Software cots wiki

See Council on Technology Services. The COTS strategy must grapple with a basic tension: even as government seeks through COTS to obtain a greater degree of flexibility that enables future vendor choice, vendors have an incentive to maximize the proprietary content of a system in order to increase the likelihood of future sales.

In other words, once an organization has made decisions about overall system design , this constrains future decisions and limits which software products and vendor product lines will be compatible.

However, since COTS software specifications are written by external sources, Government agencies are sometimes wary of these products because they fear that future changes to the product will not be under their control. Main Page All Pages Community. Random page. Community portal forum.

COTS software is used 'as-is. Almost all software bought by the average computer user and much of the software used by the U. Examples include operating systems , database management systems , email servers , application servers , and office product suites.

Because it is mass-produced, one of the major advantages of COTS software is the relatively low cost of acquiring , maintaining and achieving technology refresh. Given these low costs and the competitive forces at work, COTS software producers may or may not know, manage or track the provenance of their software , except to the extent needed to ensure that the necessary licenses are obtained for embedded components.

In addition, they generally do not make source code available, so supplier identity and software content is often blurred by the reuse of legacy code , subcontracting , outsourcing , and use of Open Source Software OSS. COTS software development environments can be more easily penetrated than custom development environments because:. The risk of damage from maliciously introduced vulnerabilities increases with the ease of adversarial access to the development environment.

That said, an adversary with "home court advantage" finds it safer and cheaper to manipulate the production and distribution of software products in its own control. Main Page All Pages Community.

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