Slashdot Mirror
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."
"causing a ship-wide crash that leaves the most formidable weapons system on the planet totally helpless and dead in the water."
Just like NT did with a naval destroyer a few years back.
Linux has just reached at the very least the NT level of complexity.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
More of the same, not that I've got any problem with that!
For instance, the Navy's Proteanforge is fantastic on so many levels it's not even funny. Besides being one of the few public Sourceforge deployements outside of sf.net, the code there is just wildly interesting, and has been for several years now.
Not to mention the funding the Navy put into Onion Routing Research and it's very popular implementation.
Since then, I've discovered that they've been involved in multicasting, network testing suites and a whole bunch of other stuff. They've a site based on the Sourceforge software for developing such projects, called ProteanForge.
So far, so good. They're obviously into Open Source in a big way. Despite the fears of some posters, this has not caused the end of the world. Yet, anyway.
Two drawbacks, though. They may be good coders - and they are! - but they are LOUSY at keeping projects going and even worse at posting news items. The last news posting is dated November 14, 2003. Ok, sure, they might have decided to put their efforts elsewhere. That happens. So why not hand the code over to someone else? The stuff isn't classified, it's Open Source, why not keep the good stuff alive?
Make that three things. They're lousy at letting anyone know they ARE doing Open Source work. I happen to keep a close eye on groups I know are involved in Open Source, but I only found out about the newer projects relatively recently and I'm damn sure that most people don't know about them at all.
(Well, up until this post on Slashdot, anyway.)
True, nothing is "owed", but this isn't about owing. This is about establishing yourself as a credible source, thereby not only increasing the interest of coders who might be of value, but also enhancing the testing of these products, and finally establishing a rapport with a sector of the IT industry that has become wary of Government involvement.
It wasn't so long ago that IBM was the "Evil IT Baron". These days, their relationship has mellowed, their older product lines have a new lease of life, their reputation has recovered and they've even made some impressive strides into the extreme high-performance computing world.
This is where the US Navy could have been, seven or eight years ago. They were already releasing Open Source products then, and may well have been years earlier. Instead, their Open Source products are shrouded in secrecy, even though they're plastered over the Internet and GPLed/BSDed to boot! Instead of learning from their own experiences, they are pulling away.
Yes, I find that annoying. There are some damn good projects out there, that they're letting rot for no reason at all. (Like I said, even if they didn't want to maintain them, they could always hand them to someone else. As IBM did recently, for example.)
It's good that the Navy is now starting to back Open Source R&D, but I will only believe that they understand what that means when I see some real understanding from them over what they already have.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I think the the photonics masts for the VIRGINIA that replace periscopes run Red Hat Linux on Apple server hardware. At least the prototype software I saw seemed to indicate this.