Open source had a number of advantages for the Pentagon. First, Pentagon programmers and defense contractors could customize the software to make it operate the way they wanted. They could slice and dice the code to eliminate parts of the operating system that they did not need and that could introduce bugs into the system. Second, after reducing the size of the operating system, they could then run what the software industry refers to as “tools” on the remaining lines of code to try and identify bugs, malicious code, and other vulnerabilities.
