Navy Commissions Open Source R&D

Lin_Matt writes "OSSI has announced a three year Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with the U.S. Navy to explore and expand the usage of Open Source Software. Barry Duplantis of Red Hat will be serving as the Program Manager for this CRADA which will cover the Navy's use of OSS within the Naval Oceanographic Office's Web services, scientific computing and enterprise architecture systems."

Comments

Strong commitment?

[e9th]

I sure am glad that they teamed up with that renowned bastion of computer science, the University of Southern Mississippi.

redhat is only better

[BobVila]

Now we can be Redhat's whores instead of Microsoft's whores.

Re:ethics

[Trogre]

Could we see an anti-military GPL that allows normal use except in orginizations who's express purpose is to kill people?

Not likely. RMS has already stated that Free Software should not be restricted from use for a particular purpose. He even used the example of Free Software being not restricted by use from either an abortion clinic or an anti-abortion campaigner.

Since abortion clinics in the US have killed more people last year than the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines together in the last 20 years, I would think it unlikely GPL software would be denied to the Navy.

Unless of course he doesn't consider unborn to be people, in which case he has much bigger problems, since it requires only one more step in logic to support killing babies and small children for convenience.