> > "formerly available only to high level government agencies"
> >
>which is code for either "marketing dept. says it would sound cool" or "it
>no longer offers acceptable levels of security so it's free for public
>consumption (remember skipjack?)" or "we don't need it now that we've
>upgraded our computers from the old IBM PC-XTs to the newer and more
>powerful 286"
A few other explanations, though "marketing dept. says it would sound cool"
probably wins.
- they developed it for the government market, now they want to make money
- ditto, but the original customers weren't buying :-)
- their government customers require it to be "commercial off-the-shelf
software",
to satisfy Federal Purchasing Buzzword Mantras,
so they're satisfying that requirement by offering it to the public.
Back when I was a tool of the military-industrial complex,
we ran into the latter scenario fairly often.
Federal cost-control rules, designed to reduce the extent to which
the military pays millions of dollars in custom development costs
for their 600-dollar hammers, tend to require COTS.
They're totally independent of the requirements that the end users
may have for highly customized features that nobody in the
commercial world actually wants to buy, or features that may be
individually available but not simultaneously available,
like B1-rated operating system security, compliance with
all POSIX standards including the Real-Time ones that weren't
fully defined at the time and required cooking the kernel
(which instantly breaks the Orange Book security certification),
Ada (of course!) interfaces to all the cool kernel features,
GOSIP Networking (that was the Government's OSI protocol stack,
which of course also breaks the Orange Book Certs),
TCP/IP over X.25 (both of which also broke the Orange Book Certs),
and X.25 with the particular combination of options that the
NSA consultant thought would be a good idea to help the
security of the system (X.25 has zillions of options,
nobody implements all of them to start with, much less
in the combinations that the consultant thought would be cool.)
