Have you ever wanted to get your hands on some American military technology? If you have, you’ve probably avoided doing something about it because the idea of incarceration doesn’t appeal. But there’s now a way to get hold of some of that tech without a security clearance or the possibility of jail time. It’s called open source code.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched the DARPA Open Catalog, a “…curated list of DARPA-sponsored software and peer-reviewed publications” that will let you muck around with the software that they’re allowed to release to the general public. The catalog consists of contributions from universities like Stanford and MIT, companies like IBM and even defense contractors like Raytheon.

According to DARPA’s program manager Chris White “Making our open source catalog available increases the number of experts who can help quickly develop relevant software for the government. Our hope is that the computer science community will test and evaluate elements of our software and afterward adopt them as either standalone offerings or as components of their products.”

So they actually want you to play with their software. That’s good to know.

Source: The Verge