety of reasons this community now embraces the need to utilize open source software (OSS) and proprietary closed source software (CSS) in the system capabilities or software components it acquires, design, develops, deploys, and sustains. But the long-term transition to agile and adaptive capabilities that integrate bespoke or legacy, OSS and CSS components, has surfaced a number of issues that require acquisition-research-led approaches and solutions. In this paper, we identify and describe six key issues now found in the Defense software ecosystem: (1) unknown or unclear software architectural representations; (2) how to best deal with diverse, heterogeneous software IP licenses; (3) how to address cybersecurity requirements; (4) challenges arising in software integration and release pipelines; (5) how OSS evolution patterns transform software IP and cybersecurity requirements; and (6) the emergence of new business models for software distribution, cost accounting, and software distribution. We use the domain of command and control systems under different acquisition scenarios as our focus to help illuminate these issues along the way. We close with suggestions for how to resolve them.