A recent Report on High Performance Computing by the US Secretary of Energy Advisory Board contains a bizarre section on open source software, which states

There has been very little open source that has made its way into broad use within the HPC commercial community where great emphasis is placed on serviceability and security.

In his thoughtful blog post in response to this report, Will Schroeder, the CEO an co-founder of the legendary Kitware Inc. makes a number of strong points defending the role of open source in the past and future development of HPC. He concludes

The basic point here is that issues of scale require us to remove inefficiencies in researching, deploying, funding, and commercializing technology, and to find ways to leverage the talents of the broader community. Open source is a vital, strategic tool to do this as has been borne out by the many OS software systems now being used in HPC application… ItÂ’s easy to overlook open source as a vital tool to accomplish this important goal, but in a similar way that open source Linux has revolutionized commercial computing, open source HPC software will carry us forward to meet the demands of increasingly complex computing systems.

See also Will Schroeder’s presentation The New Scientific Publishers at SciPy-2013.