Open Acquisition: Combining Open Source Software Development with System Acquisition

This study explores and develops concepts leading to the combination of best practices from open source software development (OSSD) projects with emerging capabilities for virtual system acquisition. Virtual system acquisition is an evolving approach to demonstrate significant improvements in reducing the cost and cycle time for acquiring software-intensive systems, while improving their quality. It employs techniques and advanced information technology (IT) for electronic government applications. Open source software development is a relatively new approach to the development, deployment, and ongoing evolution of complex software system applications. The open source approach rethinks what are the resources, products, processes, and production environments necessary to develop large-scale, easy to use, and highly reliable software system applications. Open acquisition is a new concept that combines the best practices from advanced electronic government techniques with those from open source software development. The study described in this paper thus develops, demonstrates initial capabilities, and outlines further steps needed to make open acquisition techniques part of the evolving framework for realizing virtual system acquisition.