DISA makes 50 applications available for others to use and
improve  GCN Awards For seemingly as long as the Defense
Department has deployed software, its leaders have pursued an
elusive goal: software reuse. After a military service spent the
money to develop a piece of software or commissioned a
contractor to build an application, information technology
chiefs have sought to find a way for other branches of the
military to reuse that code. Software reuse could save money and
increase uniformity of operations.  Now, the Defense Information
Systems Agency has latched onto a new approach that could help
achieve that goal by making its own internal software open
source.  Earlier this year, DISA released as open source a suite
of more than 50 different applications, collectively named the
Open Source Corporate Management Information System (OSCMIS).
The idea is that other government agencies and commercial firms
could reuse the software for their own purposes. And if a few of
the users are savvy enough to make a