[12-14-07 – Satellite News] Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. has taken their Opticks remote sensing data software and released it as an open source project, the company announced Dec. 10.
    Scientists and analysts within the Department of Defense Intelligence Community use Opticks to analyze remote sensing data and produce actionable intelligence. Opticks supports Imagery, motion imagery, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), and multi-spectral and hyper-spectral remote sensing data. Ball Aerospace expects Opticks to increase the demand for remote sensing data and broaden the features available in existing remote sensing software.
    Ball has been using the software for about five years, but the company is trying to expand the use of it outside the defense industry. The software was first developed for the government and only recently taken to the open source community, something Vance Saunders, Ball senior manager of strategic technology said is a first for the industry.
    “We took software that we developed for the government, and we took common pieces of that and put it into Opticks,” he said. “[We] made it available because there are applications to other professions, like medical imaging, agricultural applications, all kinds of different applications outside of the intelligence community.”
    Ball’s main reason for opening the software to the larger community is because of rules that make it hard to sell to companies outside of the defense industry, Saunders said.
    The International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR), a U.S. State Department policy that controls the export and import of defense-related articles and services on the United States Munitions List, also covers software distribution. The government wants to make sure that so-called “bad guys” don’t get hold of classified information in software used by the defense community, Saunders said. As a result of this policy, Ball can’t use the software to sell services to companies outside of the defense industry. Saunders said there is also a negative perception of software designed and built for the government.
    “Over the last few years, there’s been a huge emphasis by the government to use as much COTS [Commercial Off-the-shelf] software as possible,” Saunders said. “[Government owned and developed software] almost has a negative view, because it’s not COTS. So when we would try to take [Opticks] and use it as a discriminator to get services work with other customers, they would say ‘we want nothing but COTS and you’re not, so we’re not interested. It was a huge barrier to entry. By taking the government owned and developed software to the open source community, we’re overcoming the barrier.”
    Saunders said Ball wants Opticks to become the de facto technology, the “Photoshop of image remote sensing software.” There’s a mindset in the industry that prevents companies from reusing software developed for other companies, Saunders said.
    “[The companies think] ‘that thing that somebody else developed was developed for somebody else, and it doesn’t really meet my requirements because I’m different.’ When in fact, that’s not really the case,” Saunders said. “They’re paying over and over to develop the same type of functionality. Opticks provides a common set of functionality that anybody that does remote sensing needs to use.”
    Unfortunately, Edward Jurkevics, principle analyst for Chesapeake Analytics, said that while he thinks it’s a good business tactic for Ball, he doesn’t think this is going to have much of an impact on the market.
    “The question is, how much market share will this capture, how much impact on sales of Leica Geosystems, or PCI or ITT’s ENVI? What will be impact on their sales, I would say they would be nearly negligible,” he said. “There is lots of software that’s available, somebody can start image processing now with just a few thousand dollars. I just don’t see it impacting the market by creating a huge new user community either. Because if that was going to happen, then it would have happened with one of the other dozen or so freeware packages that were made available.”
    While Opticks would provide the framework for companies to use, anything specific that was needed but not provided could be developed via a plugin, Saunders said.
    Ball opened a gated release of the open source software in May, which allowed the software to be released to any U.S. citizen, after they provide proof of citizenship. More than 100 people downloaded the service during the gated release. Ball has not yet collected information on how many people have downloaded the software since it was fully released Dec. 10.