DARPA Open Sources Software, Interested In Fostering Better R&D

DARPA, a wing of the U.S. Department of Defense, has developed quite a few technological innovations for the military that wind up trickling down to us civilians, and now the agency is open sourcing some of its projects with an eye toward fostering even better R&D.

The DARPA Open Catalog is a “curated list of DARPA-sponsored software and peer-reviewed publications”, meaning that the agency isn’t just offering up anything and everything its working on, but in any case the first project posted on the site is the XDATA program.


The XDATA program pertains to big data, so any fruitful collaboration on that project would be a boon to essentially everyone. If there’s sufficient interest from the R&D community, DARPA will open source additional projects. On deck: Broad Operational Language Translation (BOLT) and Visual Media Reasoning (VMR), which like XDATA are projects out of the Information Innovation Office (I2O).


The spirit of open sourcing software is the hope that many minds together can create something better than any one individual or group could alone, and thus this is a good step.