Congress Endorses Open Source For Military 145
A draft defense authorizing act in Congress includes wording plugging open source software. It seems both cost and software security were considerations. This is an important victory for open source. "It's rare to see a concept as technical as open-source software in a federal funding bill. But the House's proposed National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2009 (H.R. 5658) includes language that calls for military services to consider open-source software when procuring manned or unmanned aerial vehicles."
Re:Old News (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Green Hills is unafraid (Score:1, Informative)
I work together with people that work with real-time control systems (mostly for particle physics data aquisition, ALICE detector at CERN). They say "OS? Linux, of-cource! WxWorks is not much used, to much hassle)
Notably, ALICE has a lot of "onboard" Linux computers (with onboard FPGA's I think). This is possible in this experiment, as the radiation levels are much lower than ATLAS and CMS - but there is much more data per collision, so they need fast and smart triggers as close to the metal as possible.
Re:GPL'd software (Score:5, Informative)
From my understanding of the GPL, this would only be true if the government is distributing the modified binaries to the terrorists. If the changes are internal-use only, there isn't a GPL conflict by not distributing the modified source.
Re:Green Hills is unafraid (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Green Hills is unafraid (Score:2, Informative)
Linux is not the choice of a new generation.
Posting anonymously...
I know of at least one embedded real time platform that fly's using none of the cruft from GHS or VxWorks. This platform leverages GCC for compilation and GDB for debugging.
I know of another embedded real time platform that is used in military communications that DOES use GHS cruft.
The most compelling evidence that I know of not to rely on GHS... there were software bugs in it that were discovered, isolated, and patched under the support agreements. There have been no such bugs in the GNU tools that have needed outside influence to fix.
Re:GPL'd software (Score:3, Informative)
So the GPL is a perfectly viable option, then ...
sic (Score:3, Informative)
Clarifications on Military Open Source (Score:5, Informative)
I already see some misunderstanding in other threads in this conversation. (a) people say the military won't give back the changes they make to GPL software. (b) people say that because it is GPL, the "bad guys" will get it.
For the first point, the GPL does not require changes to be merged back into the main development area. It allows (and encourages) projects to FORK the source code into new projects when different applications are desired. This keeps the original projects clean from "feature creep" and gives the different (competing) development teams control of their own development. The limitation that the GPL imposes is that if an organization wants to DISTRIBUTE the executable versions of their software, they would need to include an offer to distribute the source as well. Since it is not in the US military's interest to distribute their software, there is no real concern of (b) the "bad guys" getting the software.
In that vain, the "bad guys" would have access to the baseline version if they can figure out what software has been forked into military applications. If the US military is foolish enough to operate this using defaults that are hackable, then it serves them right. I personally think that they are more qualified than that.
A last concern is (c) THIS IS BEING FUNDED BY TAXPAYER MONEY AND IT SHOULD BE OWNED BY THE TAXPAYERS. This is false. I mean, the funding does come from taxes, but the public has no more of a claim for software that is developed for military applications using FOSS software than they do over the software, hardware, and designs of any other piece of military equipment ever designed. These instruments are created for the purpose of providing national security. If the designs were made public, then security WOULD be compromised. Ergo, in the interests of national security it's important for that information to be kept private.
Final point, the GPR (Government Purpose Rights) license. This is a thinly veiled government source license that I have seen the military force on subcontractors in recent years to force Boeing, Lockheed, and all the rest to "play nice". The GPR license is a requirement on contracts so that the government gains the right to send software developed by Lockheed over to Boeing for further analysis. Believe it or not, frequently in legacy codebases you see "Proprietary of XYZ Corporation" and for the most part the government tries to acknowledge these rights. However, they realize that many things are developed over and over again by different companies because they are prevented from leveraging off of each others work (at the cost of the taxpayers). It is encouraging, therefore, to see the government prevent this with GPR.
Re:new clause? (Score:4, Informative)
Considering that would violate the OSI guidelines (and contradict the GPL FAQ), probably not.
Re:Nice to see (Score:2, Informative)
Re:new clause? (Score:3, Informative)
There are no commercial usage clauses in any version of the GPL. The OSI and FSF agree that free or open source licenses, respectively, should never have any sort of usage clause in them. Richard Stallman has publicly encouraged everybody to find ways to profit off free software.
There are terms in some free and open source licenses that make certain business models impractical, but nothing that would restrict any area of use.
Mostly inteligence - not code (Score:2, Informative)
If you read the bill - as I have for the past 15 minutes - you wil learn that most of it is about "open source intelligence", which gets discussed as ways to gather info from publicly-available sources: websites, chat rooms, etc.
Open source software code is also included, but does not appear to be the main focus. Additionally, I would expect that for national security reasons, the govt. may slurp open source tools into their mix, but I would not expect them to share much. I do believe they may be exempt from most license issues due to national security regs and such, at least in some situations.
Re:Old News (Score:1, Informative)
Software vendors will now need ways to differentiate their offerings to those who provide solutions to US Government agencies. I imagine we'll see more "partnerships" (not that they don't happen now) that will influence solutions. I can't count the number of projects I've worked on where as a developer you say "open source product A would work great" but the manager says "we're using commercial product B". Many trade studies we use internally often lack open source solutions too unfortunately.
Mij
Re:Green Hills is unafraid (Score:1, Informative)
Posting anonymously for various reasons...
From where I sit, Greenhills isn't used that much in missile or flight guidance systems for defense or space applications. The most common systems nowadays seem to be Windriver's VxWorks (mostly legacy) and embedded Linux (mostly new applications).
-MG
Re:Nice to see (Score:4, Informative)
Except that the kind of software in the bill in question is rarely licensed - it's tactical software, not admin software. Specialized tactical software is usually purchased outright. (Not to mention that the Federal Government undoubtedly gets significant discounts from vendors for per seat licenses and support.)
That being said, there's much less here than meets the eye. Like many other extremely specialized problem domains, there almost certainly isn't any FOSS to be considered for use. This goes double since this almost certainly is an embedded system, not a PC, with the operating hardware, computer hardware, OS, and applications tightly bound and integrated. (In the systems like this I worked on while I was in the Navy, the line between OS and application was a wide grey area - in some ways they were virtually the same.)