At I/ITSEC 2007, Dr. Paul Mayberry said during the Flag and General Officer Panel, "Proprietary solutions are short sighted… proprietary is essentially an anathema to those criteria of responsiveness… When I can only go back to one source and their sort-of dedicated workforce, it really is not getting at the fundamental criteria that we have for all of training transformation effects, and that is a notion of being agile, adaptive, responsive, timely and trainable." The US Navy has also been at the forefront of these changes: for example the Department of Navy Chief Information Officer released a policy on accepting the use of open source software (OSS) and Vice Adm. Mark Edwards reiterated it stating, "The days of proprietary technology must come to an end. We will no longer accept systems that couple hardware, software and data." Likewise, OSD in a recent report on Open Technologies has recently begun to see the light and understand that good technologies eventually become a commodity and there is a pronounced requirement to move toward open source software platforms to better respond to the needs of the warfighter.

Taken together, it is obvious that the modeling and simulation community is going to have to implement more open source solutions in order to meet the future needs of the Department of Defense. Like any major change in business practices, this will not always be an easy or popular transformation. However, examining how other sectors of government and industry are incorporating OSS into their products can be instructive to the modeling and simulation industry. The authors present case studies of other government open source implementations and how the lessons learned from these can be applied to modeling and simulation. Additionally, they discuss successful business models companies can use to profit from this new business model.