U.S. Army's Future Combat System Will Run Linux

jkastner writes "In 2001 Boeing was chosen to be the lead system integrator for the Army's Future Combat System. The bumper sticker description of this project is 'see first, understand first, act first and finish decisively,' and while Boeing's official FCS site doesn't have a lot of technical details, but you can find some good information at Global Security. To quote their page, "FCS is envisioned as a networked 'system of systems" that will include robotic reconnaissance vehicles and sensors; tactical mobile robots; mobile command, control and communications platforms; networked fires from futuristic ground and air platforms; and advanced three-dimensional targeting systems operating on land and in the air.' The Phase 2 request for proposals just appeared and the estimated price is $26 billion through fiscal year 2009. The fact that the Army is spending billions of dollars on a project isn't anything new, but a little known fact is that the OS for FCS will be Linux (FAQ 4 here.)"

Comments

money saving technique

[dgp]

I can rent terminator 2 for a lot less than $26 billion dollars. How about $26 billion for global no-cost healthcare and food? THATs futuristic!

Re:money saving technique

[cannon_trodder]

Because splashing £26 billion dollars on a "super-duper" defence system is easier than sitting down and talking to all the other countries in the world to sort out the real problems.

Re:money saving technique

[cannon_trodder]

The US are constantly claiming an attack on their beliefs and way of life. Yeah, it's not a religion but those people in the middle-east are certainly fighting for their beliefs and way of life. And land?? America would not fight to protect their own soil? I hardly think so.

Your argument is "we haven't enough to feed the world so it's ok to blow it on crap". If we invested this sort of money regularly in these countries, they'd feed *themselves*. They *do* have sunshine, soil, water and seed. It's just hard to grow food when your fields have been napalmed.

Re:money saving technique

[BarrettAnderson]

ehem... they're gonna LEARN to feed themselves if we invest in them? how does one invest in these countries?

one way, and probably the only way, is to rid them of horrible leaders, like hussein etc... HE is the one with an economy worse than the state of alaska who is spending most of its money on weapons, not us. Sure, the US spends a lot on the military, but why not? Whether the US participates in the causes or not, there WILL be more wars, and it's worth the lives of 300,000,000 people to develop a good military

Re: money saving technique

[cjsnell]

I'm really getting sick of all this anti-military hogwash that is showing up on Slashdot lately. To quote P.J. O'Rourke:

"Any rich man does more for world peace than all the jerks pasting VISUALIZE WORLD PEACE bumper stickers on their cars. The worst leech of a merger and acquisitions lawyer making $500,000 year will, even if he cheats on his taxes, put $100,000 into the public coffers. That's $100,000 of education, charity, or U.S. Marines. And the Marine Corps does more for world peace than all the Ben & Jerry's ice cream ever made."

Re: money saving technique

[composer777]

Fine, then whoever marked me a troll perhaps could log on anonymously and explain how someone can "earn" a billion dollars? That's not a facetious question either, how exactly does someone "earn" that much money? Unless you count earning as profitting off other's hard work and skimming off the top, which I see no reason to reward. Can someone explain why skimming off the top is a desirable behavior?

Re: money saving technique

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish more people understood basic ecomomics and why being rich is one of the best things that you can be. Barring stealing and other unfair practices consider the following:
You have an orange, and I have a an apple ( or a dollar). You want the apple more than I want the orange and vice-versa. So we trade. The wealth of both of us has increased because we are both better off.
Now consider this. Through my hard work and sacrifice, I have created the most delicious orange grove in the world. My incentive for doing so, is for the joy of it ( maybe ) and to make money at it. My super oranges cost $1 and 1 billion people want one. So I sell a billion of them. We are all now better off because of it. Everyones wealth has increased.
The #1 misunderstanding about money and economics is that if I have more money ( wealth) you have less. That's just not true.
Now, if we lived in some marxist dictatorship where the maximum amount of wealth anyone could have would be $10,000, and the government would take the rest. I might say, screw it. I'm not going to invent my oranges. And we would all be worse off.
Get it ?

Re:money saving technique

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

Well, why don't you run for office and make some changes instead of claiming to have all of the answers on Slashdot? I'm sure you could have a nice chat w/ every country in the world and talk every dictator out of developing nuclear weapons in secret, right?

Re:money saving technique

[silentbozo]

We used to encourage industrial and agricultural development. Technical advisors were sent to teach modern planting methods. Grants and loans were provided for chemical fertilizers. But it all stopped. Today, we're content to export food from the US, grown with government subsidies that depress the world price for cash crops below subsistence, rather than have these countries grow their own food. And, rather than set policies that would encourage domestic food production in these impoverished nations, we just cut them a welfare check that barely keeps them above poverty level instead.

And we wonder why they're pissed at us???

Re: money saving technique

[the gnat]

Of course. The problem is that the modern market system often seems to defy the laws of economics. The absurd sums paid to CEOs whose companies tanked. The absurd stock prices for many dotcoms, which made some charismatic idiots far more wealthy than they deserved. The fact that at Enron, the people who did the actual work got screwed, while the people who cooked the books kept a great deal of money.

Personally, I view these as the price we pay for having a market economy (though a reminder of why we need some regulation), and not an indicator that our otherwise healthy system is broken. However, I can understand why some people might feel especially bitter about it right now.

Bittersweet news

[Anonymous Coward]

This is good news as it means that GNU/Linux will have another set of *very careful* eyeballs looking through the code. After all, it is now a matter of national security. The driver support for robotics and other real-time systems is also likely to improve dramatically.

On the other hand, I think that more than a few hackers will feel a twinge of sadness when they see footage of some people being blown up. Doesn't exactly make you want to point and say "oh look see, that was my code they used to send the `fire' command to that unit..." Especially if it is one of those not-declared-or-debated sort of wars that we seem to be getting into these days.

Re:Bittersweet news

[einhverfr]

Not necessarily, will they release their improvements ?? .. That is the question.

If they don't want to redo all the work the next time they want to upgrade the kernel, they will. If they don't mind passing over that the auditing task to the Department of Redundency Department, they will not release their changes.

Re:Bittersweet news

[tshak]

This is good news as it means that GNU/Linux will have another set of *very careful* eyeballs looking through the code.

Not necessarily. There is nowhere in the GPL that forces you to give away your source to the world - it only forces you to distribute (or make easily available) the source to those that you are selling/giving the binaries. So, unless Boeing plans on giving us their software (ya right!), we won't benefit at all. Rather, all of the donated work is benefiting a profiting corporation without any form of compensation. This is where the GPL fails IMHO.

Re:Bittersweet news

[Jason Earl]

You are right about what the GPL requires you to do. Boeing is going to be required to make the source code for any changes to the Linux kernel available to the DOD, but they don't have to make these changes available to the rest of us. They are also perfectly free to create proprietary software that runs on top of Linux.

My guess, however, is that most of the changes to the Linux kernel itself will make its way back to Linus and friends, and the reason for this is simple. Maintaining your own fork of the Linux kernel is hard, and such a beast would have very few benefits. After all, one of the reasons that these folks chose Linux in the first place is that it would allow them to offload some of their work on the rest of the Linux kernel developers. If secrecy were the primary goal they would simply write their own OS from scratch. What's the point of using Linux if you are going to distance yourself from all of the neat stuff being done by the rest of the kernel developers?

Good - now other services take notice!

[Hao Wu]

This is great for the army, but as we consolidate overlap between services, I would like to see all branches adopt similar platforms (Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, National Guard, Reserve Force, CIA, and Secret Service). It would save moneys for the purpose of cross-training and upgrading in the-long-run.

It is the embedded systems

[einhverfr]

If you have ever worked with Platform Builder or Embedded NT (or XP) and compared that to building an embedded system on Linux, you will see that the Microsoft products are targetted at a very narrow market and are not really all that well suited for many things that Linux is in the embedded world.

Windows is currently better than Linux in a few (unfortunatly critical areas), but even that is changing quickly. And in the embedded market, Microsoft's products really are niche products, while it is Linux, DOS, and a few other products that are the best products for most projects.

Of course in general server software, I have to say I *much* prefer Linux. For client programs I use Linux mostly (as well as XP occasionally) but even over the last six months, there have been incredible improvements made in many critical areas. Give it another couple years, and I suspect that Linux will be *the* corporate desktop of choice.

Re:Know thy enemy?

[gmuslera]

Linux is GPL, modifications that they do to specifically linux or other GPL app should be GPL also (at this only means that the source must be distributed like the binaries, no more, no less), but applications that run over all of this don't need to be.

Re:It's the end for America

[VistaBoy]

As opposed to the Capitalist Microsoft, who won't give sourcecode to their OS to the US Government claiming it would threaten national security, but will gladly hand the entire codebase to COMMUNIST CHINA. Real all-American apple pie goodness there.

Untrue + Uninfomed

[Nazmun]

Before the economic sanctions + war vs. the USA, Iraq was doing excellently economically and it's people were thriving. They were probably one of the best off countries in the Middle East under Saddam.

I don't like Saddarm but let's criticize him on more valid points. If you want cruelty you can attack him on his tyrannical rule and his version of the Gestapo.

Re:Untrue + Uninfomed

[mpe]

Iraq's economy has been crappy since Saddam came around. When Saddam took office in 1979, Iraq had a good economy and a bright future, but the Iran/Iraq war starting in 1980 pretty much ruined them.

When he came to power he was supported by the US. The US government was hardly unhappy with Iraq attacking Iran. Remember that Iran had just booted out a US backed Tyrant. (Which the US and Britain had installed in the 1950's because they didn't want to deal with a nationalist democratic Iranian government.)

Wonderful news...

[garf]

As someone who works on a large comms/IT based MoD project and who has been pushing linux and open source within the project (watch out a very large Open Source project), this just adds more fuel to the fire.