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

[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

[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?

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

[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?

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: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.