This should read "NSA mimics Google, pissed off Oracle and Senators react. Google has never expressly disapproved of Cassandra, Hadoop, HBase or any other Big Table type implementation, so why would they start now, especially by influencing Senators.
NSA should develope and release more open source software.
I would bet it is not Oracle. The alternatives suggested are not ones Oracle would suggest.
I will bet it is one of the DC consulting firms that do big business with the government. I would imagine they have a pitch going for NoSQL / Cloud and this is seen as a threat. There is quite a bit of money in integration with the government.
If you seriously want to be disgusted with the government, go look at how much is spent on consulting firms. Including, I kid you not, management firms that provide managers for projects inside the government. It gets worse when you realize that employees are supposed to do that stuff, but hire consultants to do the actual work.
Why wouldn't I be more upset with the lobbyists and consultants? They're the ones getting rich off of lying and gladhanding. The government employees are just trying to get through the day. They have a billion processes to make sure they're not getting kickbacks or a fraction of the lobbyists's pay.
Sounds like your beef is more with corruption than it is with government.
I'm not sure how you missed that I was not happy about the consulting firms. I am very unhappy money is spent do to lobbying / power players to feed the consulting firms around the beltway that are hired to do the jobs government employees were hired to do. It isn't individual corruption, it is the whole system of how government works in DC.
There used to be an office devoted to providing Congress with unbiased information about technology, but it was eventually shut down because "Congress is spending millions of dollars on itself" makes for a good soundbite.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessment
What do you think happens when there is gridlock? No confirmations of any kind. So the various departments out source. One does not need senate approval to hire consultants. ;)
In fact, there are lobbyists who push for grid lock because it's in their clients best interests.
In fact, I'd say about 60 - 70% of all federal government IT services are out sourced. It's a revolving door really.. government cuts back, claims it's saving money. Bids out for IT services. And of course, the ex-federal employes who were laid off now work for the winning (bidder) company. Who return back to their old jobs at twice the price.
That's how messed up things are in DC. What.. did you think it was only the politicians? Everyone is playing the game in DC. Everyone.
I can almost guarantee that. It is always another vendor that pulls the strings. It comes with litigation threats, lobby efforts etc. It happens for small stuff, it definitely happens for multi-million dollar items.
What reason would Google have to object anyway? Bigtable isn't open source so there's no benefit in shutting down work on Accumulo - the man-hours are not going to go into Bigtable instead.
NSA should develope and release more open source software.