Center for New American Security – Open Source Software and the Department of Defense – “This paper discusses where the DoD is already making inroads to use open source development methodologies to shorten time to mission without sacrificing national security. I hope our civilian and uniformed leaders will read it carefully and take it seriously. There is so much more we can do. We all agree that our warfighters deserve the best equipment our nation can offer. Open source software is an under-appreciated way of achieving that goal…Over the past 50 years, open source software has evolved from a process of collaborative convenience for a small community of researchers and academics into a collection of widely recognized and globally adopted software libraries. Open source software powers the Internet, mobile technologies, multibillion-dollar corporations, and even the International Space Station. Open source software is ubiquitous. Open source software released through the Apache Foundation accounts for almost half of active web servers around the world. The Android operating system, which runs on over 80 percent of all smartphones in the world, is based on the open source operating system Linux. As of 2012, open source software served 75 percent of the top 10,000 websites on the Internet. Open source has been embraced by for-profit businesses – 78 percent of companies use open source software substantially, and only 3 percent don’t use open source software in any way. Major corporations such as Verizon and General Electric also take advantage of it. IBM contributes to existing open source projects, releases formerly proprietary code under open source licenses, and creates open source platforms from which it sells other IBM products and services. As Peter Levine of the venture firm Andreessen-Horowitz wrote in 2014, “without open source, Facebook, Google, Amazon and nearly every other modern technology company would not exist.”