Lockheed Martin said that it will release a proprietary social media tool under an open source software license. The announcement is made at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, Massachusetts.

Lockheed Martin has been developing proprietary social media technology to facilitate interaction between employees to create and share content using blogs and wikis.

The proprietary social media tool, which will be released under an open source license, is expected to enable employees consume, share, and discuss information from internal and external sources in a virtual work environment. The company disclosed that it will release the source code and allow users to download, modify, and contribute to the open source project.

Linda Gooden, EVP for information systems and global services business at Lockheed Martin, said: Lockheed Martin has placed an emphasis on social media adoption by finding innovative ways to integrate a social dimension into our existing process and tools while reducing total cost of ownership. We are excited to now share our investment back to the open source community to help other organisations meet their knowledge sharing challenges.