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> Open source software has been used to develop military
> systems for many years now on the contractor side.

Right on. Just as an example, we set up CougaarForge for a DARPA project back in 2003. 'Twas good times.

When I worked on the DARPA COUGAAR distributed agent project they used lots of open source code and had no problems with donating code back. The whole PMD source code analysis tool started there and has lived on long after the sponsoring program ended... good stuff.

> The U.S. Government? Using Open Source
> Software? Umm...maybe you don't
> follow U.S. corpolitics?

How did this get modded 'Insightful'? Not only does the U.S. government use open source software, but they sponsor it, too.

Oh, and since parent is up to +5 now, more conference papers and presentations on Cougaar are here.

...this paper talks about using the open source, BSD-licensed agent framework COUGAAR to run FCS modeling tests.

Also, there's a bunch of COUGAAR support software written in Ruby, i.e., ACME.

...this paper talks about using the open source, BSD-licensed agent framework COUGAAR to run FCS modeling tests.

Also, there's a bunch of COUGAAR support software written in Ruby, i.e., ACME.

Hm. Well, maybe. There have been a couple releases this year, and the mailing list remains active.

I kind of feel that the torch is being passed on to Subversion, with no hard feelings between anyone. Lots of folks are converting over and most folks seem pretty happy with it. But CVS is still widely used and there are a bunch of of gurus who hang out on the list and answer questions.

Oh, and here's a mirror of various CVS releases if anyone needs them.

...like DARPA does with Cougaar.

Government sponsored open source is already here... good times!

...Cougaar.

There are a bunch of distributed agents scattered around lots of machines; some use more resources than others, and the system moves them from machine to machine in response to high loads. Nifty stuff, and open source - BSD licensed!

We have built an extremely robust distributed testing framework for a Java-based multi-agent system completely implemented in Ruby (see Cougaar for more on the project and the ACME testing framework). We were told on starting this project (at DARPA) that it would never work...I really like proving people wrong ;-) My company is using its Ruby expertise as a differentiator in the market and getting very good reception.

...are nifty. They can catch all sorts of stuff and produce lovely reports - or, well, at least functional reports. And running them nightly - or hourly - helps to ensure the code won't get out of sorts.

PLUG: Need to check Java code? Try PMD!

> GForge has all of this

Yup, GForge rocks. I help admin CougaarForge for a government project; GForge has worked out really well. It's not resource-intensive, either - we run 34 projects and 700 users on one dual proc machine with _plenty_ of horsepower to spare.

Lots of other folks are running GForge servers too...

What I have always wanted to do with Gnome is to get rid off the images in buttons of dialog boxes. I'd just like my buttons text only not like http://support.cougaar.org/gnome28/new-printer-dia log.png/. That's why I always go back to KDE!

Again and again, I'm told Linux's fonts are better than Windows. Again and again, when I look at screenshots I see clear and obvious rendering errors that make the whole thing look horribly ugly. I only assume that people purposely ignore these flaws because they don't want to admit them.

For instance, look at the "Xtns" menu in http://support.cougaar.org/gnome28/3.png. The X is wider than the other character. Compare to the characters in the "File" menu, which are for some reason extremely thin!

Over and over, I'm told Linux font rendering is great, and over and over, all I have to do is look at how numerical characters are rendered, or pretty much any capital letter with diagonals and/or curves in it. They always look thicker than the other letters beside them.

> Others of us do appreciate it.

Thanks :-)

> even with 10M, that you are being hammered

Yup, the MRTG graphs show us filling up the whole pipe. Interesting how the CPU load is still essentially zero, though.

FWIW, here's a page about a Slashdotting experience we had last year...

I noticed a common grammatical error on this screenshot --- assuming whatever language this is has the same conventions as English for plurals and the possessive case. Did GNOME create this "My Foto's" directory by default, and does it have the apostrophe in all localizations?
BTW, it looks beautiful.

Ah, the screenshots always kill a webserver don't they ;) Here's a mirror of just the screenies for Gnome 2.8: screenshots. Firefox users remember; center-click is yr friend! ;)

CB_)(^%#

Check it out! Scalable Nibbles! I'm in.

...is right here.

Man.. That closeup of the LEM is kinda scary. Slightly warped metal, bolted down here and there... Aluminum beach chair tubing.. Looks like something I might have built in the back yard as a kid. You kind of wonder if doubt crosses your mind when you are sitting there looking back at the earth and part of your ride home is comprised of (what appears to be) Aluminum foil.

At the National Air and Space Museum, they have a backup Lunar Excursion Module. I'm always transfixed by it when I visit. It seems so primitive; you can see tape on the foil wrapping, and there are welds and rivets all over it.

I mean look at this image. I've seen RVs with better construction! It really puts the accomplishment in perspective.

Holy crap look at picture three!

It looks like someone left a twinkie sitting on the side of the lander and it became one with the metal during launch!

...right here.

...is here.

...whew. That's as much as the most popular SourceForge project.

And I thought my charts spiked after I started mirroring CVS... crikey.

...is in the spinoff projects. For example, this open source Java memory profiler is a spinoff of the DARPA-supported COUGAAR agent framework.

And since both projects are hosted on a server running GForge, I can help improve GForge during working hours. Good times!

...is in the spinoff projects. For example, this open source Java memory profiler is a spinoff of the DARPA-supported COUGAAR agent framework.

And since both projects are hosted on a server running GForge, I can help improve GForge during working hours. Good times!

...and the server already seems to be having problems, it's mirrored here.

> US Federal Government has agreed to GPL

Better still, they've released some stuff under a BSD-style license, including this excellent Java Memory Profiler.

...is here.

FWIW, CVS 1.11.17 - the security release that happened this morning - is up there too.

...for an internal project with the Jabber4R wrapper.

Jabber ended up being too slow, though, so we built a more specialized message router in C++ - and open sourced it - to replace it.

...one of the DARPA IXO programs, Cougaar, has developed a fair number of message transport techniques over the last few years. Good times.

...one of the DARPA IXO programs, Cougaar, has developed a fair number of message transport techniques over the last few years. Good times.

Right on - from the FAQ - "Like Vishnu, our scheduler considers many different factors and attempts to optimally balance the tradeoffs between them.".

...which already has some open source ties.

For example, the Vishnu planning engine (source code and project site here) is being used as part of FCS logistics planning.

...up on CougaarForge.

Just the source and the i386 binary RPMs, but perhaps they'll be useful to someone...

> "The report warns governments
> against relying on open-source software

Since the government is busy sponsoring open source software, I think this warning falls (happily) on deaf ears.

Oddly, we just had a post to the open source distributed agent system Cougaar about using Cougaar on a Zaurus.

The only response was a mention of Cougaar Micro Edition... not sure where it will go from there. Depends on how much horsepower the Zaurus has...

Oddly, we just had a post to the open source distributed agent system Cougaar about using Cougaar on a Zaurus.

The only response was a mention of Cougaar Micro Edition... not sure where it will go from there. Depends on how much horsepower the Zaurus has...

Oddly, we just had a post to the open source distributed agent system Cougaar about using Cougaar on a Zaurus.

The only response was a mention of Cougaar Micro Edition... not sure where it will go from there. Depends on how much horsepower the Zaurus has...

There's the COUGAAR agent framework and its supporting projects - it's funded by the feds.

There's also this NOAA project site.

....we've been using the Jabber4R Ruby wrapper to route Cougaar status messages for a couple years now.

It's kind of running out of gas on us as our message volume increases, but it's worked well enough so far...

...the daily build!

Which is in the green, thanks very much.

Linux is also proving popular in the public sector. Governments like the idea of not paying a proprietary vendor huge licensing fees for years and years.

...to send Cougaar society status messages around - we've been able to get around 1100 messages (albeit simple ones) per second.

We're using the Ruby wrapper Jabber4R as well as various GUI clients, and we're using the Jabber 1.4.2 server.

> it might be a good application for a
> genetic algorithm. You could evolve
> the (near-)perfect level.

The difficult part might be coming up with a good fitness algorithm. I mean, a perfect level for one person may be a lousy level for another.

I'm hoping to come up with something that could be used to generate a level from, say, a building floor plan, or a Visio diagram of something - stuff like that. It would be nifty to run around inside of a Cougaar agent community, for example.

> this is a bugfix release of an obscure package

The big deal about this particular release was that the source code for this large DARPA-sponsored project is now accessible for browsing or for checking out with anonymous CVS.

> this is a bugfix release of an obscure package

The big deal about this particular release was that the source code for this large DARPA-sponsored project is now accessible for browsing or for checking out with anonymous CVS.

It seems just about no one has heard about Cougaar before (I know I haven't), and very few know what agents/aglets are, so here is a link to the FAQ!

Posted anonymously to prevent carma whoring, since 2001.

Ditto for the PMD Java unused code finder. And also GForge, which is indirectly supported by DARPA since DARPA runs CougaarForge.