Finding a way to decouple software from hardware–and invest adequately in research and development to improve the software–will be key to implementing several open architecture goals for the military, several speakers said Tuesday at Defense Daily’s Open Architecture Summit.
Historically, the idea of common interfaces has been applied more vigorously to hardware, whereas software is typically tied to hardware and therefore proprietary and stovepiped, Doug Schmidt, a professor at Vanderbilt University and the Software Engineering Institute, said during a panel discussion. 
Software development is “all done in a very ad hoc way,” which makes it more expensive to develop, integrate, validate and sustain. Making this trend more problematic is the fact that “as these systems have been getting buggier and slower and more expensive, something else has been going on: software has become more and more integral and crucial to everything they do,” Schmidt said.
Schmidt noted the ties between that trend and an increase in program delays and quality problems. He also said that over the past decade software sustainment costs at the Air Force’s air logistics centers has doubled–and that’s even before the software-heavy F-35 Joint Strike Fighter makes it from the acquisition phase to the sustainment phase.
Robert Matthews, the avionics architecture lead at Naval Air Systems Command, said during the same panel discussion that hardware and software need to be decoupled, and as that happens “we’re going to have a new marketplace. This will be disruptive from an intellectual property standpoint,” particularly because the current laws and acquisition regulation support a business model where software often comes along as a needed addendum to the hardware being sold.
As long as the government identifies a manageable number of common interfaces for future systems to use, Matthews said he believes the government can create an open environment in its weapons systems while still allowing industry to develop proprietary modules, sensors and more to profit from.
“We don’t want that innovation to happen around interfaces, we want that to happen around the capabilities that are delivered,” he said. “So we want to drive the key interfaces to be open so that the modules that get developed to those interfaces, that intellectual property, is protected. Industry can innovate in those capabilities and in a competitive way.”